CRMs, CDPs, ESPs and Everest: Demystifying the Martech Stack

Marketers know that acronyms abound in the email ecosystem. In this blog post, we’re expanding beyond deliverability ABCs and diving into those of the MarTech stack: ESPs, CRMs, CDPs, and of course, Validity’s Everest platform.  

With so many MarTech options available, it’s easy for marketers to feel overwhelmed. In today’s economic climate, marketing teams also face pressure to cut tools to reduce costs or simplify operations. The key to maximizing your MarTech stack’s potential isn’t about trimming down—it’s about understanding how each tool fits into your overall strategy and optimizing how they work together. 

Understanding what each tool does—and doesn’t do—can help senders make informed decisions about how to use each one effectively and integrate them for maximum impact.  

Let’s break them down. 

Email service providers (ESPs) 

An email service provider (ESP) is a platform that allows marketers to create, send and track email campaigns. In a nutshell, they provide marketers with the ability to reach customers directly through email. They typically offer features like email templates, campaign automation, list segmentation, and reporting tools to measure open rates, click-through rates, and other performance metrics. 

What ESPs do: 

• Deploy and track emails to a list of email recipients. 

• Segment email lists based on defined criteria like demographics or behaviors. 

• Automate campaigns (e.g., welcome emails, drip campaigns). 

• Provide a set of performance analytics related to email marketing performance like bounce rates. 

What ESPs don’t do: 

• Manage comprehensive customer data across multiple touchpoints. 

• Integrate data from various platforms (like web behavior or purchase history) in real time. 

• Help with personalized marketing across channels beyond email. 

• Guarantee deliverability or inbox placement.  Customer relationship management (CRM) systems 

Customer relationship management (CRM) systems

A customer relationship management (CRM) system is primarily used to manage interactions with current and potential customers. CRMs are typically used by marketing teams to track leads and nurture long-term relationships with existing customers through follow-up emails, loyalty programs, and personalized offers. They store valuable customer data and provide insights into sales processes, helping businesses maintain positive relationships and drive sales. 

What CRMs do: 

• Track interactions and manage communication with prospects and customers. 

• Manage sales pipelines and monitor progress. 

• Offer tools for managing customer relationships, such as notes, tasks, and reminders. 

• Integrate customer communication history like emails, meetings, and calls. 

What CRMs don’t do: 

• Provide detailed, unified customer data across all channels. 

• Handle the deployment of mass email campaigns. 
• In most cases, CRMs don’t offer robust analytics on customer behaviors or cross-channel engagement.  

Customer data platforms (CDPs)

A customer data platform (CDP) provides a 360-degree view of the customer. A CDP is a unified customer database that collects, stores, and manages data from a variety of sources. It enables marketers to gather first-party data from different touchpoints—websites, social media, email, and more—and combine this data to create a single customer profile. This data can be used to personalize marketing campaigns, improve customer segmentation, and drive more targeted marketing efforts. 

What CDPs do: 

• Collect and unify customer data from various sources (web, email, social media, etc.). 

• Build detailed customer profiles for deeper insights. 

• Segment audiences based on behaviors, preferences, and past interactions. 

• Provide real-time data to inform marketing strategies. 

What CDPs don’t do: 

• Send or manage email campaigns (this is the domain of ESPs). 

• Handle detailed customer relationships or sales processes (CRMs are used for this purpose). 

• Typically offer advanced sales pipeline features, reporting, or analytics tied to sales performance. Like CRMs, CDPs don’t provide significant insights into email program optimization.  

The power of integration: how these tools cooperate 

Each of these tools serves a distinct purpose, but the real magic happens when they work together. Your ESP, CRM, and CDP need to be seamlessly integrated to unlock the full potential of your MarTech stack. For example: 

• By integrating your ESP with your CRM, you can send personalized emails based on the data stored in the CRM about a customer’s past interactions and behaviors. 

• Combining a CDP with an ESP allows for hyper-targeted email campaigns using the rich, real-time data in the CDP to personalize messaging at scale. 

Integrating these systems isn’t straightforward, and it’s difficult to paint the full picture of what’s working—and what isn’t working—with so many distinct tools. This is where Validity’s Everest platform comes in. 

How Everest ties everything together 

Validity Everest is a powerful platform designed to optimize email program performance and ensure that the insights obtained from other tools in your MarTech stack are working as expected. Everest acts as a bridge, allowing your systems to share data more effectively and ensuring that your marketing campaigns are more accurate, personalized, and impactful. 

With Everest, you can: 

• Improve data quality: Ensure your customer data is clean and up to date, eliminating bad addresses and inaccuracies that could affect campaign performance and reduce your ROI from the email channel. 

• Maximize deliverability: Everest helps improve email deliverability by providing tools that ensure your messages are reaching the inbox instead of the spam folder. After all, creating segments, designing new templates, and enhancing the customer journey is meaningless if email campaigns are being delivered to the spam folder—or blocked entirely. 

• Integrate systems: Key reputation metrics and tools—such as mailbox provider reputation tools (Gmail Postmaster Tools, Microsoft SNDS, etc.), blocklist data, ESP metrics, email design overviews, and engagement insights—often exist in silos. Everest, however, allows marketers to gather all their data in one place, enabling them to make informed decisions about key campaigns and program health. 

• Enhance targeting: By providing a unified view of your email program’s performance, Everest allows marketers to create more engaging, personalized, data-driven marketing decisions. 

Without a tool like Everest, marketers don’t have a centralized system to visualize and analyze the overall health of their email program. In the absence of deliverability data, marketers are forced to make “best guess” decisions—rather than articulating and addressing programmatic issues—sometimes even before they arise. Everest data helps marketers connect and optimize these tools, making sure your data flows seamlessly, your campaigns are reaching subscriber inboxes, and your results from the email channel are maximized. 

Rather than cutting tools, marketers should focus on optimizing their stack and ensuring that email tools are integrated and working together effectively.  

The right MarTech means having the right tools that work together. The right infrastructure saves marketers time and money and also enhances your ability to engage and convert customers, driving growth and success for your business. For more insights on the email marketing landscape in 2025 and how to reach the next level of performance, check out our new report, “The State of Email Deliverability in 2025.”