Easily collect and store digital events directly to create a complete composable customer data platform (CDP)

Marketers are increasingly leveraging the Snowflake Data Cloud as the foundation for all of their customer data analytics and activation. Marketing teams are creating composable customer data platforms (CDPs) on the Data Cloud to build a 360-degree view of each customer. They’re then powering personalization and marketing optimization with that customer data, without having to learn SQL or request help from data engineers.

The Snowflake Data Cloud can aggregate customer data across all touchpoints, and so is uniquely positioned to host a truly comprehensive customer 360. Earlier this year, Hightouch partnered with Snowflake to offer identity resolution, which makes it easy to unify disparate records into customer 360 profiles. Now, Hightouch and Snowflake are launching an event collection solution that makes it easy to collect and then store digital events directly in the Data Cloud. 

With this addition, any team can easily collect and unify data into customer 360 profiles in the Data Cloud and then activate that data to all their applications. This post explores how this new event collection capability, Hightouch Events, empowers Snowflake customers to create a complete composable CDP in the Data Cloud.

A complete and composable CDP in the Data Cloud

Customer data platforms allow companies to collect customer data, resolve identities to build customer 360 records, curate audiences of customers, and finally sync customer data and audiences to downstream marketing, advertising and operational tools. While some of these platforms operate in their own data silos, composable CDPs leverage the Snowflake Data Cloud as the central source of customer data. 

This composable approach offers several key benefits for Snowflake customers:

• The composable CDP architecture allows Snowflake customers to leverage their data teams’ work in the Data Cloud to power marketing and business operations.
• The Data Cloud can aggregate all customer data from any source, including online events, transactional databases, business applications and more. The resulting customer 360 profiles are comprehensive, enabling the best possible personalization and customer outreach. 
• The Data Cloud is schema-agnostic, so Snowflake customers can model their data in whatever format makes the most sense for their industry.
• The composable CDP is modular and unbundled. Snowflake customers can choose additional technologies at their discretion to enhance their customer data strategy, only buying what they need.

Despite these benefits, one challenge to creating a composable CDP was that it typically required multiple vendors to collect, unify and activate customer data on the Data Cloud. Now, with the addition of Hightouch Events, Snowflake customers can compose a CDP on the Data Cloud with Hightouch as their sole additional vendor. This complete but composable approach is unique in the Snowflake ecosystem and includes the following features:

• Hightouch Events: Collect and store digital events directly into the Data Cloud.
• Customer 360 Toolkit: Resolve identities and entities in the Data Cloud to create a customer 360.
• Reverse ETL: Activate data to 200+ downstream tools with SQL, dbt and more. 
• Customer Studio: Leverage a marketer-friendly suite of features to build audiences, coordinate campaigns, run tests and more.
• Match Booster: Enrich data in-flight to ad platforms to improve match rates.
• Personalization API: Fetch Data Cloud data for real-time personalization.

It’s easier than ever for Snowflake customers to leverage the Data Cloud as the center of a complete composable CDP.

Collecting data into Snowflake with Hightouch Events 

Hightouch Events helps companies easily collect clickstream “event” data from their digital properties (client-side or server-side) to load into the Data Cloud. This ensures that Snowflake users can easily aggregate customer data in the Data Cloud to build comprehensive customer 360 profiles. 

Hightouch Events provides tracking SDKs that Snowflake users can deploy across their web, mobile, and server-side applications. Users can proxy these libraries through sub-domains to mitigate the impact of ad blockers on data collection. A Data Contracts feature allows Snowflake users to predefine expected event data formats and quarantine non-compliant data. Finally, a fully managed API with high availability across multiple regions loads event data directly into the Data Cloud at high frequencies (with configurable loading times). Event streaming will also allow real-time event forwarding to downstream tools directly. 

Hightouch Events operates with a developer-friendly ethos, so Snowflake users can collect events into the Data Cloud with confidence: 

• Ease of implementation: Hightouch Events is backward-compatible with other popular event collection technologies by design, making migration efforts easier. 
• Data quality: The Data Contracts feature ensures all collected data conforms to expected formats and alerts users of anomalies, making it easy to proactively govern data. 
• Version control: Git sync management makes it easy to manage event tracking and prevent regressions before they reach production. 
• Observability: Deep per-event observability makes it easy to diagnose any data-load issues. It’s easy to see data passed in each event and troubleshoot errors as they emerge.

Another essential differentiator for Hightouch Events is customer-friendly pricing. Many event collection solutions charge for each incremental “monthly tracked user” (MTU). Not only does this lead to spikes in cost in high-traffic months, but it’s tough to predict and manage against this abstract metric. Hightouch Events is priced much more transparently based on the number of events collected. This metric matches event collection cost to the actual value it provides.

All of these benefits serve the ultimate goal of helping Snowflake users collect digital events directly into the Data Cloud. With these additional customer touchpoints available in the Data Cloud, Snowflake users can create more comprehensive customer 360 profiles to power their operations. 

Unlock the power of customer 360

Organizations can leverage Hightouch in tandem with the Data Cloud to collect events, resolve identities, and create customer 360 profiles that they can then activate to all of their downstream tools. The Data Cloud is fully equipped with Hightouch to serve as a composable CDP. To learn more, book a demo with Hightouch.

The post Build an Actionable Customer 360 in the Data Cloud with Hightouch Events appeared first on Snowflake.