The value of customer data is no longer a secret. The better you keep track of your target audience’s online and offline behaviors, the more strategic your decision-making can be.
Storing data from multiple sources in a central location like a data cloud has become a high priority for many technologists and data professionals. Integrating all of the data into a warehouse allows your business analysts to deliver helpful insights and your data scientists to create models.
But the next step is using the data beyond those immediate uses. How can you input data directly into your marketing team’s tools? Data activation is the key.
This solution saves you time, prevents duplication, and gives non-technical teams access to use the data in marketing applications. It eliminates obstacles between business users and data teams, breaking down data silos.
Find out everything you need to know in this guide.
The Current Data Ecosystem
Data management is a critical part of the data ecosystem for modern companies. The rapidly changing landscape includes frequent technological advances meant to help enterprises leverage their customer data.
Now, the top data-driven companies are centered around the modern data stack. While different businesses may leverage different technologies, there are a few key components in each technology stack.
- Data Acquisition: Where the data is created.
- Data Integration: Consolidating data into a central location.
- Data Transformation: Converting all of the data into something usable, often in the data warehouse.
- Data Analytics: The business intelligence aspect of data management, where the data is analyzed and used.
To accomplish all of the data management steps above, companies often leverage a myriad of SaaS solutions. These applications fit into one of the following categories:
- Platform for advertising
- Server events
- SaaS tools
- Internal databases
- Mobile and web events
Using multiple tools for data collection can create data silos. That’s why companies must consolidate data from all sources into their data warehouse. Doing so allows them to create a single, cohesive view of their customers.
But there’s one common problem with consolidating data in the data warehouse. A big challenge companies face is that only technical users who can write SQL can access the data. The result is that only high-level decision-makers and stakeholders get access to the data via reports.
So, what’s the solution?
What is Data Activation?
Data activation is the last piece of the modern customer data stack.
Essentially, the purpose of data activation is to leverage the data in your warehouse. Activation makes the data actionable for marketing teams and other business personnel via their everyday tools.
Instead of spending time creating reports from the customer data in your warehouse, you can activate the data in real time. Through data activation, your team can put data insights into action. Marketers use data activation to leverage customer insights and create personalized experiences across all channels.
Benefits of Data Activation
There is limitless potential of data activation use cases. It helps to solve many common issues related to data silos and data management. Some top benefits include:
- Save data engineers time building and maintaining data pipelines
- Reduce data silos by ensuring more users have access to leverage the data they need
- Put the necessary data in the hands of the business users who need it
- Drive meaningful outcomes to improve the business’ bottom line
- Help business users create better customer experiences
How Data Activation Informs Marketing Campaigns
Thanks to the massive amounts of data we’re now able to collect and leverage, data-driven marketing is now the industry standard. With email opens and cookies going away, marketers must leverage their first party customer data to power campaigns. Most organizations are utilizing a data warehouse or data cloud to compile and store this first party data. The only hurdle left is providing access to marketers through data activation.
The steps of data activation include:
Collect Data
Capture customer interactions from all of your channels and into a centralized platform. The data sources may include your website, mobile apps, CRMs, offline databases, and transactional data, and more.
Analyze the Data
After syncing data to your warehouse, unlock its value through analytics. Perform data modeling that will help to drive your advertising and marketing strategies. Examples of helpful models include
- Look-alike modeling
- Act-like modeling
- Target audience profile analysis
Data Integration
The next step is integrating your marketing data. While this can be difficult, integrating your data throughout your marketing ecosystem allows you to hyper-personalize your marketing campaigns. Leverage customer segments to create the best customer experience and drive engagement and revenue with cross-channel marketing.
Data Activation For Business Teams
There are endless use cases for data activation, especially in marketing automation and automation of other business processes. Any team focused on data-driven customer interaction and improving customer engagement can benefit from it.
Data Activation in Sales
Personalization is essential in sales. Knowing when to reach out and in what context drives the best results. Understanding customer actions with the product and on different channels is a major challenge for sales teams.
Consider an example of product-led growth businesses. First, the customer signs up for a free trial and sets up their account, invites other users, etc. The sales reps need the right context to facilitate product adoption. Understanding their entire customer journey is vital.
Syncing rich customer data from your warehouse to CRMs (like Hubspot and Salesforce) allows the sales team to see the customer’s actions. Syncing specific events to the end destination or using a lead scoring model will help your team prioritize and serve customers.
Data Activation in Marketing
In general, marketing teams are focused most on conversions and impressions. Facebook, TikTok, Google, and other ad platforms measure the cost-per-impression and customer-acquisition costs. But the reality is that over half of marketers use less than 50% of data! The issue isn’t a lack of trying, but a lack of accessibility.
To generate the best results, you must create a custom audience and upload customer segments to ad platforms and marketing channels. But this is a major challenge if marketers need to consult the data team each time they want to leverage a new customer segment.
Without activation, data teams must export the data sets to the marketing teams. Then, marketing teams must manually upload these databases to their ad platforms. Data activation resolves this problem by syncing directly with the ad platforms. They allow marketers to easily leverage customer segments and create personalized experiences with relevant ads. They can also duplicate the same audiences to several destinations.
Data Activation in Customer Support
Customer support teams aim to solve customers’ problems. Most use a ticketing system and SaaS tools to handle incoming support requests. However, if your team doesn’t have all of the information on each customer, this isn’t the best experience for the customer. You’ll see long ticket times with multiple touchpoints and your customer satisfaction could suffer as a result.
Activating the data from your warehouse to support tools automates the process. Useful data about the customer’s behavior or even churn risk models in the data warehouse can sync to support tools. This makes it easier for teams to prioritize requests, improve the customer’s experience and even shorten ticket times.
GrowthLoop for Data Activation
Undoubtedly, data activation opens up new possibilities for your entire business. Data warehouses help to reduce data silos, but only when there is a code-free way to activate them. Break down the barriers by allowing them to operationalize the data in their usual systems.
For the best way to activate your Snowflake Data Cloud to all of your destinations, look no further than GrowthLoop. Run our data activation platform directly on your Snowflake Data Cloud. Empower your marketing, sales, and customer support teams to leverage your first-party data on their everyday platforms. Learn more about our software solution today. Reach out to one of our software experts now!
