The Data Warehouse is for Marketers

The data warehouse is a great way to aggregate all of your data because it's cost-effective. A CDP could store some of this data, too, but it's expensive to do so. The data warehouse is one of the most scalable and cost-effective ways to aggregate all your sources of data.

Darrell Alfonso

Director of Marketing Strategy & Operations

•

Indeed

• Flexibility: The cloud data warehouse is flexible. CDPs and CRMs often have rigid data models like users/contacts and “events”, but in reality, every business is unique. The data warehouse embraces this. If your business is based on the relationship between pets and owners - set up your data about pets and owners. If it’s about brands, producers, and musicians - then set it up that way. If you need the notion of an account, a product install, and a product user to co-exist - that’s easy in a warehouse but hard anywhere else. Armed with the warehouse’s flexibility, you can build and scale creative campaigns. Activating data from the cloud data warehouse allows marketers to define their audiences in any which way to fit their campaign objectives.

If you have a customer question to answer or a campaign goal to achieve, you can assemble [the data from the warehouse] like a jigsaw puzzle to answer any questions you might have. The flexibility is there unlike with other tools.

Jessica Kao

Senior Director of Marketing Operations and Analytics

•

F5

• Efficiency: The best part about leveraging the power of the cloud data warehouse is the efficiency gains marketers can expect. As many organizations have invested millions of dollars in their data warehouse and MarTech stack, using the data already available in your warehouse to unlock more power from these tools make the investments even more worthwhile.

Using a data warehouse has allowed our marketers to access data more efficiently for segmentation [and] improve messaging consistency. Overall, a massive win for our teams.

Jake Larson

Senior Marketing Technologist

•

M1

Using Hightouch to activate the data from the cloud data warehouse, you no longer have to download and upload CSVs or ask for favors from data engineers and analysts. You can take action directly on the data using our no-code audience builder in Customer Studio. You can even deliver real-time, personalized customer experiences with a low-latency API.

Modern marketers will continue to learn the skills needed to capitalize on their organization’s data. It started with learning SQL to run analytics, but now with rETL platforms offering No-Code Audience Builders and easy ways to pipe data around, that barrier is even lower. We love being able to use our data warehouse as the single source of truth.

Austin Hulak

Chief Strategy Officer

•

Swyft Filings

Making the Warehouse Accessible for Marketers

Historically, the keys to accessing the wealth of data available in the data warehouse were solely held by data and engineering teams. While accessible for Business Intelligence and analytics, as a Marketer the only way to get data out of the warehouse involved asking (and waiting) for custom pipelines (painful) or dealing with CSV uploads (don't even get me started).

Seeing this problem first-hand, we set out to create a new solution - a Data Activation platform that could unlock the warehouse for operational use-cases.

First, we equipped Data Engineers with a SQL-first solution that removed the drudgery of building pipelines and freed analytics teams to model and move data quickly and easily into end points like CRM, e-mail, SMS, ads, etc.

While Data Activation has proven extremely valuable to our customers - ranging from startups to Fortune 100 enterprises - we always knew there was a bigger problem to solve.

Sure, enabling technical teams with the tools needed to unlock the value of the data warehouse is great, but what about the marketers? How could we help empower them to activate customer data on their own?

Announcing Customer Studio: Data Activation for Everyone.

We are excited to announce the release of Customer Studio, an entire suite of purpose-built, marketer-first tools that make data exploration, management and activation easier than ever before. With Customer Studio, we enter a new era of Data Activation - this time, for everyone.

Customer Studio is anchored by a new version of our no-code audience builder that enables non-technical users to explore, build, and manage audiences at scale. Once defined, audiences are synced and kept refreshed in any of over 140 marketing and advertising platforms. As part of the Customer Studio release, we’ve revamped our existing audiencing UI to support more complex logic, like nested and/or statements, while maintaining high usability for less-technical marketing users.

With Splits, we’ve added additional functionality that enables marketing teams to seamlessly create and manage multivariate experimentation across channels. Leveraging the new functionality to perform experiments (ex. holdout tests) accelerates growth and drives a deeper understanding of the experiences and channels that best resonate with customers.

With Insights, you can easily analyze audience composition, while Priority Lists let you orchestrate the experiences people have as they progress through your funnel.

These are just a few of the enhancements available in Customer Studio so that marketers never again have to say: “We couldn’t run that campaign. We didn’t have the data in time.”

You can read the full announcement blog post with feature details here.

The best part is that it’s completely additive to whatever MarTech stack the team has to begin with. I’m not going to say you’ll never need to buy another piece of MarTech - that’s ridiculous. But what I will say is that you should never need to buy another piece of MarTech just because it lacks the data your team requires. Teams should go through the upheaval of ripping out a technology because it doesn’t work - not because it doesn’t have the data it needs to work.

Customer Studio gives our marketing teams the tools they need to activate customer data, enabling them to personalize marketing campaigns, optimize ad performance, and drive experimentation across our digital properties.

Ben Tengelson

VP of Data Science

•

IntelyCare

Wrapping Up

If Scott’s Brinker’s comprehensive MarTech map is any indication, the marketing landscape will continue to evolve rapidly. Marketers will continue to face new challenges. There will be new regulations, new social networks, new devices, and changes in culture we’ll all need to grapple with. We built Customer Studio so that everyone, regardless of technical skill, could benefit from the power of the data warehouse and so that teams can finally make the most of the incredible MarTech tools at their disposal.

It’s time to unleash the data warehouse. It’s time to unleash our MarTech investments. It’s time to unleash our marketers.

If you’re interested in learning more about how Hightouch works with marketing teams, feel free to request a demo, DM me on Linkedin, or send me an email at tejas@hightouch.com.

Onwards,

Tejas