In a previous blog, we articulated two of the biggest challenges marketing leaders face in today’s saturated digital landscape. First: the absolute abundance of advertising platforms, dashboards, and lead generation tools that continue to flood the space, insulating critical data in more and more impenetrable data silos. Second: the mounting need marketers face to quantify returns on investment to the organizations they support, tying the campaigns they run and marketing technology services they leverage to tangible business outcomes.
To this end, we have highlighted that one of the chief ways marketing teams can take on these lofty challenges is by shoring up their customer data quality—eliminating data silos and unlocking holistic views that span the customer lifecycle with the help of a centralized cloud data platform, like Snowflake.
In this blog, we will take a deeper look at the value Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) and Customer 360 views bring to organizations in virtually every industry, as well as the chief obstacles marketers must face to get there. We will also share success stories from two Hakkoda clients who are harnessing the power of the modern data stack to extract and deploy actionable insights that transform the customer experience.
Customer 360: Why It Matters and Why It’s So Hard to Get There
Achieving a Customer 360 view is pivotal for companies aiming to deliver tailored experiences that resonate deeply with their audience. This comprehensive perspective integrates insights from interactions spanning the customer lifecycle, enabling marketers to craft strategies that respond to the real-time needs of prospects and existing customers. This sensitive and responsive approach cuts down on blind marketing efforts, helps sales organizations hone in on their ideal customer, and fosters stronger connections and loyalty long-term.
For many enterprises, however, the journey to Customer 360 is fraught with operational hurdles. The fragmentation of data across numerous platforms and departments often results in silos that obscure valuable insights, while inconsistencies and inaccuracies in the data itself lead to misguided marketing efforts—selling customers products or services they either already have or that fail to address their needs. Technological disparities among the systems collecting and processing this data further complicate the unification process, especially when the POS-to-insight circuit depends on ingesting large quantities of data into costly, inefficient legacy data systems.
Put simply, true Customer 360 demands that an enterprise’s data be complete, accurate, and interoperable at scale, which makes investing in the right data stack an indispensable consideration.
Crafting a Customer 360 View with Snowflake
Fortunately for enterprises looking to enrich their customer insights, the use of a robust centralized cloud platform like Snowflake is a great place to start when it comes to addressing quality, consistency, and fragmentation in an enterprise’s marketing data.
By facilitating the seamless integration and real-time analysis of diverse data sources, cloud solutions like Snowflake make it possible to build a comprehensive and accurate customer profile faster than ever before. This centralized approach not only eliminates data silos but also empowers marketers with the ability to conduct detailed audience segmentation, craft highly personalized messaging, and refine their marketing strategies for enhanced performance.
Through Snowflake, marketers also gain access to advanced analytics tools, enabling them to dive deep into customer behaviors and preferences to drive strategic decision-making and foster more engaging, effective marketing initiatives.
Customer Success: A Transformative Approach to Marketing Technology Services for an Active Lifestyle Brand
Consider a prominent active lifestyle company with a portfolio of global brands under management. At the start of their digital transformation journey, the company first needed to contend with the fragmentation of their marketing efforts, characterized by the independent operation of each of their brands and a complete lack of data visibility between them. Unable to track customer behavior and engage audiences across the brand portfolio, key sources of revenue were also inaccessible, including the ability to directly monetize troves of siloed customer data.
Enter Hakkoda with a Snowflake-centered approach to marketing technology services. To help the customer integrate its wide array of disparate data sources, Hakkoda designed and implemented a Customer Data Warehouse in Snowflake that seamlessly integrated with the customer’s CDP platform, facilitating the activation of new pipelines. In just sixteen weeks, Hakkoda’s data teams were able to migrate two of the customer’s primary brands into the cloud and enable ongoing, near real-time modeling and action through the CDP. As more and more brands were incorporated into their Snowflake instance, the customer was finally able to not only access key insights into customer behaviors within each of their subsidiary brands, but also to explore the member journey across brands.
The Hakkoda team also assisted the client’s data teams in the development, testing, and deployment of machine learning (ML) models in Snowpark, capable of leveraging intra-brand data to unlock key insights, including propensity scoring and next best action determinations.
Finally, our data experts worked closely with the customer’s internal data team to establish a foundation for ongoing data science initiatives, allowing each brand to appropriately access and design ML models to keep ahead of competitors in the market.
Customer Success: Powering Actionable Insights for a Performance Marketing Agency
Consider also the case of a full-service digital agency struggling to aggregate customer insights due to crippling data latency. Following a merger, the agency also needed to consolidate multiple products while rolling out a new one that collects customer data points and uses them to optimize campaign spending. Finally, they also needed the capability to quickly provision and onboard customers into their new product platform.
Unsurprisingly, the first pillar of Hakkoda’s solution was to design and implement a Customer 360 model that could support an entire marketing intelligence platform and a suite of existing dashboards while also allowing the customer to monetize their data. The integration of ChatGPT interfaces into customer dashboards further improved the accessibility of information, allowing stakeholders throughout the organization to quickly extract the information they need and utilize it to drive mission-critical decisions.
Meanwhile, by enabling infrastructure as code for automation and scale with the help of a data stack leveraging Snowflake, Terraform, dbt, Fivetran, & Airflow, Hakkoda was able to introduce automated processes that cut down customer onboarding from 2-3 weeks to just 10 minutes.
Finally, the Hakkoda team also helped introduce comprehensive governance and Master Data Management (MDM) protocols throughout the organization, enhancing compliance, visibility, and strategy across the business while shoring up data quality.
Tapping into Customer 360 with Hakkōda’s Marketing Technology Services
As marketing leaders continue to fight an uphill battle to aggregate the vast arrays of data at their fingertips into holistic, intelligible customer views, the need for a strong data strategy and a technology stack that can support it has never been more apparent. Cloud platforms like Snowflake, which are capable of ingesting and parsing data from a wide range of sources, emerge as one critical asset in this endeavor.
The other key ingredient to a successful Customer 360 initiative is the support of the right data talent. According to Hakkoda’s recent State of Data report, the most innovative organizations across all industries report outsourcing 63% of their data and see an average ROI of 164% on their data technology investments.
Hakkoda’s Snowflake consulting and marketing technology services bring together 100% SnowPro-certified data talent with deep expertise across the modern data stack with industry veterans who intimately understand the relationship between your business’s data and its operational goals. We help our clients safeguard their marketing strategies against the unpredictability of future trends with scalable, innovative data solutions that act as a strong foundation for continued growth and success.
Ready to unlock Customer 360 and tailor your next marketing campaign to emerging customer trends and behaviors? Let’s talk.
