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Lessons from SIGNAL: How international brands Univision & Zalora use Segment to improve their D2C business models

At SIGNAL 2022, our annual customer and developer conference, we heard from Univision and ZALORA about how to use to succeed as a D2C brand.

Dec 9, 2022

By Meg Buchanan


Whether you’re a digital-native business or looking to add a D2C model within your digital transformation, a direct-to-consumer approach requires a strong understanding of your customers’ communication preferences and shopping habits. To do D2C well, you don’t just need access to your customer data, you need to understand what it means. 

For ZALORA (the premier online destination for everything fashion across Southeast Asia) and Univision (the largest United States broadcaster of Spanish-language content), the decision to lean into their customer data has made all the difference in learning who their customer really is and how to reach them.

During SIGNAL 2022, we learned how ZALORA created a data-driven culture rooted in analytics and experimentation and how Univision used its first-party customer data to launch a new streaming video service and efficiently acquire subscribers. 

Watch the full session for yourself here and read on for our top takeaways from our discussion with these two companies below. 

Lesson 1: Removing data silos can reinvigorate your team and re-engage your customers

ZALORA is one of the top online fashion destinations for Southeast Asia with everything from apparel to accessories for women, men, and children. Despite its massive reach across a multitude of countries, its customer conversion rates were stagnating, so the ZALORA team began to look into its customer journey to see how it could keep consumers coming back for more. 

The company quickly realized that its existing CRM stack was not agile enough to drive personalized and timely messaging to its customers to drive business the way it wanted. Beyond that, they also had multiple sources of truth as opposed to one unified view of their customer. This meant that for each new event they wanted to implement, they would have to duplicate efforts to reach every downstream vendor and spend hours in manual data reconciliation. Not ideal. 

Enter Segment. Now, ZALORA uses Segment technology as its primary event collection service as well as providing a single source of truth for trustworthy customer data across the organization. 

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While this implementation has doubled ZALORA’s customer conversion rate (which is impressive in itself), what’s happened in-house is nearly as compelling. As we said before, data configuration used to take hours of manual work at ZALORA. With the product analytics and marketing automation that Segment provides, employees are now more data-focused than ever before with a 150% MoM growth in internal users and nearly 400+ experiments in year one alone. 

What does this mean? Because ZALORA employees can easily run experiments in the platform that automates across all their marketing and data destinations, they have changed the internal culture around analytics and experimentation. This creative data-backed approach results in more and more engagement initiatives that ultimately benefit the customer. Win, win. 

Lesson 2: Si se puede (Yes, you can) use real-time customer data to deliver your highest advertising ROI

Univision is the United States' largest provider of Spanish-language content, with a wide range of television programming including telenovelas, sports, sitcoms, and news. To stay relevant with its audience, Univision recently launched Vix, a Spanish-language streaming video service with over 20,000 hours of content to watch on-demand.

To launch and drive interest in this new product within the three-month timeline they were given, Univision planned to push out a significant amount of advertising to their audience. The company partnered with Segment to improve the targeting and personalization around those ads by collecting real-time data about its customers straight from its streaming properties. 

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In doing so, Univision had a single unified view of its customer data to use that advertising money for the best ROI possible. This singular data collection continues to benefit the business over time by giving them real-time insights into its customers and ensuring its advertising budget continues to go toward ads that customers are responding to.

Today, VIX has grown by 21 million MAU (Monthly Active Users) since its launch just eight months ago. 

That’s a wrap on SIGNAL 2022

On November 2-3, Twilio Segment hosted its annual customer and developer conference, featuring 30,000 attendees and 50+ customer studies and thought leadership sessions. 

But if you missed it live, don’t worry! Read our recap on the whole conference here and then register to watch other expert videos and learn more about how Twilio Segment can support your business in everything from data collection to customer engagement. 

The State of Personalization 2023

Our annual look at how attitudes, preferences, and experiences with personalization have evolved over the past year.

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The State of Personalization 2023

Our annual look at how attitudes, preferences, and experiences with personalization have evolved over the past year.

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SOP 2023

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