High-quality customer engagement relies on a strong data foundation, and our new features like the Segment Data Graph and Linked Events enhance warehouse interoperability, providing deeper insights and enabling personalized marketing strategies.
Better data drives better engagement.
Here’s the catch: high quality customer engagement is impossible without a strong data foundation to back it up.
This quarter, the teams at Twilio Segment focused on three major product investment themes:
Warehouse Interoperability - The ability to unlock new personalization use cases by orchestrating how data flows into and out of your data warehouse.
AI and Personalization - how it’s supercharging customer engagement experiences.
Platform Extensibility - Letting all developers in the community build on Segment - customers, partners and other Twilio teams.
In this multi-post blog series, we will share Segment product releases and updates in how they fit into these three themes in depth.
This post will focus on warehouse interoperability.
The Segment Data Graph allows businesses to map and understand the relationships between different sets of data about their customers. In simpler terms, it's like creating a detailed map that shows how different pieces of customer information are connected to each other within a company's database.
For example, imagine you have information about a customer's purchases, their website browsing behavior, and their interactions with customer service. The Data Graph helps you see how all these pieces of information relate to that specific customer, making it easier for marketers and business teams to create targeted and personalized experiences for them.
It works by linking the customer profiles you have in Segment (which is a collection of all the data you've gathered about your customers) with any related data stored in your data warehouse. This linking process helps you build a comprehensive view of your customer, which can then be used to improve marketing strategies, customer service, and overall business decisions.
Linked Events makes it easy to enrich all tracked behavioral events with any available data sets within the data warehouse. This gives marketers unprecedented access to data in tools they already use to personalize customer experiences in downstream channels.
Data engineers only need to define the relationships between data sets once to give marketers access to all the data they need to target, personalize, or analyze customer experiences in a downstream application. Linked Events builds on top of your existing data investments, leveraging your already cleaned and transformed data, which reduces time to value from months to hours.
Linked Events is in Limited Public Beta in Q2.
After releasing Reverse ETL for Databricks last quarter - we are bringing full CDP support to Databricks with the addition of Profile Sync and Storage Destination!
Now customers can access cleaned and verified Segment event and profile data within Databricks. From there it can be joined with other datasets for numerous use cases, including training for machine learning models, before being activated back through Segment (and your downstream destinations) with Reverse ETL.
Reverse ETL, Profile Sync, Storage Destination for Databricks are currently in GA.
Reverse ETL for Microsoft Azure allows Azure customers to activate their Azure warehouse data for enhanced personalization in any downstream application using Reverse ETL. This new release joins several other Segment supported warehouses and data lakes including Snowflake, Google BigQuery, Redshift, and Databricks and is available in GA in Q2.
We're excited to announce new data sharing capabilities with Snowflake and Databricks. This offering allows data in your warehouse to be securely shared with Segment.
dbt is a common data engineering tool to centrally manage warehouse models, jobs, and versioning. A native dbt integration has been commonly requested from our cohort of rETL customers who want to leverage their own dbt models. We also provide visibility into Segment model/syncs in dbt plus continuous integration checks to prevent breaking rETL syncs.
Git Sync allows developers to manage version control across Segment resources like Connections and Tracking Plans.
Together, these features provide developers teams with the flexibility to work with their preferred tools.
These features will be Public Beta in Q2.
Over the past year, we’ve been tirelessly working on our Observability features to give users unprecedented levels of visibility and transparency into the performance of the data pipeline. If you’re interested in learning more about that journey, check out our blog post on Accelerating your time to value with effective Observability.
This quarter, we’re excited to announce Delivery Overview support for Storage Destinations and Linked Audience syncing. As a quick recap, Storage Destinations are destinations where you can store raw Segment data, which includes data warehouses, object storage destinations, and data lakes. Delivery Overview provides a complete view into each stage of data delivery, from the time Segment ingests data, to Source and Destination Filters, and finally whether the data was successfully delivered to the intended destination or not. Similarly for Linked Audiences, once your marketing team has built an Audience with object data from the warehouse, Delivery Overview enables you to precisely track what happens to the audience list when you sync it to a downstream destination for activation.
Delivery Overview support for Storage Destinations & Linked Audiences goes into Public Beta this quarter. This release is only the latest addition to the number of Destination types that you can gain transparent observability into with Delivery Overview. In addition to Storage Destinations and Linked Audiences, Delivery Overview currently also supports Streaming Destinations, Destination Insert Functions, and Destination Actions.
Segment is committed to listening to our users when they request new features to make it easier to work in their CDP. That’s why we’ve invested in enhanced alerting to notify you of anomalies in the data pipeline as soon as they occur and prevent issues before they spiral out of control.
Alerting for rETL & Data Graph enables users to implement an alert that will automatically trigger whenever data syncs from the warehouse fail and notify the appropriate users on channels like email and Slack to take action.
Both Delivery Overview and Alerting are key components of warehouse interoperability because Observability answers the question of how you make sure that you’re able to extract data reliably from the data warehouse with minimal data loss and that you really are making data available to other teams for activation in downstream tools.
The immediate benefits of Observability tooling are increased uptime for syncing data from the warehouse and reducing the propensity of failed syncs, but in the long run, you can build genuine trust into the performance of the data pipeline from the warehouse because these features bring tangible transparency and accountability for what is happening to your data.
Alerting for rETL& Data Graph goes into public beta in Q2. This release is in addition to Alerting support for Connections, which is already in GA.
Last quarter, we announced Consent Enforcement in Connections to General Availability, this quarter we’re excited to extend Consent Enforcement in Reverse ETL and Unify!
Consent management has been a top request for customers that want to ensure compliance with GDPR and privacy laws in the US, with most companies having found a solution for consent collection. Several of our customers store end-users’ consent preferences in their data warehouse, but have no way to enforce those preferences when sending warehouse data to downstream platforms.
That’s why this new release helps you respect end user privacy and enforce consent when using Segment’s rETL to send data from your warehouse to downstream destinations. GA will include all supported warehouses including BigQuery, Databrick, Redshift, Snowflake and Azure.
Additionally, Unify will now pull consent preferences, whether managed in the warehouse or a CMP, into Segment customer profiles. Now, you’ll be able to leverage Unify traits to enforce consent when building Audiences or Journeys in Twilio Engage.
Stay tuned for additional Consent Enforcement support in Segment later this year!
Segment's CDP ensures high-quality engagement through Linked Audiences, Linked Events, and enhanced data sharing, all seamlessly integrated with data warehouses.
Stay tuned for part two of this series, which will cover the advancements in AI + Personalization for Segment in Q2.
Our annual look at how attitudes, preferences, and experiences with personalization have evolved over the past year.