The Customer Engagement Stack

Technology and tactics to optimize customer engagement

In the ever-changing landscape of digital business, customer experiences are now the key differentiator for success. As data-driven organizations continue to outperform their peers (HBR, 2022), the traditional tech stack has evolved into a more holistic and focused approach: the "Customer Engagement Stack."

Illustration: Customer Engagement Stack

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Introduction

At the heart of this new stack lies a crucial component, the Customer Data Platform (CDP), which helps orchestrate and unify data to power exceptional customer experiences.Despite the undeniable value of data, a staggering 63% of executives admit their technology infrastructure falls short, while 67% struggle to access or utilize data from their existing tools and resources. So, how can organizations adapt and thrive in this new era of customer-centricity?It's this persistent data struggle that CDPs, like Twilio Segment, were built to solve and why they must sit at the center of your Customer Engagement Stack. But what other technologies should you be connecting to your CDP to ensure your ability to deliver best-in-class experiences your customers love?In our comprehensive CDP Report, Twilio Segment examined data from over 25,000 businesses to explore the technologies that underpin their interactions with customers. Based upon our unique vantage point we've identified the top categories of technologies and the most prevalent applications that form the backbone of today's Customer Engagement Stack, enabling organizations to create and deliver significant value across the enterprise.As you embark on this journey, you'll discover how a data-driven Customer Engagement Stack, with a CDP at its core, can transform your organization—unleashing the potential to create more meaningful customer experiences, drive business growth, and establish a competitive edge.
Illustration: Introduction

Categories

A/B Testing

A/B testing is a critical component of an effective customer engagement strategy. By testing different variations of web pages, emails, or ads, businesses can determine which elements are most effective in driving customer behavior. Below we’ll explore some of the top A/B testing tools on the Twilio Segment platform to understand the unique features that can help businesses take their customer engagement to the next level.

Recipe

A/B test your tech stack

In this recipe, you'll learn how to design, run, and analyze an A/B test to determine what marketing tools are generating the most ROI.

Advertising

With so many different advertising platforms available, it can be challenging to choose the right ones for your business. In this section, we'll introduce you to some of the most popular advertising tools used by Twilio Segment customers today. These tools allow you to target specific audiences and deliver personalized messaging, making it easier to engage and convert potential customers.

Recipe

How to Use Lookalike Audiences and Audience Suppression

In this recipe, you’ll learn how to use Twilio Engage (formerly Segment Personas) to create hyper-specific audiences in advertising platforms like Facebook, Snapchat, and Pinterest to increase advertising efficiency.

Analytics

By analyzing customer data, businesses can gain valuable insights into their customers' behavior, preferences, and needs, which allows them to create more personalized, targeted experiences. In this section, we'll explore some of the top analytics tools being used on the Twilio Segment platform and highlight their unique features and use cases.

Recipe

Measure product KPIs to determine product growth

This guide will teach you how to determine, track, implement, and measure the KPIs in Mixpanel, which will serve as leading indicators for revenue growth or churn. You’ll be able to save these reports to a Mixpanel dashboard and set up alerts, so your team can be notified when any metrics cross specific thresholds in real-time.

CRM

CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is a critical category of technology for businesses in their customer engagement efforts. By leveraging CRM tools, businesses can manage their interactions with customers, track their behavior and preferences, and build stronger relationships. In this section, we'll round up some of the top CRM tools on the Twilio Segment platform and highlight their key features, which allow businesses to create more personalized customer experiences.

Customer Success

Customer success involves managing the customer journey from initial purchase to continued use of a product or service, with the goal of ensuring customer satisfaction and loyalty. By leveraging customer success tools, businesses can proactively monitor customer behavior and preferences, provide targeted guidance, and offer personalized support. To give you the complete overview, we'll take stock of the leading customer success tools being used on the Twilio Segment platform.

Recipe

Break down data silos between your sales and support teams

In this recipe, you’ll learn how to keep sales and support aligned by enriching your user profiles with information from Salesforce and syncing that data to Zendesk.

Email

In this section, we’ll highlight some of the most powerful email tools available to modern businesses, and how they can help to create meaningful customer experiences. From automated campaigns to A/B testing and dynamic content, these tools provide a range of features to help businesses of all sizes connect with customers more effectively.

Recipe

Personalize customer communications using real-time location data

In this recipe, you’ll learn how to use Segment to connect Radar (a location data infrastructure platform) and Customer.io (a marketing automation software) to personalize your customer communications.

Screen Recording and Heatmaps

Screen recording & heatmap tools allow businesses to gain an in-depth understanding of their customers' behaviors and preferences by recording user sessions on websites and mobile apps. With this data, companies can identify pain points, areas for improvement, and opportunities to enhance the customer experience. In this section, we'll take a closer look at some of the top screen recording & heatmap tools on the Twilio Segment platform and explore their leading features.

Warehouses

Customer data can come from a wide variety of sources, and it's crucial to have a reliable and scalable way to store and manage that data. This is where data warehouses come in - they allow you to store large amounts of customer data in one place, making it easier to analyze and derive insights from. In this section, we'll cover some of the most popular data warehouses used by Twilio Segment customers today, including BigQuery, Postgres, Redshift, and Snowflake.

Twilio Engage

The heart of the customer engagement stack

Twilio Engage, our trailblazing customer engagement solution, operates like the heart of your customer interaction ecosystem, pumping vital lifeblood in the form of real-time data to the diverse veins of your tech stack. Built on top of Segment CDP, Twilio Engage activates real-time data across our native channels (email, SMS, WhatsApp, etc.) which enables marketers to power personalized customer experiences, journey orchestration, and multichannel campaigns together in one solution.

Illustration: Twilio Engage

By giving marketers the ability to build dynamic audiences without reliance on technical teams, and orchestrate multi-step journeys based on real-time customer behavior, Twilio Engage helps brands optimize marketing spend, improve campaign performance, and grow customer lifetime value.

Since Segment is an open, flexible, and extensible platform with over 450+ out-of-the-box integrations (including the tools and technologies featured above), we make it easy for you to use Segment CDP and Twilio Engage with whatever systems you currently have in your tech stack – and any new tools you might need or want in the future.

At the heart of your customer engagement stack, Twilio Engage provides a single data-first solution to help you reach your customers with the right message where, when, and how they want to engage with your brand.

Explore Twilio Engage Product

Case Studies

From converting prospects to nurturing brand loyalists, customer-centric tactics start with a strong data foundation. Learn from top brands across industries to understand how cross-functional teams are activating their Customer Engagement Stacks and driving engagement across the customer journey.

Data-driven omnichannel customer engagement

Use Case

Data powered digital customer experiences

Industry

B2B SaaS and Technology

Data-driven omnichannel customer engagement
CraftJack, a subsidiary of Angi, is a home services platform that connects homeowners and service professionals. During the pandemic-driven home improvement boom, CraftJack struggled to manage the influx of customer data generated from new homeowner signups and grow service professional signup rates to meet increased demand.Twilio Engage helped CraftJack build a modern data foundation, giving it a unified view of the customer and its marketing team the ability to easily act on that real-time data by launching personalized customer experiences natively across email and SMS without help from technical teams."This is the first time marketing can send SMS on their own instead of having their devs set it up,” Jordan Dietch, VP of Product Management at CraftJack, said. “With Twilio Engage, we are able to do the work of three or four different tools, all in one centralized platform. We are able to bring transactional conversation and personalized marketing messages all into Twilio Engage for greater efficiency.”As a result, CraftJack improved its operational efficiency and delivers data-driven customer engagement:
  • 31% increase in new service professional signups YoY
  • 80% improvement in engineering implementation efficiency
  • 41% growth in homeowner reviews YoY
Read the full case study

Deliver more personalized experiences

Use Case

Data powered performance marketing

Industry

Consumer Goods and Services

Deliver more personalized experiences
Schnuck Market is a fourth-generation, family-owned grocery retailer with over 100 stores throughout the Midwest.With the accelerated adoption of digital shopping, Schnucks wanted to deliver better digital experiences. However, teams struggled to understand the customer journey and personalize digital experiences due to siloed systems and dataSchnucks turned to Twilio Segment to unify its customer data across systems and channels. With a CDP in place, the retailer has replaced its manual batch-and-blast marketing strategy with an automated and triggered workflow for personalized communications based on user actions. Their team can now simultaneously execute multiple campaigns based on user behavior and make real-time campaign changes based on user actions.By unifying customer data and automating segmentation and customer journey data, Schnucks increased the number of active personalized campaigns by 200%.
Read the full case study

Thrive in a world without 3rd party cookies

Use Case

Privacy and compliance

Data powered digital customer experiences

Data powered performance marketing

Industry

Entertainment, Media, and Broadcasting

Thrive in a world without 3rd party cookies
Quartz (qz.com) is a digital-first media publisher offering global business news and insights for a new generation of business leaders. Based in New York, the company focuses on delivering valuable global business content to users and advertisers across digital devices.From global data privacy regulations to major initiatives changing how users are tracked and targeted online, Quartz Media knew it needed to invest in a customer-centric data privacy strategy that would differentiate its brand from the competition; and meet its needs as a publisher, the needs of its advertising partners to drive campaign efficiency, and the needs of its readers for relevant and timely content.Quartz implemented Twilio Segment as the foundation of its customer data infrastructure to double down on first-party data and make it easy to exercise good data practices. By using Twilio Segment and having all customer data clean and automatically inline with user specifications, Quartz is able to create more relevant experiences while respecting user privacy.
Read the full case study

Build a direct-to-consumer business

Use Case

Customer insights and analytics

Customer data infrastructure

Industry

Consumer Goods and Services

Build a direct-to-consumer business
Founded in 2015, Daily Harvest quickly gained traction with its mission to clean, delicious, and convenient food straight to their customers’ doorstep.Like many direct-to-consumer businesses, it struggled with fragmented customer data using Google Analytics for website tracking, and storing data from its production database in a data lake. To double-down on personalization, Daily Harvest needed to break down these data silos and create a single source of truth that could be leveraged across teams.By implementing Twilio Segment, its team could finally access the data they need to make decisions from what ingredients were included in recipes, to campaign messaging, and product recommendations. With this process streamlined, Daily Harvest could more precisely target email communications based on customer interest, to put the right items in front of the right people.
Read the full case study

Speed into new markets with connected data

Use Case

Customer 360

Customer data infrastructure

Customer insights and analytics

Data enabled sales and support teams

Data powered digital customer experiences

Data powered performance marketing

Data stack modernization

Privacy and compliance

Industry

Financial Services and Insurance

Speed into new markets with connected data
Toggle, a Farmers Insurance brand, offers straightforward and customizable insurance products meant for the needs of today’s modern consumer such as renters insurance, car insurance, and even identity protection insurance.After implementing Segment, Toggle gained a fuller understanding of the end-to-end user journey. Leveraging Twilio Engage, the team can improve the user experience at every customer milestone, from acquisition, to onboarding, to the claims process, to customer support. The team can also now create in-depth customer profiles and deliver personalized messages and campaigns without relying on technical resources — streamlining a process that once took weeks to implement.For example, to acquire new customers, the team sends hyper-targeted audiences built with first-party customer knowledge from Segment to model lookalike groups in ad platforms like Facebook and Google to retarget users with tailored ads based on actions prospects have taken on the site.Toggle has achieved remarkable business results in a short period of time as a result of using Segment:
  • Decreased cost per acquisition by 64%
  • Increased Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) with more targeted audience segmentation
  • Reduced customer support tickets by 35%
Read the full case study

Drive an increase in customer engagement and lifetime value

Use Case

Customer 360

Customer data infrastructure

Data stack modernization

Data powered performance marketing

Data powered digital customer experiences

Customer insights and analytics

Industry

Consumer Goods and Services

Drive an increase in customer engagement and lifetime value
Founded in 1946, Fender's worldwide guitars, amps, pedals, and accessories have been played on more stages than any other company in the industry.Fender needed to create a single view of the customer to better understand their journey. They also wanted to improve marketing efficiency by sharing data across teams, and increase activation for Fender Play® while moving app subscribers from free to paid accounts.The brand turned to Twilio Segment to create a single source of truth by unifying customer data. Now Fender's marketing and product teams can query events and traits with Segment’s self-service audience builder and create cohorts of users for more target messaging. And API access to user profiles enables real-time personalization across its website and mobile apps.As a result of implementing a CDP, Fender is able to:
  • Create a single customer view by consolidating and cleaning its data
  • Optimize marketing spend for greater ROI through personalization
  • Improve marketing campaign performance via cross-team data sharing
Read the full case study

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