Twilio Segment interactive tour recap

I attended a Twilio Segment demo. Here's how it went.

The other day I received an invitation to join an interactive tour of the Twilio Segment Customer Data Platform. As a former Twilio employee, with little exposure to the Segment side of things this was one of those occurrences where I was really excited to join the event come the day of. While it felt very high level, as a marketer who dreams of having the full capabilities of a fully integrated CDP, it was interesting to walk through.

Bryn, a Product Marketing Manager on the team took us through the tour. Starting out narrowing in on the state of the market. Basically, he highlighted the fact that more people are making purchases online, and as that becomes the norm, customers are starting to keep tabs on their own data privacy and hold companies to higher standards. Based on their latest Customer Engagement Report they shared some stats.

"75% of companies think they provide a good or excellent experience, but only 48% of their customers agree."

Moving on he touched upon the state of the economy and the looming theme across the world around, doing more with less and facing challenging growing Lifetime Value (LTV) and Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC.)

One common issue is data silos, or multiple tools being used that don’t integrate together. Basically, there is no complete view of the customers. Meaning, no way to accurately meet the needs of your customer. No way to build great customer experiences and this hampers businesses ability to win customers in the market.

And guess what? Twilio Segment CDP can help you solve that.

Twilio Segment Customer Data Platform Overview. Get started collecting and organizing your customer data across every touch point & more.

“Goodbye data silos. Hello, Segment”

The main focus was around breaking down barriers, and enabling teams across your company to create one customer profile.

Provide every team in your organization access to good, actionable, consistent data.

Diving into the product tour of the demo, Bryn showed us on the connections page, what the interface looks like for connecting data “Sources” to data “Destinations”, sort of the main point of a CDP. He makes the point that as new tools get integrated into your tech stack, the pressure falls onto your developers to make sure that data get integrated with the other tools in the system it needs to, and that can get complicated.

Main takeaway - no more data silos.

Solve for your complete picture, and Segment has over 400+ integration out of the box across numerous categories. Plus, if the integration isn’t out of the box, Segment Functions can help you connect new things.

Moving on from the high level, they looked at 2 questions:

• Can you give an example of what type of data Segment is collecting?

• How is this data organized around a user.

Looking into a website data source, Bryn clicked into its source tab. Double clicking into the “Debugger” section of the website source, you could view each “event” Segment was collecting from the website. (An event meaning something like an action happening on the website ex. A click.)

Bryn walked through a mock checkout on a mock retail store website he had, then went back to the segment tool, and was able to see each event he took logged into the debugger in that source page on segment. As a non-developer, it was quite simple to understand.

Next, the focus shifted to customer profiles, and how those events such as the actions taken on the mock website, get added to that customers profile, and begin to paint a valuable picture of what that user's behavior is.

Segment’s identity resolution engine merges email, anonymous id, and other first party identifiers to create this single view of the customer. This is constantly happening in real time.

Moving on Bryn, next began to explain how with Segment, you can act on this data within their “Audience” section of the tool.

Big takeaway: No more relying on developers to pull lists.

Getting started in audiences, Bryn began to build a list of customers with a high lifetime value. The configure section looked pretty standard to some you might see in any marketing automation builder, however, what stood out to me, and it was something that Bryn didn’t really go too deep into, but it looked like the capacity to build highly specific, targeted lists based on those events collected was the real advantage here.

Use your unique customer data points to build effective segments to action against.

For folks working with marketing automation tools like Marketo, or Salesforce Marketing Cloud, getting just a handful of new data points piped into the system for something like this can feel like you’re trying to move mountains, and can take months.

Having all of this data, or events at your fingertips to slice and dice audiences seems really powerful. Obviously, it takes the connections of sources at the forefront, however, that initial investment seems to enable a lot on the backend.

In the final portion of the demo, Bryn took us into the “Journey’s” section of the tool. At first glance, Journey’s seemed like a pretty standard automation builder that you might get in something like Hubspot, or Customer.io. It was a drag and drop tool that allowed you to set up actions and if/then statements to help direct how you treated your customers. Sticking with the retail example, Bryn provided a scenario where he wanted to target customers with a re-engagement email to try and bring them back as customers. He then would wait 3 days, and for folks who did purchase, he’d suppress them from digital ads (smart), and for those who didn’t he’d target them with a digital ad.

Build detailed customer journey's using customer touchpoints like email, SMS and digital ads in a visual drag and drop layout.

While the capabilities of sending an email, or SMS, or serving a digital ad, or sending to a support team didn’t seem mind blowing, remembering that these capabilities sit on top of the customer data platform that updates in real time, this feels like it gives it an executional edge. For example, while something like Customer.io, or Salesforce Marketing Cloud might take 8 hours to update on a customer meeting a scenario in one of these journeys, Segment will identify them instantly and allow that next step to happen in a more relevant manner.

Finally, remembering that Segment is surely leveraging Twilio SMS and SendGrid email, this gave me a lot of confidence in the capabilities of the tool from an executional standpoint.

Final thoughts:

As a Lifecycle marketer, having access to a CDP integrated across customer and product systems really feels like a step that could open the gates to the marketing gold standard: sending the right message, at the right time, over the right channel. It also sounds like a great source of truth for data to make sure all teams are looking at the same stuff. While they didn't get into the implementation of the integrations, they definitely seemed like they made connecting data sources and tool straightforward for technical people, and that once they were setup, you were good to go.

Basically, I’m into it. How much do they cost though? Assuming that as no prices are listed anywhere - A LOT.

Signup to watch the webinar yourself here.