CDP Week: Summer Edition, Day 3 Recap

Twilio Segment Personas is now part of Segment’s Twilio Engage product offering.

And that’s a wrap on CDP Week: Summer Edition!

Over the past three days, we’ve heard from industry leaders about the future of customer experiences, the State of Personalization, and how to innovate with first-party data. 

Below, we’ve listed the top takeaways from the final day of CDP Week, which included a fireside chat with Twilio’s new CMO, Joyce Kim, and a product tour of Twilio Segment that showed how to implement omnichannel customer journeys.  

A fireside chat with Twilio CMO Joyce Kim on first-party data and privacy

Joyce Kim began her career in software development before moving to product management, and then digital marketing. It’s given her a holistic view of operations in the tech space, and a deep understanding of how critical the back-end infrastructure is to a business. 

Joyce recently joined Twilio as our new CMO, and sat down with our VP of Product Marketing & Demand Generation, Katrina Wong, to discuss the future of consumer privacy and first-party data. 

These are topics that both Katrina and Joyce are well-versed in. When Joyce worked at Arm, a leading provider of processor IP, she testified at a Senate hearing about the security risks of Spectre and Meltdown (two different hardware vulnerabilities that had widespread ramifications across the entire tech industry).

As Joyce notes, “In today’s business landscape, brand reputation can go hand in hand with privacy and security.” 

This is also why first-party data is so important for companies. It’s the result of the direct interactions a business has with a customer, making it more transparent than the vague transfer of third-party cookies (which are already being phased out by browsers due to privacy concerns).

But are companies ready for the end of third-party cookies? Not quite. According to this year’s State of Personalization report, only 37% of businesses surveyed said that they exclusively use first-party data. 

While third-party cookies have long been the backbone of digital advertising, first-party data is more accurate, and builds stronger customer relationships. (69% of consumers say they appreciate personalization, so long as it’s based on data they’ve shared with a business directly.) 

A great example of a company pivoting to first-party data to strengthen its relationships is the global pharmaceutical company, Allergan. Allergan manufactures products like BOTOX®, JUVÉDERM®, and LATISSE® (to name a few), and historically relied on medical practices for distribution. 

But in a post-cookie world, Allergan knew that they needed to better engage their customers directly. By focusing on building a loyalty program, they not only collected a deep pool of first-party data, but generated $400 million in revenue in one year. (They also decreased customer acquisition costs by 40%). 

You can read more on how Allergan did this here.

But to echo what Katrina said, simply collecting first-party data isn’t enough. In her words, “The companies who are collecting vast pools of first-party data, and have the technology to digest and activate that data, are the ones who will win.”

You can watch Joyce and Katrina’s full discussion here. 

Product Tour: Building Omnichannel Customer Experiences with Twilio Segment CDP

We’re no longer in the days of one-size fits-all marketing campaigns. Thanks to market leaders like Amazon and Netflix, customers now expect to choose how they engage with a business, and through what channels. So, what’s the secret behind successful, omnichannel experiences? In a word: data. 

The reason that Amazon and Netflix are creating amazing end-to-end experiences comes down to the data they collect, and how they leverage it in intelligent ways. That is, personalizing each customer interaction. 

It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in: the success of your business depends on how well you know your customers, and how you build a relationship with them. 

Unfortunately, most businesses today are plagued by data silos, and don’t have a universal view of their customers. As a result, the different teams within a company (like Marketing, Customer Success, etc.) can’t imbue each customer interaction with the context and fluidity it needs to be a seamless experience. 

This is an expensive problem to have. According to Forrester, marketers waste 21% of their budgets targeting the wrong people because of bad data. And engineering teams can spend countless hours trying to fix bad data, which pulls them away from building new products.

This is where a customer data platform comes in. A CDP solves bad customer data in four ways, as it:

• Connects and organizes data from every source, across every platform and channel, which eliminates silos. 

• Processes and validates data to ensure it’s clean and reliable.

• Synthesizes data to create a unified customer profile. 

• Activates data so you can build personalized customer journeys at scale. 

Now, you may be wondering how companies today are using a CDP to build omnichannel customer experiences. And we have a prime example of this with Veronica Beard.

Veronica Beard is a clothing brand with over 500 global distributors, 15 freestanding stores, and its own e-commerce site. They had wanted to grow their  direct-to-consumer business, which meant they needed to connect all the disparate data that had been scattered across their tech stack. This is where Twilio Segment’s CDP came in. 

Veronica Beard was able to unify their tech stack using Connections, and then build sophisticated audience segments for their marketing campaigns with Personas.  

The results speak for themselves: a 25% increase in email ROI, a 20% reduction in CAC from Facebook Ads, and over a 100 hours of engineering time saved. 

Read the full story here.

See you next time! 

CDP Week: Summer Edition may be drawing to a close, but you can still watch all the sessions here.

Thanks for joining us, and until next time!