How Marketers Can Enter the First-Party Data Era with Confidence

[Snowflake]

Marketers everywhere are anxious about what fortune the cookieless future holds — but I think we should embrace what will be a refreshing change. 

The fear is that we will have to reinvent how we target and have an even harder time measuring engagement. Neither is true if we use the deprecation of third-party cookies and subsequent shift to first-party data as a positive forcing factor. The urgency around generative AI demands focus on first-party data anyway, and regulatory environments are tightening — GDPR violations alone cost companies nearly 2.1 billion euros in 2023, a record high in fines. Third-party cookies are a crutch, an educated guess at best. In their place, we’ll have the authenticated and consented identifier — an ID that’s verifiably known through data such as email addresses or their verified location. 

Because this is the year that Google finally introduced Tracking Protection, rendering third-party cookies restricted by default for some users, marketers must focus on centralizing their customer and marketing data as never before. Specifically, a crucial goal must be to unify all your disparate sources of customer data in order to establish the elusive 360-degree view of the customer. As I’ve said before, customer 360 is where the abstract idea of AI optimization becomes very real; it will not only replace the cookie but also let us better engage with prospects through the channels they prefer and with the offers they want — all while respecting their privacy preferences. 

For marketers at Slack, siloed data made it nearly impossible to keep track of subscriber preferences. By wrangling its data sources in Snowflake, the company improved its consent management and got in touch with the right people at the right time.

The more than 11,000 martech solutions worldwide are enough to leave any marketer’s head spinning. At the Marketing Data Cloud Forum, I moderated a conversation with Jason Davis, Co-Founder and CEO at Simon Data; Jay Goebel, General Manager of Data and Identity Partnerships at The Trade Desk; and Kathryn Murphy, SVP of Product and Design at Twilio. We talked about how it is essential to have the right marketing data stack — where marketers have free reign to choose from an open ecosystem of martech and adtech solutions, and there’s interoperability across those tools so that you can use your data effectively. Many martech solutions try to make life easier but end up creating lots of noise and governance concerns instead. 

“There’s a lack of clarity around what tool does what and what data goes where. When we think about how to orient ourselves, it’s about making sure there’s a singular view of the data, which is governed, controlled and monitored,” Davis said. Achieving that view improves visibility and accessibility, so teams aren’t managing 35 independent marketing applications.

“There are different starting lines,” Murphy said. “Some people come very sophisticated. As Snowflake customers, they’ve got great data from across their channels that they can use to inform campaigns.” Others are just starting to build that single source of truth, and it can be overwhelming. The panel’s advice? Take it one step at a time. Start with a single use case and build up from there.

How the Marketing Data Cloud empowers Snowflake customers

Snowflake is a data platform focused on removing friction. The Marketing Data Cloud helps simplify complex martech architectures, delivering superior customer experiences and maximizing marketing and advertising ROI. 

“It represents a paradigm shift for marketing applications [and advertising],” Davis said. With the Marketing Data Cloud, marketers can integrate their marketing and customer data — across various sources — to build a foundation in an easy-to-use, privacy-preserving, highly governed cloud data platform. Snowflake customer WeightWatchers, for example, centralizes vast streams of marketing and customer data, ensuring accuracy and reliability for their millions of users. 

As for the shift in advertising, “there’s been this incentive to build massive segments because when [advertising platforms] match, they get paid,” Goebel said. “With the first-party-data focus, we can bring precision to that portion of the industry that will make everything better.”

Instead of navigating a maze of standalone applications, marketers can work with a best-in-class partner ecosystem built on, or native to, the Marketing Data Cloud or leverage third-party data from Snowflake Marketplace to execute end-to-end marketing workflows on a persistent data platform. ZoomInfo, which unified all of its marketing data and its martech stack on Snowflake, saved months of manual work, driving a 17% year-over-year increase in marketing ROI.

Another Snowflake customer, Canva, realized a composable customer data platform powered by Census could help it harness the value of its 200 terabytes of first-party customer data stored in Snowflake. With the composable customer data platform, Canva unlocked 33% higher email open rates, saved $200,000 annually on engineering costs and created new marketing audiences in just five minutes.

The Marketing Data Cloud offers an opportunity to help solve three fundamental challenges in marketing: 

• Increased alignment between marketing and data teams. Davis noted that the standard was for data teams to approve and integrate every one-off solution. The Marketing Data Cloud, on the other hand, builds on Snowflake’s data infrastructure to streamline the entire process. This can cut months off campaign production times, letting marketing organizations plan, react and operate more strategically. With optimized visibility into customer engagement, Vimeo, a Snowflake and Simon Data customer, improved free trial conversions by 300%. 
• Accessibility to next-generation data tooling. As marketers in fast-paced environments, we want to be able to use the latest and greatest tools. You have to work from one singular data source to generate bespoke data science models or leverage clean rooms and deeper attribution. 
• Campaign effectiveness and enhanced customer experience. In the Marketing Data Cloud, your customer 360 delivers an all-encompassing view — across acquisition, first-, second- and third-party data. Now, you can deploy campaigns that drive personalization, coordinated across all channels. 

Making AI work to your advantage with a strong data foundation  

The scramble to adopt advanced AI tools in marketing is forcing better interoperability between data and marketing teams. “The race toward gen AI has lifted all AI use cases,” Murphy said. “Predictive AI has been around for a long time, but it’s not well-adopted.” 

There are two aspects to an AI-enhanced strategy for marketing: AI for workflow efficiencies (the incremental improvement) and AI for optimization (the game changer). For Twilio, its AI strategy is about helping marketers do what they were already doing, — only better and faster. Murphy says the company is now pursuing the game changer by making predictive AI accessible. Once that’s in place, add generative AI to power data instrumentation, campaigning and audience generation, and the end result offers marketers autonomy and speed of execution.

AI, combined with great data, will make it really fun to be a marketer in the coming years. But that solid data foundation is pivotal. Marketers have never been able to understand their audiences so deeply nor act more quickly and precisely on those insights. 

The Marketing Data Cloud allows marketers to be more effective — to eliminate silos, simplify their data foundation, modernize marketing execution and prepare for a privacy-first future. 

Watch the keynote of the Marketing Data Cloud Forum on demand to hear how the leaders from The Trade Desk, Twilio and Simon Data are preparing for the future. Watch the entire half-day event for more on the product innovations powered by partnerships with Salesforce, Microsoft, AWS, Hightouch, Census, GrowthLoop and more, or for conversations about the real-world applications of the Marketing Data Cloud from Samsung Ads, Canva, Spark NZ, AXS and others. 

Check out Secrets of Marketing Success: Building a Data-First Organization to see how Snowflake customers like Slack, Tapestry and OpenTable are making their data-driven marketing goals a reality.

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