Snowflake + Simon Data for marketing 101
By now, you’ve probably heard of cloud data warehouses and customer data platforms (CDPs). However, as the industry continues to evolve, and with over 150+ CDP tools out there, it’s difficult to understand how using these platforms together can personalize the customer experience.
Put simply, if your enterprise marketing team wants to:
- Deliver the 1:1 experience customers crave
- Consolidate and activate customer data
- Drive more personalization and optimization, and be able to adapt customer workflows in real time
- Use (or currently uses) Snowflake
…then Snowflake + Simon Data is the right solution for you!
We don’t need to tell you all that you’re sitting on a goldmine of rich, valuable customer data. You already know that. But, like an actual goldmine, it can be complicated to find and extract it — and for many of you, use that data for marketing purposes. Many companies still struggle with siloed data, and manual and messy data workflows—making it slow and difficult to use the data for marketing purposes. And with this messy data, the dream of becoming truly data-driven seems further away.
Why should marketers care about their Data Cloud?
Reason 1: It’s your single source of truth. You do not want “multiple” sources of truth. A single source of truth (SSOT) ensures that everyone in your organization is making decisions based on the same data.
Snowflake captures all the data there is to know about a customer: website activity, purchases, channel engagements, and even customer support data. Having multiple sources of data is not efficient, and it’s not scalable.
“If everyone in the business is working in the same data instead of in their own siloed data, there will be better decisions made across the org.” - Luke Ambrosetti, Senior Partner Solutions Engineer at Snowflake
Reason 2: You can use Snowflake data for marketing segmentation and activation. If you have your data activation layer within Snowflake, you’re preserving that SSOT.
If you take it out and replicate the data in another platform, you lose that SSOT because it leads to poor quality data, inconsistencies, bad decision-making, etc., and this also poses certain security and privacy risks.
Reason 3: Data security, governance, and compliance. Privacy regulations have exploded in recent years and for good reason. These new laws have set a precedent as to how businesses should handle customer data – correctly, respectfully, and with care.
Reason 4: With AI and ML being top-of-mind for enterprise marketing teams, cloud data platforms and CDPs use GenAI to help teams save time, streamline processes, and offer predictive analytics so you can get the most out of your data.
“For AI/ML, both Simon and Snowflake can help you harness the power of AI. But when you’re thinking about AI, first solidify your data strategy. You need quality data for quality AI.” - Luke Ambrosetti
Why should marketers care about a CDP?
A CDP unifies your customer data from all sources and all types, including online and offline, real-time events, from your cloud data warehouse, and other marketing engagement data.
CDPs then create one single profile for each customer, enabling marketers to create highly sophisticated customer segments, which turn into highly personalized campaigns spanning multiple channels in some cases. All of which help businesses drive revenue!
How Simon Data + Snowflake work together
Simon Data is a Snowflake-connected CDP. It is built on top of Snowflake, connects directly to your Snowflake instance, and enables marketing teams to activate that data directly from Snowflake.
But what exactly does a connected CDP mean for marketing teams? There are several benefits over a traditional, non-connected Snowflake CDP.
First, marketers can create the highly sophisticated segments you need for campaigns easily. Simon Data’s segment builder is self-serve and no-code, so you don’t need to know SQL, and you don’t need to ask your data or engineering team for that data. Your engineers get time back, and you can launch campaigns quickly. It’s a win-win!
Second, real-time data processing, which is extremely important for certain marketing campaigns, such as abandon cart campaigns. You want the event data in real time, so you can see exactly when and what a customer abandoned and follow up with them in real time to get them to purchase.
“One of the cool things about using the Snowflake and Simon architecture is going beyond just customer data by having contextual data, and even meta data, too, which you can use for marketing purposes. It’s a huge benefit.”- Luke Ambrosetti
With Simon + Snowflake, there will be no data replication, so the data remains in your single source of truth (in this case, in Snowflake), until it’s ready for activation.
Other CDPs require data replication, which means now you have a second source of truth. Another added benefit of this is that you also inherit Snowflake’s security and governance.
The last significant benefit of Simon’s Snowflake-Connected CDP is that it's built for composability. You can use and integrate all of the existing tools you know and love like Braze, Iterable, Attentive, or Salesforce.
Snowflake houses all of your customer data so you can use Simon Connected to develop all of those hyper-specific audiences that you need.
With Simon’s seamless connection to Snowflake, you can easily access that customer data to build audience segments, and then sync those audiences and orchestrate your campaigns to all your marketing channels which we see on the left (such as SMS, email, paid, push, and more).
Simon’s Snowflake-Connected CDP also allows customers to leverage the core capabilities of a CDP, such as identity stitching, reporting, and other additional Simon SKUs — as well as ID+, Match+, and Predict.
What’s more, all of your campaign data from those channels get funneled back into your Snowflake Data Cloud for further analysis.
Check out our latest webinar to learn more. If you want to see Simon Data in action, book a demo today.
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