The Data Cloud Is Your Most Powerful Marketing Tool

Through data activation, modern organizations are able to unleash the power of the Snowflake Data Cloud, enabling marketers to deliver best-in-class customer experiences.

Historically, the data warehouse has been the final resting point for customer data, serving as an analytics source-of-truth for data teams to run complex SQL analyses against in order to answer the most pressing questions from marketing teams and business leaders alike. But like every great technological revolution, it’s time to take the next step. It’s time to expand beyond analytics. It’s time for activation—and the emergence of the Data Cloud as the most powerful marketing tool in any modern organization.

Market-leading organizations such as Warner Music Group, Lucid, Imperfect Foods, and AXS have turned to Hightouch to capitalize on the opportunity to further activate their data in Snowflake. Doing so has allowed their teams to drive revenue growth, personalize customer interactions, and empower their front lines with customer data—faster and easier than ever before.

The foundation

Behavioral event collectors like Snowplow have made it easier than ever for organizations to collect customer interaction data. ELT/ETL tools like Fivetran bring in batched data from sources like internal dbs or CRMs—rounding out the components needed to ingest all relevant customer data into the Data Cloud. With all customer data in place, transformation tools like dbt empower teams to quickly and easily model the data in the Data Cloud to provide a clean, 360-degree view of customers.

This 360-degree view of customers unlocks deep customer insights for modern data and marketing teams to better understand their customers and even predict their next actions before they occur. But why stop at marketing analytics? Why not sync your source-of-truth data from the Data Cloud to the many business applications used by your organization?

Enter data activation, the next step in the continual evolution of customer data management.

Data Activation

Data activation is the method of unlocking the knowledge stored within Snowflake and making it actionable in the end tools that your business users use daily. Gone are the days of working to line up customer data across multiple systems. The Data Cloud is now the center of the marketing technology stack—empowering each and every system used by a business with the data from a single source of truth.

Powered by a technology coined “Reverse ETL,” data activation platforms like Hightouch sync data out of Snowflake to any business application. Data and marketing teams alike leverage either SQL or a no-code table selector to define data models before then scheduling recurring syncs to automatically synchronize customer data from the Data Cloud to over 100 prebuilt destinations, including CRMs such as Salesforce or Hubspot and ad platforms such as Google or Meta.

A visual audience builder then becomes the gateway for marketers to truly unleash the power of the Data Cloud by offering a no-code solution to managing granular customer cohorts—made actionable in any of their marketing applications.

With a fully activated data single source of truth at the center of their marketing and data stack, businesses can move quicker, streamline operations, and offer customers personalized experiences that drive exponential value to both the consumer relationships and the organization’s bottom line.

Drive revenue growth

Activating their data from Snowflake enables businesses to leverage their source-of-truth data to drive revenue growth rather than simply verifying accuracy or identifying cost-cutting opportunities. The same analysis identifying deep customer insights such as “purchase propensity” can be seamlessly activated to marketing platforms as cohorts or events to trigger marketing campaigns. Organizations, like the leading price comparison website Compare Club, optimize paid media campaigns on Facebook to increase offline conversations. They go beyond just answering questions to using their data to create automated omnichannel workflows.

Imagine a popular ecommerce website that activates its data from Snowflake. The company could activate lead scoring models into its Salesforce instance to ensure that sales reps can identify which customers are most likely to respond to outreach. The same data points could additionally be sent to its ESP (e.g., Braze) where marketers can customize experiences for customers. With their most valuable data from Snowflake now available in Braze, the marketing team can easily experiment and iterate at a moment’s notice without ever having to go through the data team.

More information on how Compare Club activates its Data Cloud can be found here.

Personalize customer interactions

Product and marketing teams alike know the value of personalization. Yet still today, most don’t know how to get started building the personalized experiences expected by the modern consumer. Unknown to many is that nearly all the data needed to create hyper-personalized experiences can reside in Snowflake. With an activated Data Cloud, granular customer data points are more easily accessible in nearly any of the tools leveraged by marketing and product teams to deliver the personalization capabilities they strive for.

By creating a 360-degree view in their Snowflake Data Cloud, marketing teams at Imperfect Foods, an online grocer on a mission to reduce food waste, can now provide their customers with enhanced experiences while optimizing their marketing operations. Marketing teams set up automatic syncs to send customer data from Snowflake in near real time to their ESP (Iterable) for lifecycle marketing as well as various ad platforms for look-alike audiences and retargeting. Doing so has enabled the organization to launch new marketing campaigns that have boosted reactivation by 53% while reducing paid media CAC by 15%.

You can read more on how Imperfect activates its Data Cloud in its case study here.

Empower the front line

Through data activation, organizations can leverage Snowflake for much more than analytics and marketing use cases. The Data Cloud can become the engine behind not only marketing efforts, but also sales and customer success. Insights can be activated to power real-time business operations that expand across functional teams within an organization.

We at Hightouch have proven this ourselves as we leverage the data within our Snowflake instance to monitor customer activity and activate near real-time notifications when our teams need to engage with our customers. Sales and Success teams have confidence that the moment customers are at risk of churning, they are alerted and can engage as needed. Doing so has enabled us to quickly and efficiently surface issues and respond to our customers proactively to decrease the risk of churn.

Summing it up

The data cloud is evolving from an analytics source of truth into an engine supercharging every marketing and business application. From relatively simple first-party data points to deep customer insights driven by machine learning models, modern organizations now have the ability to take action on the data residing in their Snowflake Data Cloud by implementing a data activation platform.

And now, thanks to the deep partnership between Hightouch and Snowflake, activating your Data Cloud has never been easier. Hightouch is readily available within Snowflake Partner connect—allowing you to stand up an integration with a free Hightouch workspace in under 5 minutes.

To learn more about activating your Data Cloud for a best-in-breed Customer Data Platform, download The Composable CDP: A Future-Proof Customer Data Platform ebook.