Experience end-to-end ROI with a CDP + Snowflake
In today’s customer marketing world, data isn’t just for data teams. 🤯
While brands recognize — and customers demand — the need for a personalized marketing experience, it’s tricky to implement a truly data-driven marketing strategy. Why? Many orgs have relied on the cookies from their sites and the often siloed, stale crumbs of data they get from their data teams.
But Google has closed the lid on its cookie jar, and customers are more leery than ever before when it comes to maintaining their data privacy and trusting companies to keep it secure.
As if that wasn’t challenging enough, marketing budgets are shrinking, Gen AI is taking over the world for better or for worse, and martech stacks have become overly complicated, rendering them inefficient and ineffective. No more.
Enter the customer data platform (CDP), a platform designed to work with a cloud data platform (CDW) like Snowflake to enable marketing teams to activate real-time, third-party data to build and orchestrate personalized customer experiences to deliver the right message on the right platform at the right time.
As brands mature in their data and marketing strategies, the benefits of using CDP with your cloud data platform compound, and, with this dynamic duo in place, marketing can even share its data and insights back into the cloud.
With over 160 CDP vendors on the market, there’s no doubt that the space is growing rapidly — and becoming more difficult to navigate. If you’re in the market for (or recently invested in) a CDW like Snowflake, a CDP is a wise addition to your investment.
Here’s why.
Understanding the Customer Data Platform (CDP)
Gartner defines customer data platforms (CDPs) as software solutions that support marketing and customer experiences by “unifying a company’s customer data from marketing and other channels.”
Unlike the other components of your martech stack, the CDP’s job is to orchestrate between all of your marketing tools and your data platform, helping to create a “single source of truth” for your buyer.
The beauty of the CDP lies in its ability to assist disparate systems to communicate with each other to power a complete picture of your customer.
A true CDP must:
- Ingest customer data from multiple sources
- Unify customer profiles into a single view (resolve identity)
- Create real-time customer segments
- Integrate customer data from other systems, out of the box
By integrating with other components of your martech stack, a CDP improves the performance and efficiency of the stack as a whole, while also eliminating the bottleneck between data engineering and marketing.
Identity resolution and personalization that drives ROI
One of the most essential unique functions a CDP brings to your martech stack is a modern, robust identity solution.
To build a truly personalized customer experience, brands need a CDP based on a flexible data model that understands complex notions of customer identity while offering real-time recognition and enrichment capabilities to drive revenue.
Simon Data was recently cited as a “game-changer” in Snowflake’s recent Modern Marketing Data Stack Report. In particular, the report cited Simon’s Connected Customer Data Platform for its ability to tap directly into the data cloud to help enterprises craft tailored experiences for their customers. Simon’s customers, including brands like 1-800-Flowers, JetBlue, WeWork, and Vimeo, are achieving personalization at scale.
The CDP readiness checklist
First, consider whether your company and its marketing teams are ready for a CDP. Our experience working with companies reveals that those getting the most ROI from their CDPs share these common points:
- They have or will implement a cloud-based data warehouse such as Snowflake
- They are actively maturing an enterprise-wide data strategy
- They have a need to define new customer segments and achieve a high degree of personalization
This article will give you the quick-hit information you need to know to get end-to-end ROI with your Snowflake CDP.
Need more information or looking to purchase a CDP? Our in-depth CDP Buyer’s Guide will walk you through everything you need to know.
What features should your CDP have?
All CDPs must offer these four core competencies:
- Data ingestion: A CDP must gather, standardize, and validate all data from across sources, both online and offline
- Profile unity: A CDP must dedupe and consolidate customer data into one, informative profile for each customer
- Segmentation: A CDP must leverage consolidated profiles to allow marketers to build custom segments from a single platform and increase personalization
- Integration: A CDP must allow marketers to make immediate use of created customer segments by seamlessly integrating with end channels to quickly deploy personalized experiences.
- End-to-end service models: Today, more data-driven marketing teams are choosing CDP vendors that offer end-to-end service models with proven ability to drive ROI
Choose a CDP that offers comprehensive customer support and partners with you to ensure you’re getting the most value from your CDP.
Why is it necessary to use first-party customer data?
Reason 1: Meet customer expectations
Customers expect that brands understand and relate to them based on past interactions. This is one of the key benefits of attaining a single, unified view of the customer, also known as a customer 360.
Reason 2: Build emotional connections
Centralized, accessible customer data is the only way to make informed decisions that support delivering personalized experiences to each customer.
Creating customer lifetime value starts with that emotional connection.
Reason 3: Increase ROI across marketing
If your data is siloed, no one is operating with a full, valid view of the customer. This wastes marketing spend and a lot of time.
A modern, cloud-based CDP can ensure that all stakeholders are using live, real-time data, making analytics far more reliable and campaign measurement far more accurate.
Reason 4: Ensure compliance with privacy regulations
Privacy, privacy, privacy. This is the old-but-new-again customer data mantra. Siloed data runs a higher risk of non-compliance. A CDP with built-in compliance functionality ensures you are up-to-date and compliant across the full martech stack. It also creates customer confidence.
What does a CDP do, exactly?
A CDP enables you to better understand and relate to your customers so you can easily build personalized customer relationships at scale.
It also allows you to create offers and opportunities that align with your customer’s preferences, even to the point of helping to anticipate what they might need or want in the future (hoorah, Gen AI and ML!).
Ultimately, CDP should help create the kind of regular experiences that make your customers feel emotionally connected to your brand with a, “They really do know me!” feeling.
The ultimate CDP value proposition: Deliver centralized and actionable customer data at your fingertips.
Can your CDP do this?
- Enable your marketing teams to better understand and relate to your customers.
- Improve marketers' agility and help them move more quickly to optimize and personalize campaigns.
- Provide a single view into customers in a campaign to enable non-technical people to adapt/quickly change messaging based on real-time data.
- Make data activation easy.
- Deliver intuitive tools for data enrichment, identity resolution, data activation, and measurement/analytics all from a single interface.
- Alleviate the bottleneck of reliance on data engineering teams to gain an actionable view of the customer.
- Help marketers know their customers better.
Genuinely connecting with your customer is about anticipating their wants and needs and delivering on them in their channel of preference.
How CDPs (like Simon Data) and CDWs (like Snowflake) work together
CDWs are cloud-based databases that store valuable data from nearly every part of the business, including first-party customer data. CDWs were primarily constructed as a business intelligence tool, and access to the data is oftentimes limited to IT, engineering, or other technical gatekeepers.
Think of your CDW as your dad’s garage. It’s completely chock full of valuable stuff, and a total mess — rendering it completely impossible for anyone who’s not him to find anything.
While CDWs provide a centralized source of customer data, supporting activities like personalization and segmentation require brands to invest in technologies that integrate directly with a CDW, like a CDP, to enable marketers to access and use the data within.
Your CDP should flex to your current and future data architecture. A connected customer data platform is designed to integrate seamlessly with your CDW and enable you to easily access unified customer profiles directly in your CDW.
There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to personalization. Successfully building a modern marketing data stack for personalization depends on your data infrastructure, available technology, and your team’s organization and governance, among other things.
What value will a CDP bring to your business?
You can expect the following business outcomes from your CDP:
- Increased operational efficiency for the business
- Increased revenue
- Reduced media spend
- Streamlined technology costs
Specifically, customer marketers will gain:
- The ability to segment audiences almost as fast as you can think
Think of all the tests you could run if segmentation weren’t slow and inconvenient.
- More granular and dynamic personalization
With a CDP, you can get much more granular and personal than you can with even your fanciest rules-based ESP settings.
- A single, unified, and real-time view of your customers
For the customer, a lack of orchestrated messaging results in over-messaging, inconsistency, or delivery promotions on CTAs that the customer has already seen.
- The ability to experiment in omni-channel campaigns
Aligning customer data and omni-channel orchestration in a single place transforms your unified customer view into a 360-degree view of your marketing efforts. Your marketing stack can become a marketing ecosystem where visibility and collaboration between disparate marketing functions are straightforward.
- Omni-channel experimentation
With a CDP that allows for cross-channel experimentation, you can manage end-channel execution from a single platform.
Conclusion
Now’s the time to make the most of your Snowflake investment. By using a CDP with Snowflake, marketers can activate the customer data required to build personalized marketing campaigns.
Simon Data, an industry-leading CDP, is reimagining the road to 1:1 customer relationships by unblocking data, simplifying workflows, and putting the Data Cloud at the heart of the tech stack.
The Simon CDP is loved by marketers, trusted by data teams, and empowers enterprise teams to deliver the personalized experience customers crave.
Ready to dive into the CDP selection process? Check out our latest CDP Buyer’s Guide for the information you need to know.
Learn how Simon Data can help you create personalized customer experiences
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