We're excited to sponsor the Snowflake Data Summit 2024, highlighting Segment's partnership with Snowflake in enhancing customer acquisition and retention through improved data integration.
Next week, thousands of data professionals will gather in San Francisco for Snowflake Data Summit 2024 - and we’re excited to be a Blue Square sponsor. If you’re attending Summit, learn about our speaking sessions and request a seat at our ancillary events here! Given the upcoming event, we thought it appropriate to reflect on our longstanding relationship with Snowflake and some of the trends that have strengthened it over time.
The Snowflake and Segment partnership first launched in 2018 and has grown consistently over the past few years, now qualifying Segment as an Elite partner. In fact, nearly 700 businesses use both Snowflake and Segment to create – and activate on – a unified profile for their customers. These companies see improved customer acquisition and increased lifetime value through better personalization strategies, marketing ROI, and customer retention.
More specifically, customers are able to:
Centralize their data in Snowflake and ensure it is AI ready: Twilio Segment helps ensure that more data is sent to Snowflake and that Snowflake becomes the source of truth for that data. Instead of data living in different, siloed systems, Segment collects and standardizes the data in one location and then sends it to Snowflake. Since the data is sent in a clean, governed way, it can quickly be used for AI/ML models, yielding better predictive analytics.
Develop trusted profiles of your customers and have a 360 view of them: Identity-resolved customer profiles are created in Segment based on cleaned and unified first-party data. The profile is continually developed as new data is collected in Segment and can be enriched with data stored in Snowflake or from the Snowflake Marketplace. This continuous cycle ensures that companies have comprehensive customer profiles.
Deliver personalized customer interactions and improve acquisition effectiveness: By integrating Snowflake and Segment, companies can see improved acquisition effectiveness (higher conversion rate, lower CAC, higher ROAS) by bringing marketing and data teams closer together. Targeting, retargeting and lookalike audiences, advertising suppression lists can be quickly built by pulling customer records from the warehouse.
One of the best examples of a customer using Snowflake and Segment together is when Allergan Aesthetics relaunched its Allē loyalty program and generated $400 million in direct-to-consumer sales. Allergan built a powerful new intelligent customer engagement architecture with Segment, Twilio, and Snowflake that allows its teams to deliver the right message directly to their patients, and enabled the company to relaunch its personalized customer loyalty program and saw a substantial improvement in sales.
To learn more about how Segment and Snowflake work together, check out why CDPs and the Data Cloud make for a dream team, how you can unlock next-level insights using Segment Reverse ETL with Snowflake Cortex, or how to achieve personalization and customer retention with Segment and Snowflake.
Although the partnership has strengthened over the years due to the success of joint customers, there are larger consumer and technology trends that have helped foster the alignment of cloud data platforms and customer data platforms (CDP^2)!
One of the most important trends over the past several years is the rising expectations customers have today around personalized and bespoke interactions from brands. Instead of generic messages or promotions, customers want 1:1 interactions that are truly unique to them. And, their dollars follow accordingly. In Twilio Segment’s State of Personalization 2023 report, over half (56%) of consumers say they will become repeat buyers after a personalized experience, a 7% increase year-over-year.
But the challenge for many businesses is getting access to that data. As more and more data is created, it’s proven harder to store that data in a way that is structured, actionable, and available to all relevant teams in a company. Customer Data Platforms offer a huge insight into first-party event data that allows brands to offer personalized interactions based on recent activity and actions.
For many customers and brands, that wasn’t enough. They wanted to provide experiences that also leveraged the offline and batch data that was stored in the Data Cloud. There was no easy way to create a complete profile for a customer that leveraged both the real-time event data with the offline data in the warehouse.
With Segment and Snowflake, that began to change.
As we've mentioned before, combining these two powerful tools has opened up a unified approach to hitting growth targets. By merging warehouse data with the real-time customer data processing of CDPs, businesses can now get a complete view of their customers. No single system can be the “single source of truth” without pulling in data from multiple other systems. A CDP needs to gather data from various touch points into trusted profiles before sending it to the warehouse, where it can be linked to rich relational data sets.
Together, they can integrate customer event data — like actions and behaviors from website interactions, app usage, and email responses — with object data such as static info on organizational relationships and product associations. This combined data forms a detailed customer profile, enabling more personalized and targeted marketing.
This integration also provides a robust platform for creating audiences and mapping customer journeys, helping marketers understand customer behavior, preferences, and patterns. These insights are invaluable for enhancing customer experiences and driving growth. Essentially, integrating a CDP and the Data Cloud turns scattered customer data into valuable insights, helping marketers deliver personalized experiences and support data-driven growth.
At Snowflake Data Cloud Summit next week, we will be announcing more features that help further the interoperability between Segment and Snowflake. If you’ll be on-site in San Francisco, please come by our booth, attend one of our talks, or join us for an ancillary event - learn more here.
Our annual look at how attitudes, preferences, and experiences with personalization have evolved over the past year.