We are excited to announce that Profiles Sync and Reverse ETL are now available in public beta. The public beta of Twilio Segment’s Profiles Sync and Reverse ETL empowers our customers to achieve a new level of customer data management flexibility, control, and unlocks new and exciting use cases that customers can build on.

Unlock Customer Data

Profiles Sync is a new solution that enables organizations to synchronize their identity-resolved customer data into the data warehouse. This allows organizations to create a comprehensive and accurate view of their customers. By introducing profile data from Segment with data in the warehouse, customers can build golden customer profiles that can be used to create personalized experiences in any channel.

Use Cases:

• Golden Profile - Join Profiles and other customer data to build a single view of the customer

• Advanced Audiences - Build advanced audiences based on traits or other customer information in the warehouse

• Attribution Analysis - Build dashboards that help Marketers understand the steps that lead to customers buying the product

• Machine Learning - Feed ML models to reduce customer acquisition costs, increase lifetime value, and inspire engagement and loyalty

• Identity Graph Monitoring - Get insights on Identity Resolution and uncover how identity decisions were made

Activate and Share Data Anywhere

Reverse ETL, on the other hand, is a new feature in which data is extracted from the data warehouse system and then loaded into a destination application.

Use Cases:

• Golden Profile Activation - Send data in the warehouse back into Segment that can be activated in all supported destinations, including Twilio Engage and other platforms

• Sales Efficiency - Sync lead scores created in the warehouse to Salesforce to customize interactions with prospects and optimize sales opportunities

• Audience Building - Sync audiences and other data built in the warehouse to Braze, Iterable, or Hubspot or Salesforce Marketing Cloud for personalized marketing campaigns

• Self-service reporting - Connect Google Sheets to a view in the warehouse for other business teams to have access to up-to-date reports

• Self-service analytics - Sync enriched data to Mixpanel for a more complete customer view

• Improved ad performance reporting - Pass offline or enriched data to conversion APIs like Facebook, Google Ads, TikTok, Snapchat

More Powerful Together

Together, Profiles Sync and Reverse ETL provide a powerful solution for managing and analyzing customer data. Profiles Sync enables organizations to create comprehensive customer profiles, while Reverse ETL ensures that the data in those profiles is always up-to-date, accurate, and available where you need it. With these features packaged into the CDP, customers benefit from leveraging the best parts of the Segment infrastructure. 

Profiles Sync and Reverse ETL are reliable, as they are built on robust and scalable technologies already available within the CDP. Profiles sync is a natural extension of our powerful identity resolution capabilities, that has been developed over years and enables you to open this data directly to the warehouse. Ultimately, this allows organizations to handle profile creation across large amounts of data and users –utilizing Segment’s mature and performant systems and without having to manage or troubleshoot performance issues at scale.

Plus, these features are fully extensible, as they take advantage of the open platform that Segment has already built with our leading destinations catalog and Developer Center for companies to build their own integrations. This allows any customer to customize and expand the capabilities of their Reverse ETL pipelines, and to integrate them with other systems and platforms. 

Finally, Segment has always provided easy to access observability of your event and pipelines. Profiles Sync and Reverse ETL. This enables organizations to monitor and analyze the data flow between all your systems and platforms. It also allows you to identify and troubleshoot any issues with the data pipeline easily. No need to build or monitor another disparate system - it is all built into a single platform that your team already uses.

Ultimately, using a CDP alongside your warehouses enables your marketing and data teams to work directly on the data you rely on already and make it easier to activate within the systems you already use.

Get Started

Profiles Sync and Reverse ETL public beta is now available and will be rolling out to all eligible customers over the following days. If you’re a customer already, you only need to log in to your account and follow our docs for Reverse ETL or docs on Profiles Sync for how to set up your first models or begin syncing profile data to your warehouse. 

We’re looking for partners to give us feedback on how they anticipate using these features and where we’re going. If you’re not currently a customer and are looking to learn more about how a CDP and data warehouse can work better together - sign up for a demo today!

1. You must be a Twilio Engage customer to participate in the public beta for Profiles Sync. To get started with Twilio Engage, request a demo.

2. All Twilio Segment customers qualify to receive access to the public beta for Reverse ETL. If you are not a customer and would like to get started, create a free account today.

• Twilio Segment for Healthcare is now HIPAA-eligible. Segment can sign Business Associate Agreements (BAAs) with organizations in the Healthcare & Life Sciences industry.

• Twilio Segment for Healthcare unlocks offline data, where most patient interactions occur, along with online data from web, mobile, and engagement applications.

• Healthcare organizations can now take disparate patient interactions and create unified patient profiles to better understand the care journey, and improve health outcomes.

Today’s leading healthcare organizations are on a mission to modernize and personalize patient engagement and the care journey. 85% of U.S. consumers wish their healthcare experiences were more personalized and 80% of patients prefer to use digital communication to interact with healthcare providers and brands. Industries like retail and finance have led the way and proven personalization can help boost acquisition, conversions, satisfaction, and retention. 

But, regulations, data silos and disconnected technologies have prevented healthcare businesses from leveraging these techniques to help improve health outcomes of patients and deliver personalized care journeys at scale.  

Twilio Segment is ranked as the #1 Customer Data Platform in worldwide market share by IDC for 2021, and is now HIPAA-eligible and ready to be an integral part of healthcare and life sciences companies' patient engagement solutions. Segment enables providers, payers, healthtech, and life sciences organizations to unlock patient data, improve patient outreach and retention, and elevate the care journey with personalized engagement. 

Unlock patient data

Twilio Segment is an extensible customer data platform with 400+ native integrations and a Developer Center that allows healthcare and life sciences companies to break down data silos and establish a single platform for collecting, unifying, connecting, and activating patient data. With Twilio Segment, you can collect patient data from all your online and offline data sources and securely send only the data that needs to be shared with any tool in your tech stack.

By eliminating the need to build a spider web of point-to-point custom integrations between various tools, your engineering, data, and marketing teams can focus on the job that matters most: creating lasting relationships that improve patient health outcomes. 

• Engineering teams no longer need to maintain multiple integrations with tools for analytics, advertising, and customer engagement. Integrate once with Twilio Segment and then set up your workspace to selectively push only the required data across your stack. 

• Twilio Segment simplifies data collection from all of your online and offline sources, including web app, mobile app, contact center, legacy backend applications, and data warehouses, so you can truly understand your patient’s needs and deliver the care that’s required.  

Improve patient outreach and retention

Twilio Segment allows healthcare and life science companies to stitch together first-party customer data in real-time allowing data, marketing and care teams to perform funnel analysis, improve conversions, build Audiences and create real-time campaigns, based off of patient data, all with an intuitive user interface.

• Healthtech and telehealth companies focused on providing prescriptions and diagnostic services online use Twilio Segment to analyze patient onboarding, improve conversions and re-engage inactive patients. 

• Payers focused on reducing care gaps use Twilio Segment to create real-time, personalized campaigns, based on member data, to increase participation in health programs that support the management and prevention of chronic conditions. With the ability to build lookalike audiences, marketing teams can share vital program information across any of their engagement tools with Segment’s out-of-the-box integrations.      

Elevate patient experience with personalized engagement

Twilio Segment allows customers to build targeted and personalized care Journeys across all products and platforms.

• Crafting a care journey can be as simple as identifying a cohort of patients susceptible to a specific condition, encouraging them to sign up to your preventive care or condition management programs, and measuring channel and marketing effectiveness. 

• And, the Twilio Segment platform allows healthcare organizations to orchestrate their desired complexity. Import patient lab results and orchestrate personalized treatment plans, at scale, with journey flows resulting in follow-up visits, prescription recommendations, or even additional lab work. 

Get started with Twilio Segment for Healthcare

Ready to build? Take a look at some of our healthcare and life sciences Recipes, and our guide  for Architecting for HIPAA on Twilio Segment.

Get a demo to see how Twilio Segment can unlock your data and help your patients achieve better outcomes with more personalized care.

• Profiles Sync and Reverse ETL, two new features for the Twilio Segment CDP, will be available for public beta in December, 2022.

• Profiles Sync makes Twilio Segment’s identity-resolved customer profiles portable. It syncs customer profiles to the data warehouse, giving data teams the foundation they need to create valuable audiences in the data warehouse that power personalized customer experiences.

• Reverse ETL makes activating these enriched profiles, and other valuable data stored in the data warehouse, easy and automatic. Connect to and start syncing data from your cloud data warehouse of choice within minutes.

Delivering personalized and relevant customer experiences is now the expectation, not the exception.

And year over year, these expectations are getting higher. According to our 2022 State of Personalization Report, 62% of consumers say a brand will lose their loyalty if they deliver a generic, unpersonalized experience, up from 45% in 2021.

In practice, however, delivering these personalized experiences is an empty rallying cry rather than a reality.

The problem is that gathering all the data about your customers and merging it into one record is a largely unsolved challenge for the vast majority of businesses. Stale, inaccurate, and fragmented customer profiles are still the norm, leading to impersonal (not to mention inefficient) customer engagement.

For over a decade, Twilio Segment has been on a mission to change this. With our industry leading product – Segment Profiles – businesses can merge the complete activity history of each customer across web, mobile, servers and systems into a single profile, giving companies complete, accurate and trusted customer profiles automatically – no data modeling or extra transformation required.

Now, we’re taking things one step further. Two upcoming features – Profiles Sync and Reverse ETL– make our industry-leading customer profiles portable, allowing businesses to create hyper-tailored audiences in their domain-of-choice, the data warehouse.

These features, alongside Twilio Segment’s other products, such as Engage, are the next step in our vision to empower businesses with real-time, accurate, and unified data together in one platform.

Providing secure, native, and open access to data where it already resides

Since Segment’s founding in 2011, open data and interoperability has been at the heart of our approach to customer data management. Unlike legacy marketing suites, our open platform of 400+ pre-built integrations ensures customer data is not locked in any one system, and can be activated in real-time in your marketing and analytics tools of choice.

So, when we heard from some of our most data-savvy customers that they were performing advanced analytics, machine learning, and trait computation in their data warehouse, it got us thinking about what customer profiles in the warehouse looked like.

Using new modern data platforms, we saw 1-3 person data teams running powerful cloud data warehouse systems alongside their CDP to enable mission-critical analysis and impressive personalization use cases on par with big tech companies staffed with armies of data engineers. 

But when it came to building customer profiles, we observed a recurring stumbling block.

These small but mighty data engineering teams were creating “shadow profiles”, custom-built identity resolution pipelines within the data warehouse itself. 

The problem? 

Custom-built, identity-resolved customer profiles are very difficult to create and maintain in the data warehouse directly, sometimes taking years to model and refine to a point that they are trusted. 

In some cases, data teams were able to stitch identities in their warehouse by performing transformations or working with additional vendors, but for many businesses these “shadow profiles” became incomplete, out of date, and less accurate than using Segment’s identity resolution system built over several years.

Additionally, more and more customers showed us how they were driving business impact with machine learning. To enable this, they wanted to send sources and data processed through Segment into the environments their data scientists already worked – the data warehouse. 

The inverse was also true – these data teams were creating hundreds or thousands of traits, and wanted efficient ways to push these traits from the warehouse back to Segment so their marketing team could use them for fine-grained targeting, audience creation and journey building. 

Seeing how the data warehouse complemented the modern customer data foundation they had established with Segment, the opportunity ahead of us was clear: to deliver a complete, identity-resolved, customer profile that can be enriched with any and all data in the warehouse, and easily sent back out of the warehouse to any tool in their tech stack.

Profiles Sync and Reverse ETL: democratizing access to a single view of the customer

Today, we’re announcing two exciting products – Profiles Sync & Reverse ETL – that combine Segment’s powerful customer profiles with the storage and compute power of cloud data warehouses like Snowflake, BigQuery, and Redshift.

Profiles Sync: making profiles portable

The number of touchpoints customers can have with your business has exploded in the last decade, and a typical customer journey is likely to take place across various devices. Think about it: How many devices have you used in the past hour? Your work laptop, your phone, maybe a smart speaker, and possibly more.

With Segment’s best in class identity resolution engine, you can gather data across those different touchpoints, tie it all to one unique customer profile, and then use that data to delight your customers with messaging tailored to them.

With Profiles Sync, you can take things one step further. Profiles Sync provides easy-to-use data sets and data models right out of the box, so that you can enrich customer profiles in the warehouse according to the needs of your business. These data sets are designed to make it easy to join Segment provided tables with existing identities and other tables in your warehouse of choice. 

That means rich customer profiles in your warehouse in hours, as opposed to years.

Reverse ETL: solving the “last mile problem” for data

Our data-savvy customers also told us that once they had built out and enriched their customer profiles in the warehouse, they needed a way to send these profiles from the warehouse to downstream destinations in their tech stack.  

For example, say you wanted to combine event data from your website (tracked via Segment) with object data from your CRM or contact center in your data warehouse, using that data to model a “likely to convert” audience, and sending that audience to an email marketing tool or Google Ads for re-marketing. 

Sure, you could have your data teams manually export and import CSV files, or build custom Python data pipelines, spending vast amounts of time and money in the process.

Or you could use Reverse ETL.

Reverse ETL lets you activate the data in your warehouse automatically. It lets you send data in your warehouse through Segment out to all of the downstream tools you use with the same design, reliability, and observability you expect from Segment.

Crucially, this means you don’t need a different vendor for each type of data pipeline – event streaming, ETL, and reverse ETL. Segment provides every type of data pipeline in a single, easy-to-use platform so you can have one vendor and one tool for all of your data.

At Segment, we are in constant conversation with our customers and closely monitor the shifts and changes of the customer data landscape. We are excited to provide this first look at our Reverse ETL tool and empower customers who want to activate the valuable data within their cloud data platforms.

Getting started with Profiles Sync and Reverse ETL

With Profiles Sync and Reverse ETL data teams now have a complete toolkit to support profile enrichment and movement. This means more flexibility, more accessibility, and most importantly, better quality customer engagement.

If you’d like to stay in the know, follow the steps below to sign up for the Profiles Sync and Reverse ETL public beta when it’s released later this year: 

• Profiles Sync is available to all Engage (formerly known as Personas) customers at no additional cost. Sign up here.

• Non-Engage customers can contact their Segment rep to access Profiles Sync. 

Reverse ETL will be available to all Segment Connections customers at all tiers. Customers can sign up here to be notified when Public Beta becomes available.