IT has long been perceived as a cost center, but it’s increasingly being reimagined as a profit center by forward-looking companies. A 2021 IDG State of the CIO report noted that two-thirds of CIOs said creating new revenue-generating activities falls among their responsibilities—and customer engagement offers exciting opportunities in this area for CIOs and CMOs alike.
Thanks to predictive models associated with AI and machine learning (ML), marketers have more insight than ever into customer behaviors, and can therefore gain a better understanding of how to best influence those behaviors. With the right information on hand, brands can leverage these tools to support effective personalization, which in turn can boost revenue. Accordingly, 46% of CIOs listed customer engagement as a new area for expansion, and personalization as a key revenue driver for their business.
However, this opportunity comes with its own unique challenges. A customer-centric approach to customer engagement requires actionable information, but all too often that data ends up siloed within apps, websites, and other back-end systems and databases. The result? Inefficiencies, data latency, and inaccuracies that lead to broken customer experiences. In addition, the cost associated with collecting, storing, and managing actionable data can inhibit efforts by marketing and IT teams to use personalized customer engagement programs to drive revenue.
To truly profit from data, brands need the ability to transfer it throughout their tech stacks at the speed of their business. With the right technology, brands can create a data ecosystem that allows them to act immediately on key customer information, regardless of origin.
That’s where Braze and Snowflake come in. The Braze customer engagement platform supports the real-time flow of data, enabling brands to easily gather, understand, and take action upon multiple customer events. By connecting it to the Snowflake Data Cloud, you can create a 360-degree view of the customer to power relevant and memorable experiences.
Snowflake Secure Data Sharing and Braze: The key to customer engagement
Customer engagement approaches like audience segmentation, messaging personalization, and behavior-triggered outreach all require smart data collection and management. That’s why data management and seamless connections with other technologies are always top of mind at Braze when it comes to evolving our platform.
One of the most significant of these evolutions came when we launched Braze support for Snowflake Secure Data Sharing back in 2019. This feature gives customers in-the-moment access to event data that’s generated by their users and stored on the Braze platform, allowing them to bypass cloud storage and ETL friction points by enabling secure, account-to-account sharing of information through Snowflake—without copying data (see Figure 1).
Because the data is accessible from each customer’s own environment, they can seamlessly combine Braze and internal data in a single query. This enables them to analyze behavioral patterns for predictive modeling, generate custom conversion and funnel reports, conduct ad hoc conversion analysis, and more. Plus, Snowflake Secure Data Sharing makes it easy to democratize data access across various departments, allowing marketing teams to easily collaborate with data and engineering teams to support more compelling, meaningful customer experiences.
This functionality allows brands to sync Braze data with Snowflake while allowing for massive scale and high reliability when it comes to uptime and data completeness. In addition, the secure, scalable process established by Braze and Snowflake helps ensure that customers receive the right data and are able to comply with GDPR deletion requests in an efficient and timely manner.
Thanks to Braze support for Snowflake Secure Data Sharing, brands can unlock deeper insights using their own Snowflake data warehousing technology. They can leverage Braze and Snowflake in tandem to better understand their messaging campaigns’ performance and their customer relationships, and then take effective action within the Braze platform.
Payomatic: A case study in the power of Snowflake and Braze
Payomatic, New York’s largest provider of check cashing and financial services, did just that. As part of a digital transformation initiative, the brand wanted to revitalize its digital marketing strategy to encourage users to carry out high-value actions (HVAs) such as enrolling in direct deposit, reloading prepaid cards, and sending money. To make that happen, Payomatic used Braze together with Snowflake to centralize customer data into one location. This gave the brand a 360-degree view of user activities, and enabled them to launch campaigns that could help engage and retain their customers.
Payomatic leveraged data based on customers’ behaviors in stores, within the app, and through the mobile pay network to reach out at the right stage of the customer journey. That involved sending push notifications, in-app messages, and Content Cards—all tailored to each user’s behaviors and preferences.
These personalized campaigns resulted in a
- 50% increase in prepaid cardholder app penetration
- 32% uplift in direct deposit via the app
- 11% increase in mobile engagement
Through the combined power of Braze and Snowflake, Payomatic was not only able to leverage data from various sources, but was able to provide personalized customer experiences that delighted customers and boosted their bottom line.
“Payomatic has embraced cloud technology and SaaS offerings, allowing for greater flexibility in our toolset(s) and enhanced our visibility into the journey of a customer,” said Michael Saraceno, CIO/CISO at Payomatic. “Utilizing services such as Braze and Snowflake provides near real-time data points which allows Payomatic to engage with customers on a personalized level. This personalized approach aids in long term retention and new customer acquisition.”
Final thoughts
Brands that use Snowflake and Braze in concert can more effectively oversee, analyze, and uncover actionable insights using data that lives within different platforms, back-end systems, and databases. By gaining real-time access to data regardless of location, they can create effective (and profitable) experiences that keep customers coming back.
Interested in learning more about how Snowflake and Braze can work together to support your customer engagement efforts? Watch the Powered by Snowflake Q&A on YouTube with Braze Co-founder and CTO Jonathan Hyman, and check out the Braze x Snowflake guide, “Exploring Data Management and Customer Engagement.”