How CDPs leverage Snowflake to create hyper-personalized customer experiences

In the continually evolving landscape of customer-centric marketing, the combination of cutting-edge technologies has paved the way for unparalleled personalization opportunities.

At the forefront of this revolution are Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) and Cloud Data Warehouses (CDWs), with Snowflake emerging as a powerhouse when it comes to marketing data management.

In this article, we’ll discuss how CDPs like Simon Data integrate with a CDW like Snowflake to unlock infinite personalization possibilities that ultimately lead to increased customer acquisition, retention, and satisfaction.

Understanding Snowflake and CDPs

The benefit of CDPs

By now, you’ve probably heard about Customer Data Platforms, so let’s quickly define what a CDP is and its use cases. A CDP is a martech tool that sits at the center of your marketing strategy. CDPs aggregate and unify all types of data from basic customer contact information to all-time purchase history, to purchase propensity determined by an AI tool, to a customer’s website page view from five minutes ago.

The data that CDPs compile is stitched together to create a complete, accurate, unified view of your customers. This single customer view serves as the basis for effective personalized marketing. From there, mark‌eters can use this data to create granular customer segments to deliver the right message, at the right time.

What is Snowflake?

Snowflake is a powerful Cloud Data Platform that can store all of your customer data and serve as your single source of truth. Snowflake’s scalability and ability to handle massive datasets make it a perfect fit for your business as it grows and acquires more data.

With your CDP sitting on top of Snowflake, your marketing team has direct access to this data. Your data team works diligently to collect and maintain this data, and by having your CDP sit on top of Snowflake, marketers get easy access to the wealth of quality data that is already available.

The connection between a CDP and CDW reduces the duplication of data outside of your warehouse, improves data cleanliness, eliminates data silos, and allows marketers the freedom and ability to quickly set up high-quality, data-driven marketing campaigns.

Now that we’ve defined CDPs and Snowflake, let’s explore how these two powerhouses work together to achieve hyper-personalized marketing campaigns.

Empowering Customer 360s with Snowflake

Without having real-time, centralized data, it’s nearly impossible for marketers to effectively manage their marketing workflows and tailor their campaigns to their customers.

This is where using a CDW like Snowflake comes into play. Snowflake excels in storing and aggregating customer data collected from various sources and customer touchpoints, such as customer website behavior, order history, and customer service interactions.

This centralization creates the foundation for a unified customer view, which is instrumental in understanding the complete customer journey.

Benefits of centralizing customer data

Rather than setting up data routing from disparate sources and sending them to your CDP, focus your energy on getting that data into your data platform so that it remains your source of truth, enabling your marketing teams to get access to the most reliable data to build their campaigns.

When all of your data is housed in your CDW, it not only can be used for marketing campaigns, but for campaign analysis, historical tracking, and any other data use your business may have as well. Working toward your data platform as your source of truth is an investment in your company’s long-term success.

via GIPHY

Let’s look at some use cases. You’ll probably want to use a customer’s email clicks and opens to create personalized customer experiences across many different channels like social media, onsite personalization, SMS, and further email campaigns.

Instead of sending email behavior data from your ESP to tens of different locations, route that data to one place: your data platform. Then, your CDP can use that data to segment customers and orchestrate a unified, omnichannel customer experience.

So, if your customer opens an email and clicks on an image of a red pair of sneakers, you can store that information in Snowflake and use a CDP like Simon Data to send that information to channels like Meta, Attentive, Dynamic Yield, and more.

You can ensure that the next time your customer goes on your website or Meta, those red sneakers are the first thing they see. And, when your next SMS campaign goes out, an image of those sneakers is sent along with it.

When your data is centralized in your data platform, all your channels can use the same reliable data so that your customers have one unified, great experience.

A powerful CDP can also send data back to you. With Simon Data, for example, we can set up a Snowflake share so that all metadata related to campaigns orchestrated through Simon can be shared directly back to you — making Simon CDP the connective tissue that helps keep Snowflake as your source of truth.

Scalability: Empowering growth with Snowflake and a CDP

Snowflake’s scalability is a game-changer, especially in the era of big data. As businesses accumulate massive datasets, the ability to scale becomes paramount.

Snowflake’s architecture allows for seamless scalability, accommodating the growth of customer data without compromising on performance. It achieves this by separating storage and computing, allowing an almost unlimited amount of queries to be run simultaneously.

Snowflake can scale both vertically and horizontally and has powerful auto scalability capabilities. This scalability is key to supporting the growth and continued optimization of your marketing campaigns.

Ensuring data quality for accuracy and precision

Every good marketer knows that a single customer view is only as valuable as the data used to create it. Snowflake allows you an environment to easily implement and automate various data cleaning processes that will standardize and deduplicate your data.

By having your CDP sit on top of Snowflake, you have complete control over the quality of your data used to create your unified customer view.

In addition, Snowflake’s commitment to data security and quality ensures that the information stored is not only comprehensive but also safe and secure. By consolidating all of your data in one place, you strengthen its security and allow enforcement of data governance policies established by your business. Snowflake provides a secure location to manage customer data responsibly.

Clean and trustworthy data is crucial to crafting personalized experiences that resonate with individual preferences. When a CDP sits on top of Snowflake, your marketers get access to accurate, holistic, and centralized data.

Incorporating AI and Machine Learning for personalized insights

With a high-quality cloud data platform in place, the stage is set for the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) tools. Snowflake’s compatibility with these technologies empowers CDPs to capitalize on these meaningful insights from customer data and build highly targeted campaigns that can strategically pivot based on customer needs.

Seamless integration with AI and ML tools

Snowflake can integrate with a variety of AI and ML tools, and its compatibility spans popular tools and frameworks, empowering data scientists and analysts to leverage their preferred AI and ML tools without constraints. Performance is crucial when running intensive ML algorithms. Due to Snowflake’s ability to scale, it is perfect to support robust ML queries needed to effectively derive insights from customer data.

Using AI insights for customer marketing

When your CDP sits on top of Snowflake, you can easily infuse your AI insights into all customer journeys to create a 1:1 personalized customer experience. Marketers have access to all of the customer data and insights that they need to build data-driven, tailored communications.

Real-time insights can be implemented across all channels to create smarter campaigns that nudge customers with the right message at the right time. These insights can be used to automatically adjust a customer’s experience based on their behavior.

Some of the most useful AI insights for marketers are churn propensity, purchase propensity, and product recommendations. If you’re looking for robust predictive insights, check out Simon Predict.

Targeting your customers at the right time can make or break your campaign success. Models such as churn propensity can help catch customers at crucial moments in the customer lifecycle.

When your CDP has access to powerful churn models and customer data, you can instantly detect when their churn risk changes and take action before it’s too late. You can even set up a journey so that customers receive proactive communication when their churn risk increases.

This journey could provide them with a special offer or send them a personalized message from your customer service team showing them that they are a valued customer, and helping build brand affinity, loyalty, and revenue.

Driving personalization across the entire customer journey with a CDP

Armed with a unified customer view and AI-driven insights, CDPs leverage data in cloud data platforms to personalize interactions across diverse touchpoints. Here are some of the benefits our customers see.

Tailored website and app experiences

Websites and apps serve as primary interfaces for customer interaction. Fueled by your data platform, CDPs can help personalize these onsite experiences so that they resonate with your customers.

With a CDP, you can sync over all customer information to your onsite personalization tool so that it is fresh every single day. This information can include past purchases, recent email clicks, demographic data, communication preferences, and more. Because your CDP is powered by your CDW, you can be assured that it is the freshest, most accurate data.

Dynamically syncing this data to your onsite personalization tool allows your customers to see tailored product recommendations that they are most likely to purchase and enjoy. The result? An immersive, 1:1 customer experience.

Elevating email marketing campaigns

Emails remain a crucial and effective part of marketing strategies, and personalization here is non-negotiable. CDPs built upon CDWs give marketers the data they need to craft email campaigns with targeted messaging and offers, aligning with individual tastes and behaviors.

For example, while marketing automation tools may be able to execute simple abandon carts and browse emails, orchestrating abandonment through a CDP allows you to take advantage of all the customer data you already have and further personalize abandonment.

Your AI tool may have predicted that sending an abandonment email for a pillow is best 30 minutes after it’s abandoned, versus an email that is best sent three hours after for a mattress. With a CDP, you can use those insights to effectively choose the right content and timing that would best resonate with your customers.

With CDP-powered emails, customers’ inboxes become a personalized feed worth their time rather than a generic broadcast channel.

Smart post-purchase campaigns

Access to customer data and AI insights allows you to offer highly personalized product recommendations in the post-purchase customer journey. If a customer has recently bought a camera, AI algorithms can analyze their preferences as well as items frequently bought together and suggest complementary accessories like specific lenses, tripods, or camera bags that fit with their purchase.

This tailored approach not only enhances the customer’s experience by introducing relevant items but also increases the likelihood of additional purchases. You can harness upsell and cross-sell opportunities that make sense for your customers. This level of personalization could not be achieved without a CDP that is powered by your cloud data platform.

Rethinking real-time customer support

In the realm of customer support, real-time personalization matters more than ever. Customer information can be sent over from a CDP to any customer support tool.

When that data is powered by your CDW, you are sending over the complete, accurate customer profile. With more relevant information, support members can be better empowered with context to provide recommendations and solutions that align with the customer’s history, fostering a sense of individualized care. This leads to better and quicker support interactions, and ultimately more satisfied customers.

Conclusion

The combination of a CDP with the robust, real-time data stored in Snowflake has the potential to bring about transformative improvements in personalized customer experiences. The combination of these technologies centralizes data and creates a complete customer view, which can be activated to foster increased engagement, customer loyalty, and satisfaction.

The seamless integration of a CDP and Snowflake ensures that all of your marketing campaigns are using the most accurate, freshest data available. When CDPs are built on top of your CDW, it eliminates data silos and duplication of data and gives marketers the tools they need to re-imagine touch points across the customer journey, infusing data into every customer interaction from your brand.

Explore the boundless hyper-personalization possibilities that unfold when a CDP like Simon Data is combined with a powerful cloud data platform like Snowflake.