Hightouch Builds its Product-Led Growth Engine on Snowflake and Boosts Activation Rates by up to 30%

Software vendor Hightouch helps companies activate their data warehouse. Its Reverse ETL platform enables data teams to sync data from Snowflake into more than 100 SaaS tools—such as CRM, marketing automation, ads, and finance suites—without needing to build custom pipelines.

As a product-led growth (PLG) company, Hightouch sought to build a more seamless customer journey by leveraging its product usage, marketing, and sales data to power targeted customer experiences. But that was easier said than done as many third party customer engagement tools did not directly support the complex data that Hightouch had. On the other hand, building and supporting a custom solutions would have required significant engineering resources and prevented the team from launching experiments at its desired pace.

Hightouch turned to Snowflake’s Data Cloud for help as the foundation for its product-led growth engine. 

Centralizing business logic in Snowflake

Hightouch’s approach is novel in that Snowflake was not only a central repository of data, but also a repository of business logic powering personalized, cross-channel campaigns. Targeting that historically lived in the marketing automation platform was migrated into Snowflake as materializations.

Ingesting Hightouch’s business data into the Data Cloud was straightforward and had the additional benefit of breaking down data silos. This theoretically made it possible to send targeted messages to customers through third-party tools. However, many of these tools did not support the complexity of the raw data in Snowflake. As a result, it took more than 25 hours of additional implementation between three senior-level team members to deploy each targeted outreach campaign.

Seeking to accelerate revenue growth by orchestrating personalized messaging across email, sales, and in-app channels, Hightouch rearchitected its PLG engine on Snowflake. 

Snowflake’s unique architecture, combined with a data modeling tool called dbt, helped Hightouch efficiently implement campaign logic as a series of SQL models that emit data that third-party tools can process. 

“We standardized on an architecture that mimicked the functionality of a traditional third-party tool for building campaigns and journeys, but directly on top of Snowflake data. Effectively the logic for these campaigns lived in Snowflake instead of application code,” Hightouch’s Head of Self-Serve, John Tan, said.

By leveraging its own Reverse ETL tool, Hightouch synchronized the final output of this business logic to other applications—for emails, banners, paywalls, tasks, and so on. “As a Powered by Snowflake partner, we believe that leveraging Snowflake and Hightouch together can drive business value—and we’re drinking our own champagne to show what’s possible by activating warehouse data directly into our business tools,” Hightouch’s Head of Partner Marketing, Shiri Friedman, said.  

Achieving PLG objectives with high impact campaigns

Rearchitecting on Snowflake enables Hightouch to accelerate execution velocity and launch 5x more campaigns per quarter with enhanced levels of confidence. According to Tan, “With Snowflake and dbt, we have a robust framework to track, test, and monitor each campaign to ensure quality.” Deploying more personalized campaigns has helped Hightouch increase activation rates by approximately 30% and improve retention response rates by 2.5x.

Centralizing Hightouch’s data and business logic in Snowflake also makes it easier to perform multi-channel attribution, predict upgrades and churn, and measure campaign effectiveness. 

Data-driven insights foster increased levels of cross-departmental collaboration, which ultimately helps Hightouch advance its PLG strategy. “Snowflake can be the engine that powers product-led growth by joining the two worlds of product and go-to-market,” Tan said. 

Moving faster with Snowflake

Hightouch plans to push the limits of personalized, cross-channel targeting by powering even more campaigns with Snowflake. According to Tan, “Snowflake has become an incredible repository of customer data. Not just traditional sources like your CRM or product database, but also data like event clickstreams, prior campaign engagement, and product logs. This leaves room for creating innovative customer experiences to drive better customer experience and business value.”

For example, an upcoming campaign will help Hightouch ensure customers get the help they need when onboarding onto the platform, to successfully activate as many self-serve users as possible. When processing clickstream data and error logs in Snowflake, Hightouch is able to detect how a user got stuck, and automatically send the specific guidance or messaging needed to unblock their issue in that moment. that moment.

Learn more about Snowflake’s Data Cloud and Hightouch.