Beyond audience creation: Customer 360 data activation transforms results for every team

Customer data is a means to an end. You can have all the right data cleaned, modeled, and fit for purpose, but it doesn’t matter until the business puts it to work to create value. In the data space, we’ve come to call this process data activation.

The hardest part about data activation isn’t the activation. It’s the data. Without reliable, complete customer profiles, the effectiveness of every activation initiative is limited, and many use cases are blocked altogether. Powerful data activation is close at hand, however, when it’s based upon the solid foundation of complete, well-modeled data.

With a solid foundation in place, you can deliver effective solutions for a variety of use cases, from analytics and AI/ML to marketing and personalization. And that’s what warehouse data activation is about – improving outcomes across the business with customer 360 data. Marketing teams can fall into the trap of limiting the definition of activation to audience creation and journey orchestration, but the Customer 360 can transform outcomes well beyond these two use cases (even within marketing).

We’re building RudderStack to help every data team build a solid data foundation and bridge the gap from Customer 360 to measurable business results, no matter the activation use case. Here’s how we see the problem and how our platform delivers a unique solution.

The foundation is powerful but elusive

When you have the right data, you can deliver the goods. Statpearls was struggling to break a growth plateau, but once their data team built a customer 360 they quickly began helping the business solve growth problems across teams.

The business's initial priority was to optimize marketing spend. The data team quickly built an attribution model on their identity graph and customer 360 data that combines granular customer journey touchpoints with lifetime payment history (LTV). The result? The marketing team scaled ad spend 3.8x while maintaining a high ROAS threshold. Next, the data team attacked a key customer success goal – improving retention. Using the same Customer 360 data, the data team leveraged machine learning to accurately predict churn risk. The CS team used scores from the model to drive personalized re-engagement campaigns that increased retention by 1.7x. Today, teams across the company are leveraging customer 360 data for personalization in email campaigns, real-time product experiences, and sales efforts.

Companies that fail to achieve results like this don’t fail because they’re not capable of executing the campaigns. They fail because they don’t have reliable, complete customer data to fuel the models and messages. Building and maintaining a customer 360 is complex and intensive and we routinely see overloaded, under-resourced data teams unable to do their best work because they’re too busy responding to requests and wrestling with unresolved identities.

This cycle forces companies to settle for a fragmented reality where teams aren’t aligned, everyone works in data silos, and data activation suffers. Consider how activation without a solid foundation affects marketing teams specifically:

• Limited visibility into the customer journey
• Poor paid and email marketing performance
• Inability to rapidly test and optimize campaigns across channels

Now multiply that across the organization. Without a solid data foundation, every team’s activation efforts suffer. The customer pays the price through a disjointed experience, and the business pays the price at the bottom line. The good news is that you can break the cycle, as Statpearls’ story proves.

Data activation: Teaming up to deliver outsized results

Powerful data activation is a team sport. It starts with a solid data foundation, and it ends when business teams uncover insights and execute tactics that drive measurable results. Bridging the gap involves overcoming technical, operational, and cross-team collaboration challenges. It’s a tricky (but solvable!) problem that requires a thoughtful approach. At RudderStack, we’ve listened to our customers, done the thinking, and we’re building on our convictions:

• We believe transformative data activation requires a solid data foundation.
• We believe data activation is a team sport where data and business functions partner to drive results.
• We believe the data team should build and own the customer 360 in the warehouse and that business users should have safe, easy access to its data.

RudderStack gives data teams the technical tools they need to build a solid data foundation. It also makes collaboration between technical and business teams easier without assuming major culture change. With our suite of activation tools, the data team can move more quickly to deliver high-ROI data sets and use cases and then make that data accessible to reduce collaborative friction. Our activation suite also empowers marketing teams with a self-serve UI that makes it easy to create and sync audiences for downstream use. Here’s how our convictions manifest in our product:

Create the foundation: ID Graph and Features

We believe the data team should own the customer 360, and we believe it belongs in the warehouse. Our Profiles product enables you to solve identity resolution at the root, establish a comprehensive identity graph in your warehouse, and quickly add new features for business use cases to create a customer 360. The velocity afforded by the configuration-based feature builder enables you to turn around requests quickly, setting the tone for productive collaboration with the business throughout the data activation lifecycle. With the customer 360 set in the warehouse, you have a solid foundation for data activation and a source of truth to align the entire business around.

Sync data downstream: Reverse ETL

Sometimes the utility of a pipeline is all you need. Our Reverse ETL tool makes it easy for data and Ops teams to sync customer 360 data to downstream tools on a set schedule to ensure consistent, standardized customer records across every system, from marketing to customer success.

Solve use cases on top of your customer 360: Attribution & Propensity Scores

Data activation isn’t just about audience creation and journey orchestration. It’s about delivering use cases to help the entire business turn customer data into competitive advantage. Our suite of activation tools provides packaged but highly configurable models for key analytics and machine learning use cases.

You can consult with business teams to identify high-ROI attribution and propensity use cases, tailor our models to meet their specific requirements, and deliver activation-ready data in days or weeks, not months. Best of all, because you're building on the reliable, complete customer profiles from your customer 360 table, you and your business stakeholders can build confidence in the data.

Audience segmentation in two steps: Cohorts and Audiences

When it comes to marketing segmentation, we’ve observed a familiar, pervasive, and problematic reality. Data teams need to control core business definitions and user segments in the warehouse, but because warehouse data isn’t easily accessible to marketing teams, the data team has to spend time exporting CSVs or, worse, marketing (and other) teams operate independently in their own tools, each with a different source of truth.

To make it easier to align the business around core definitions and help business teams move fast by accessing that data, RudderStack enables two key segmentation workflows.

First, the data team works with the business to identify and define core segments of the customer 360. We call these Cohorts. Examples could include active users or loyalty program members. After consulting with the business and aligning on definitions, the data team can easily create the segments in the warehouse via a configuration based workflow to align the entire business around a foundational source of truth – and make sure that truth doesn’t change. Cohorts establish definitions at the strategic level and serve as the starting point for tactical segmentation.

Second, we enable marketing teams to access customer 360 data through an intuitive UI workflow in RudderStack. It’s a safe, self-serve environment where they can explore cohorts, further filter them to create Audiences, then sync audiences to downstream tools to execute paid advertising, email, and SMS campaigns. They can also sync entire cohorts to their tools and build audiences downstream. Most marketing teams use both workflows for different types of campaigns and tools.

Last mile execution: Campaign deployment

The backstage modeling for data activation represents the bulk of the work, but it’s the actual execution of business activities with your customer 360 data that make all the work worth it for your business.

RudderStack’s 200+ integrations mean that every team at your company can use their choice of best-of-breed tools to deliver last-mile campaigns and experiences. When those tools are fed with all of the right data from the customer 360 in your warehouse, they’ll feel like they're using a cheat code.

Transform data activation across your business with a customer 360

Data activation is bigger than any one use case, and it’s the key to realizing the value of your customer data. When you get it right, the results speak for themselves. But without a solid data foundation and low-friction collaborative workflows, activation efforts fall short. Tensions run high as teams execute from different sources of truth, the customer journey gets disjointed, and revenue is left on the table.

Don’t leave revenue on the table. You can build a solid data foundation, enhance collaboration, and deliver solutions for every data activation use case, and RudderStack can help. Request a demo to find out how our Warehouse Native CDP makes it easier to create a customer 360, rapidly build use cases on top, and enable marketing to move fast with an intuitive self-serve experience.