How Travel & Leisure Co. Delivers Personalization with Snowflake & Simon

This post serves as a summary of the live webinar from October 15th hosted by Snowflake and Simon Data with Travel & Leisure Co.

Everyone wants to be data-driven, but often there are mountains of challenges like siloed data or old methodology causing roadblocks. An important goal for brands is using data to deliver personalized experiences that customers expect and businesses need to drive growth.

Many executives say they’re going to activate on their data, but teams need to be given the proper tools to do so. Many don’t have a strategy to unlock the value of data that combines business needs with technology. Often, an IT or business team may tackle this on their own, which keeps others in the dark.

The solution at hand is to have a 360-degree view of customers upon which we can drive personalized messaging to any channel. So, the question becomes, how do we build this foundation of customer knowledge and activate it effectively?

Snowflake as the Foundation for Personalization

Thousands of organizations are sharing data constantly with their ecosystem. Snowflake serves as a central point to aggregate all customer data and create a unified customer profile. They also ensure all data is compliant with current GDPR standards and can drive analytics and personalization. Of utmost importance, they work with partners like Simon Data to ensure data is being utilized to its fullest potential.

Snowflake can take a unified customer profile and send it to Simon to create rich segmentations that activate across all channels at scale.

Simon Unlocks Data

When using data, the goal is to apply it to drive business outcomes and speak to the customer about what they care about. Customer Data Platforms (CDP) span data collection, data modeling, and marketing activation; Simon falls into the last category as an Orchestration CDP helping brands leverage data they already have in their funnel. An effective CDP is about more than just spitting out analytics, it’s connecting data to drive business processes. Ultimately, it’s about putting data in the hands of marketers, enabling marketers to make better and quicker decisions.

The Simon team also strongly believes in empowering marketers to work closely with engineering or product teams. We encourage brands to think about crafting marketing strategies where reporting is seamlessly and consistently accessible. As a result, we can continue to iterate and learn from what’s been done. This is why people who own the creation of customer experiences need to be able to have an understanding of data and personalization.

Simon’s CEO, Jason Davis, describes the three pillars for data-driven marketing as:

• Invest centrally in data – leverage the data you have and build on top of your data strategy
• Democratize access – enable access to data for strategic insights and iterative execution
• Learn cross-functionally – Refine marketing strategies by ensuring data continuity

Travel & Leisure Leverages Both for Personalization at Scale

Travel and Leisure Co. initially started with channels that were separate from one another; attempts to orchestrate fell short because their legacy data provider couldn’t bring everything together. Their goals were to centralize data, connect central data repositories, and deploy models.

After introducing Simon and Snowflake to their backend, Travel and Leisure Co. was able to connect channels and create a flawless consumer experience. Their ability to personalize cross-channel marketing for customers now means that wherever they go they get a consistent message. 

An example of this is Travel and Leisure Co.’s “vacation recommendations” which combines data about transaction history, inventory, demographics, and web activity to make suggestions to customers. Utilizing these data points, they were able to inspire members with destinations they will likely enjoy. As they see intent toward a destination, their recommendations become more granular. Of course, this personalization boosts performance across channels through more  relevant and consistent messaging

A central orchestration platform such as Simon allows Travel & Leisure Co. to maintain a history of cross-channel messages. Using the campaign history, they’re able to build a fractional attribution model based upon engagement quality and its time from conversion. Through this process, they have determined that their personalized comms far exceed generic messaging.

Their teams are also now able to work on more interesting problems due to data automation and model integration from Simon, yielding time to launch even more marketing campaigns. Subsequently, teams are more data-driven as they introduce capabilities to measure the incrementality of their efforts.

The Three Takeaways

1. Break down data silos and unleash the full power of first-party data
2. Develop models to form the basis of communication – models won’t solve everything, but they’ll be able to serve as a construct
3. Measure and evolve tactics using a holistic view of performance – make sure attribution approaches align to the measure of success