The data-driven advantage: Inside Simon Data's services-led approach to marketing success

For marketers today, having powerful customer data platforms isn't enough — marketing success requires the right blend of strategy, technology, and expertise. At Simon Data, our Services team plays a crucial role in helping clients unlock the full potential of their customer data and drive meaningful marketing outcomes. 

We sat down with Paige Rotar, who leads Simon Data's Services team, to discuss how they're helping clients navigate the evolving CDP landscape while driving impressive results through innovative approaches to campaign strategy, identity management, and AI-powered optimization.

Let's jump right in with the challenges marketers face today. What are the common roadblocks you see when brands try to turn their customer data into effective campaigns?

Marketing has never been more complex than it is today. The biggest challenges we see often come down to three main areas: connecting data and marketing strategies to actual outcomes, fully adopting and leveraging the technology they already have, and uncovering hidden insights in their data. Additionally, if the hurdle is simply having enough resources to execute effectively, we can help fill that gap as well.

That’s interesting — how have these challenges impacted a brand’s ability to actually execute successful campaigns?

What we’re seeing is that many brands struggle to unlock the full potential of their customer data, which leads to missed opportunities and campaigns that don’t perform as well as they could. That’s why we designed our Lifecycle Services program: to bridge this gap. It combines human expertise with data-driven insights and AI-powered recommendations to help brands maximize their marketing ROI.

You mentioned that Simon’s services bridge these gaps. Can you walk us through your approach to helping customers?

Sure! First, we start with our core CDP capabilities. You’ve probably heard the term “customer 360” thrown around a lot — that just means our CDP sits on top of your customer data and creates a unified customer profile with that data. We first ensure a stable identifier is in place, and from there, Simon helps optimize targeting, segmentation, and predictive insights. 

Our Lifecycle Services takes this foundation to the next level. We use the data and segmentation strategies you have in place but combine them with expert marketing strategies, actionable insights, and AI-driven recommendations to help transform campaigns into high-performing, revenue-generating engines.

So, whether a client needs help refining their marketing strategies, connecting their tech to their strategy, executing campaigns, or continuously optimizing performance using our strategists and latest AI innovations, we’re there to support them every step of the way.

Let’s dig into that. What does strategy engagement actually look like for your customers?

Every engagement starts with understanding what success looks like for that specific client. What’s their focus? Success criteria? What baseline metrics do they want to measure or optimize against?

We conduct an initial audit of their customer experience, then design or iterate on their personalized omnichannel strategies to improve engagement and conversions. Depending on their needs, we might focus on campaign strategy design, content and personalization recommendations, and segmentation strategies.

Our new AI features are exciting and have been useful for the entire support process. It helps our customers make smarter decisions about who to target, what content to deliver, and how to continuously improve their campaign outcomes.

We often hear about execution being a bottleneck. Can you share an example of how your team helps clients speed up their campaign execution while maintaining its effectiveness?

Absolutely. One of our key approaches is to first identify optimizations that can be applied across multiple campaigns. We first test our hypothesis on an underperforming campaign and then extend our learnings to other campaigns that can benefit from the same improvement to scale ROI and ensure they get the most out of Simon’s capabilities.

Email deliverability is still a massive concern for marketers. How does your team help ensure messages land in the right inboxes?

Our Email Deliverability Services combine CDP-powered insights with expert guidance to optimize send time, enhance segmentation and personalization, and ultimately, ROI. We’ve developed a three-tiered service model that lets clients start with essential monitoring and scale up to comprehensive program management as needed. 

By leveraging first-party data for personalization and advanced segmentation, we help ensure messages not only reach the right audience but also arrive at the right time across all channels. We’re focused on protecting and maximizing this revenue stream.

Let’s talk about identity management. How does Simon’s services help brands build that essential 360-customer view you mentioned earlier?

Identity management is incredibly important to any business that needs accurate, stable customer records — which, let’s be honest, is pretty much everyone these days.

We start with a thorough audit of existing data sources, then conduct an identity workshop to determine the best practices that make sense for their specific business. From there, we implement those practices into a single, consolidated customer table. 

In some cases, we might focus on establishing a single customer ID. For others, it might be as comprehensive as running deduplication and data cleansing processes. The end result for all these cases is to have a unified and accurate customer table that becomes the foundation of effective marketing.

You’ve spent your entire career in MarTech. How has that experience shaped how you help clients succeed?

Having consulted in MarTech across various brands and industries, I’ve seen firsthand how technology adoption can make or break marketing success. Although knowing marketing best practices is important, understanding the tech behind the curtain — and how to optimize it — is equally important. 

It’s not the technology itself, and sometimes not even a team’s marketing expertise, holding marketers back. It’s the process of adopting and fully utilizing new tech like AI. Thankfully, my experience helps me quickly spot where clients might be struggling and work with them to drive the results they’re looking for.

The CDP market is evolving rapidly. What excites you most about leading the Services team during this transformative period?

What really excites me connects back to our “Anti-CDP” approach. We know that having a CDP alone isn’t enough to drive positive marketing outcomes. The magic happens when you blend the right strategy, people, and technology together. 

That’s where our services team comes in. We’re the people who help make that blend work. And now, with AI in the mix, we can make even more sophisticated recommendations based on exponentially more data.

Looking ahead, how do you see marketing evolving, and what opportunities do these changes create for marketers?

We’re seeing huge momentum in personalization at scale, AI and machine learning, predictive analytics, omnichannel marketing, and first-party data strategies. What’s exciting is that our product team stays ahead of these trends, which allows our services team to leverage cutting-edge capabilities, like our AI beta, to support use case recommendations and strategy development.

One final question: What should marketers know about working with Simon Data’s Lifecycle Services team?

At the end of the day, we’re focused on three things: making your life easier, your processes more efficient, and your data more streamlined. Beyond that, everything we do ties back to driving incremental return on investment and customer lifetime value for your org.