CDP Week: Summer Edition, Day 1 Recap

Today marks the start of CDP Week: Summer Edition, an immersive, virtual conference that explores the compounding impact of customer data, and how it’s shaping our new customer-first – and privacy-conscious – era. 

For the past few years, a few topics have been top of mind across industries: the phaseout of third-party cookies, the rise of omnichannel customer behavior, and the need for companies to reach data maturity. 

At this summer’s CDP Week, we’re exploring these themes through both a strategic and technical lens: inviting industry leaders and developers to discuss the strategies and infrastructure needed to make good on the promise of being customer-first. 

Twilio’s CEO and co-founder, Jeff Lawson, kicked off CDP Week with a quick state of affairs on how customer communications, and business strategies, are evolving. Right now, we’re in the midst of massive changes when it comes to how we do business. The emphasis on digital acceleration that we saw in the early stages of the pandemic is now being eclipsed by a need for efficiency – especially as we grapple with inflation and the fear of a recession. 

This makes decreasing customer acquisition costs and increasing lifetime value all the more important. There’s also an even greater emphasis on companies to lean into direct customer relationships by leveraging first-party data. 

All these themes are explored in more detail throughout the next three days of CDP Week. But, here are some more highlights from Day 1. 

Keynote speaker Bozoma Saint John on leading with resilience and innovation

Bozoma Saint John has an impressive resume, to put it lightly. She was named Forbes #1 Most Influential CMO, and has been the Chief Marketing Officer at powerhouse companies like Pepsi, Apple, Uber, and Netflix. 

For our keynote session, Twilio Segment’s VP of Product Marketing & Demand Generation, Katrina Wong, sat down with Bozoma to discuss the leadership blueprint for building authentic relationships with your customers and colleagues – something all the more important in a post-pandemic, post-isolation world. 

One of the biggest takeaways Bozoma shared was the importance of context. There’s a pressure in the workplace to completely separate our personal lives from our professional selves, but that can be detrimental. All the experiences in our lives shape our unique perspectives, and this diversity of thought is often a team’s greatest strength. 

The importance of context also applies to data analysis. It can be easy to take data at face value, but you always have to ask yourself: what are the circumstances? When was the data collected? Was it for a specific cohort? Being able to look through a data-driven lens, as well as a more intuitive, human one is often where you’ll find success.   

IDC Research Director Gerry Murray breaks down the importance of modern data ecosystems

We’ve been in the “age of experience” for the past few years now; it’s how consumers choose between brands, and decide which businesses to stake their loyalty to. In one IDC survey, 92% of customers said that CX (i.e. customer experience) highly influences their future purchase decisions. 

As for what makes an excellent experience, you’ll often hear “omnichannel personalization” as the answer. This refers to a company’s ability to customize (and connect) each user interaction, no matter the time, place, or device it takes place on. But for as much as omnichannel personalization has become a discussion point, what remains vague is the nuts and bolts of its implementation. 

Gerry Murray, Research Director at IDC, helped us look behind the curtain at the data ecosystem needed to deliver unique customer experiences at scale and in real-time. But first he asked: is your data fast enough to keep up with your customers? 

In a single day, the average person touches their smartphone over 2,000 times and switches between three devices. And one person will often use 10 different channels to interact with a single brand. That’s a lot of disparate data points if companies aren’t equipped with the right infrastructure. 

It’s no wonder then that companies' investment in Data & Analytics rose 44% in a span of four years.   

Source: IDC's Marketing Tech Investment Benchmark Survey, 2020

It’s also why more and more companies have been turning to customer data platforms, which help automate data consolidation and integrations, to create a connected tech stack. 

According to the Gerry, here is the trifecta of what to look for in a CDP:

• Aggregation: data management, security governance, consent management, etc. 

• Analytics: segmentation, optimization, AI/ML visualization, predictions, etc. 

• Activation: multi-channel engagement, journey design and orchestration, testing and optimization, connectors to on- and offline channels. 

Cookieless conversion and the future of marketing

The phaseout of third-party cookies has been underway for a few years now – and from a legislative standpoint, there’s no slowing down. Right now, there are fifteen states in the U.S. that are in the midst of passing a CCPA-style law (with more likely to follow suit). 

This is a watershed moment in digital advertising. Third-party cookies have long been the go-to for retargeting anonymous users with personalized ads across domains. Soon, that won’t be an option. 

But that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Increasingly, third-party cookies have come across as creepy to consumers. People want more transparency around how their data is being collected and used. 

In this session, Twilio Segment PMMs sat down with Ruxanda Wehr, Product Partnerships Manager at Signals Meta, to discuss what the future of digital advertising looks like.  Hint: it will depend on first-party data.

For a quick refresher, first-party data is collected by your company, based on the interactions you have directly with your customers (on your website, in your app, etc.) As mentioned above, CDPs help collect and consolidate data from across your organization. Numerous studies have found that leveraging first-party data for advertising actually helps businesses perform better when it comes to revenue, customer satisfaction, average order values, and more. 

And in 2020, Boston Consulting Group did a study which found that the incremental revenue from a single ad placement doubled when marketers leveraged their company’s first-party data.

Facebook’s Conversions API is another marker of how the industry is changing: moving away from the inconsistency of browser-based pixels to the more reliable server-side.

To learn more about these shifts brought on by the end of third-party cookies,  check out this in-depth guide.

Get ready for Day 2!

Tomorrow, we have another jam-packed agenda featuring the launch of our third annual State of Personalization report, developer showcases on the latest Twilio Segment libraries and SDKs, and more!

There’s still time to save your spot. See you there!