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Bombas and other clients are seeing 7x+ ROI within days of implementation.

Today we’re introducing Identity+ which enables marketers to increase the real-time identification rate of their e-commerce traffic and fully understand their first-party customer data to build more complete customer profiles. It works by matching rich personalized customer data to an existing customer profile, without the need for them to be logged in, even in the absence of third-party browser cookies.

With Google’s planned 2023 depreciation of third-party cookies in the Chrome browser, a tool like Identity+ will be invaluable to marketers as it allows them to unlock next-generation third-party data and device graphs enabling them to solve the classic ‘who actually are my customers’ question. Clients who have activated Identity+ have seen instant digital revenue lift from the increased scale of behaviorally triggered messages, richer real-time personalization, and greater collection of first-party data.

“Simon Data has always been purpose-built for enhancing the ROI of first-party data,” said Jason Davis, CEO, and co-founder of Simon Data. “Identity+ demonstrates the potential of this by leveraging next-generation machine learning and an emerging world of third-party data to enhance the data quality in our core platform.”

The Unique Identity Resolution Offering from Simon Data

Before, using identity resolution data for MarTech use cases was a notoriously difficult task for marketers to undertake. It typically requires excessive customer integration work and support from data and engineering teams and as a result, rarely happens. Since Identity+ is natively integrated with our CDP and, as such, utilizes Simon Journeys, making the data very accessible and approachable for non-technical marketers. The Simon CDP also has a much higher identity match rate and is based on a broader population than many of its competitors.

E-commerce marketers already struggle with recognizing customers who do not log in to make a purchase, and that will only get harder as third-party cookies phase out in 2023. Identity+ relies on a rich and emerging category of third-party data sets and device graphs that work without relying on third-party browser cookies.

How Bombas Targets Customers Using Simon Identity+

Cart and browse abandonment emails are among the highest converting but lowest volume campaigns available to marketers since so many users who opt in should be eligible for the emails but do not appear as recognizable. Leading e-commerce brand Bombas used Identity+ to dramatically increase their send volume in an effort to leave less of that money on the table, and make this cost-effective channel a bigger part of their remarketing strategy. Choosing Simon Identity+ helps them increase their targetable audience, boost abandonment campaigns, and hit more critical points in their user lifecycle. Within four days of implementing Identity+ Bombas saw a 7.2x ROI.

“It’s not often that we introduce a technology to our marketing stack that delivers results overnight,” said Kate Huyett, Chief Customer Officer at Bombas. “With Identity+, we were able to take high-converting campaigns that we already had running and dramatically scale their reach, with a clear impact on top-line revenue.”

Why Today’s Marketer Needs Identity+

By identifying more users and their online behaviors, marketers can also reduce email unsubscribes and increase customer satisfaction. Using third-party metadata marketers may not have had before, Simon Identity+ enhances customer unification capabilities and allows for increased personalization in outreach across channels.

Identity+ is powered by a combination of our exceptional core identity capabilities and enhanced by best-in-class partners like FullContact in the rapidly changing identity space.  By opening Simon’s ecosystem to identity providers like FullContact, unifying the view of a customer becomes simpler than ever before. Simon Data is able to amplify its match rates because of its already existing unified first-party data repository. Because this is an out-of-the-box offering where marketers have the ability to act on this enhanced data, identity resolution is more approachable for marketers and direct-to-consumer brands.

Identity+ improves overall marketing ROI by securing more remarketing conversions via owned channels like email and SMS instead of relying on Google or Facebook retargeting, which can be expensive. Ultimately, using Identity+ cross-channel offers stronger customer loyalty and increased engagement.

Simon Data is already implementing Identity+ with other leading brands in retail, e-commerce, and travel, positively impacting customer engagement and revenue as it rapidly has with Bombas. As the CDP space has evolved, Simon Data has stood out by unlocking the value of data and enabling marketing teams to create great customer experiences. While the identity landscape evolves and third-party data, artificial intelligence, and machine learning opportunities progress, Simon will continue investing heavily in these offerings.

In this week’s episode of Data Unlocked, Jason interviews Christopher Harrison, the CEO of FullContact.

Christopher is an analytics and marketing expert with thirty years of experience in marketing technology.

He has worked with hundreds of brands and worn several hats, from engineer to data architect, before landing his current CEO role.

He is currently at the head of FullContact, a company that specializes in identity resolution for marketing and advertising.

Earlier today, Simon Data introduced Identity+ which is powered by a combination of Simon Data’s exceptional core identity capabilities and enhanced by best-in-class partners like FullContact in the rapidly changing identity space.  

By opening Simon’s ecosystem to identity providers like FullContact, unifying the view of a customer becomes simpler than ever before. For more information Simon Data’s Identity+ announcement, click here.

An Inc. 5000 company, FullContact is a leader in the identity resolution and insights industry and has worked alongside others such as Epsilon, Hero Digital, Placekey, and more.

Today, Christopher is here to discuss the role and future of identity in marketing, how identity resolution can help companies understand their customers better, their partnership with us, and more!

He and Jason also talk about what identity resolution is exactly and how it works. They also discuss how it can add value to brands and companies by helping them understand their customers better.

As Christopher says in this episode:

“Without the ability to progressively understand your customer, you will fail to deepen your relationship with them.”

Ready to learn more?

Click play on the episode above!

And don’t forget to listen to the Snowflake episode with Bill Stratton Jason and Christopher talk about here!

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The difference between all-in-one marketing clouds and cross-channel marketing platforms is not always obvious. Therefore, the mindset becomes, if I am using this tool for “x” function, I should use it for “y” as well. However, choosing an all-in-one marketing solution to meet your organization’s needs has many limitations. There are also many benefits of selecting best-in-breed solutions that fit each area. This blog will look at a head-to-head matchup of marketing clouds vs. cross-channel platforms for your marketing solutions and the pros and cons of each.

All-in-One Marketing Clouds

An all-in-one marketing cloud solution bundles various technologies onto one platform for you. Examples of technologies a marketing cloud will offer are CRM, eCommerce, social media marketing, and analytics, but there are other possibilities. As stated earlier, there are pros and cons to having all your tools within the same system.

Benefits of an All-in-One Marketing Solution

The pros of an all-in-one marketing cloud are in the name- you buy one piece of technology, and you have several solutions. These types of solutions also come with many integrations for easy out-of-the-box use. All-in-one clouds are best for early-stage businesses that may have less data and need a single solution in place fast.

Cons of an All-in-One Marketing Solution

However, things that seem like benefits of an all-in-one solution can also be cons. For example, this type of solution has a lot of bells and whistles, which may grab your attention at first glance. However, it may be more than your business needs. Also, marketing clouds’ design is for speed out-of-the-box, meaning this solution is not data powered or built for ingestion at scale. The only type of data that marketing clouds process is event data. Meaning it does not capture historical data. This gap ultimately limits your customer view. Aside from data limitations, marketing clouds require extensive time and resources from technical and engineering teams to properly use and access your data. This strain hinders marketers’ ability to work quickly, easily access a unified view of their customers, and autonomously query necessary data for campaigns.

Combining your e-commerce and data warehouse customer data is not easy for marketing clouds. As the business grows, this gap limits scalability, contributing to siloed and disaggregated data.

While all-in-one marketing clouds are great for smaller-sized businesses starting out, brands need access to more cross-channel endpoints as your business grows. Marketers need to get outside tools to fulfill this need. However, this results in more siloed data and a disjointed customer experience.

Cross-Channel Marketing Platforms

Cross-channel platforms allow marketers to orchestrate customer journeys across various channels seamlessly.

Benefits of a Cross-Channel Marketing Platform

Future-proofing your techstack is essential. Its flexibility is one of the most significant benefits of unbundling your marketing tech stack by buying a cross-channel marketing platform over an all-in-one cloud. You can find the best solutions for each business need and plug and play as you scale.

Data activation is another typical piece missing from the all-in-one cloud that cross-channel platforms offer. Data activation enables marketers to act on their data autonomously. Marketers no longer need to rely on engineering or data science teams, which is beneficial for companies strapped for bandwidth or those who don’t have data science/engineering support. By gaining the ability to create their segments quickly, marketers can:

• Create complex segmentation powered by customer data
• Experiment across channels, allowing marketers to optimize unique customer experiences
• Orchestrate robust cross-channel journeys and have access to channels that all-in-one-clouds don’t
• See reporting in one place that syncs with all your data

Having best-of-breed capabilities in one cohesive workflow ensures marketers get the most out of each channel and action. In other words, best-of-breed tools help ensure you are getting the ROI expected.

Cons of a Cross-Channel Marketing Platform

Cross-channel marketing platforms may not have all the bells and whistles an all-in-one cloud does. Also, the amount of data available can sometimes be overwhelming. Having access to all your data is good, but more data available means marketers have more decisions to make. This information overload seems overwhelming to some marketing teams. Lastly, because these platforms connect to data, marketers may need buy-in from additional technical team members.

Unbundle Your Marketing Tech Stack

There will inevitably be new technologies and channels you will need your existing technology to integrate with as time goes on. The ease of integration with best-in-breed solutions is the real power over an all-in-one cloud. And, as the number of new technologies and channels increases, so will the amount of data.  Therefore, understanding how to organize and segment audiences will be even more difficult. Marketers will have to double down on efforts to personalize content effectively. As your business grows, your tech stack needs to support more complex needs and use cases. Ultimately, flexibility will be more critical than ever. Enabling marketers to act quickly and power meaningful customer experiences requires workflows that seamlessly activate customer data to power targeted, hyper-personalized content.

Building your Tech Stack with Simon

Simon Data is a vendor-agnostic cross-channel marketing platform. In other words, no matter what other technologies you use or add to your tech bundle, Simon will seamlessly integrate with them. Simon will also ingest data from all sources in various forms without any reformatting needed on your end. These abilities are critical in making sure you’re ready to scale for the future. No matter the tools in your tech stack, you can feel confident that your cross-channel marketing efforts are powered by robust and unified customer data that result in lasting customer relationships.

Request a demo to see how Simon Data fits into your techstack!

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As brands prepare for a cookieless future beginning in 2023, in addition to Apple iOS changes that now require companies to ask consumers’ permission to track them across the web, brands have some important decisions to make about how to access and activate customer data to continue to generate meaningful business results.

For example, deploying the right data infrastructure can help brands make sense of and effectively use customer data. Or, developing the right best practices for consented data collection can provide a highly personalized customer experience. These data decisions matter because they play a big role in how a customer experiences and ultimately, trusts a brand. It can mean the difference between a brand that people trust or not.

We examined how our clients–some of the world’s best-known brands–are using their customer data and wrapped the findings in our 2022 State of Customer Data Report. Here’s what we uncovered:

5 Trends in Customer Data

• Greater Privacy Concerns – A reported 88% of customers want consent over their data usage. We expect this number will increase. Only 7% of consumers know how their information is used once they have given consent. Customers are more likely to opt into data collection if they see the enhanced value.

• More Data Available – Marketers have more data available than ever before. In the last two years, 90% of the world’s data was created. The more data that’s available to marketers, the more personalized campaigns can be, thereby increasing their effectiveness.

• Lack of Confidence in Usage – Many marketers struggle with a lack of data integration between technologies or data sources. This gap translates into difficulty turning actions into insights and ultimately proving ROI.

• Heightened Customer Expectations – Our report found that if brands aren’t utilizing their customers’ collected data, they probably also aren’t meeting their minimum expectations for a personalized experience.

• Value Exchange – Zero-party data collection, when done right, is about collecting data to exchange value with the customer.

How Our Clients Use Data

Our clients are responding to these trends. We found that among the top-performing brands, third-party data collection (cookie tracking) is becoming obsolete because of looming consumer privacy protections to be enacted by Google. These forward-thinking brands are collecting their own data directly from their customers (first-party data) or using data that customers intentionally share (zero-party data).

Our report also found that these brands are able to effectively leverage large amounts of first-party and zero-party data to create personalized campaigns that exceed customer expectations and generate higher conversion rates.

The top 40% percent of our zero-party and first-party data-reliant clients had campaigns that performed 2.9x better. Clients in the top percentile of campaign performance use 2x more data points per campaign, integration, and segment. Each additional data point led to an average of a 3% increase in a campaign’s performance.

In other words, the more data points brands leveraged in any given campaign, the better that campaign performed. Not only that, but they have mastered data usage to create personalized campaigns, campaigns that achieved higher conversion rates

Key Takeaways

Our 5 takeaways from the 2022 State of Customer Data Report are:

• Own data collection and prioritize consented data provided by the customer.
• Being able to make sense of and use data will become table stakes.
• Brands that can maintain transparency can make better use of consented data.
• Directly collected data combined with shared information will balance personalization with privacy.
• Technology is only one piece. Brands need best practices of data usage to succeed.

Simon Data’s CDP answers these challenges by helping brands unlock this data to create exceptional and impactful personalized experiences that exceed customer expectations. To learn more, please visit https://www.simondata.com/resource_types/case-studies/.

To view the full report, visit the 2022 State of Customer Data Report.

Are brands tracking the right data? And if so, do they know how to read between the lines to utilize that information efficiently?

These are the exact questions Jason is asking our guest for this week – Erik Huberman, CEO of Hawke Media.

CEO, marketer, public speaker, thought leader, and author, Erik is a jack of all trades when it comes to marketing.

His agency, Hawke Media, runs marketing for 600+ brands. They help both large and small companies grow through branding, production, media buying, content marketing, and more. On their client roster, you’ll see well-known names, such as Red Bull, Alibaba.com, and Proactiv.

Recently, they’ve also come out with their own marketing bible, The Hawke Method. The book encompasses everything about their brilliant marketing methodology.

Today, Erik is here to discuss the “North Star” metric: how brands can become fully customer-centric using data, the importance of tracking your purchase cycle, and more.

He and Jason also talk about other important metrics, such as the cost to acquire customers and net retention.

Finally, they also take a gander at some big brick-and-mortar brands, namely, Apple and Lululemon, and analyze what truly differentiates them from their competition.

Wondering what Erik has to say?

Click play on the episode above!

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What’s a Customer Data Platform?

A customer data platform (CDP) is martech software that creates a unified view of your customer data from your various systems in a single place. This unification makes data accessible throughout the entire organization. However, to be a true CDP, this software must do four things:

• Ingest customer data from multiple sources
• Unify customer profiles into a single view via identity resolution
• Create “real-time” customer segments
• Integrate customer data to other systems, out-of-the-box

Let’s take a closer look at those four functions.

Understanding What a Customer Data Platform Does

Data Ingestion

One of a customer data platform’s critical capabilities is gathering, standardizing, and validating data from across all online and offline sources. Most CDPs need to format the data specifically for ingestion data. Simon Data, however, can ingest data as-is and does the reformatting on its end. Next, the profile is ready for unification.

Profile Unification

A CDP brings together ingested data, deduplicates, and consolidates it into a single customer profile. This unified profile becomes your sole source of truth when it comes to understanding your customer. Everyone in your organization can now use the same to execute campaigns and create segments.

Segment Creation

As we stated above, consolidated customer profiles allow marketers to build custom segments from within a CDP. These segments increase personalization and tailored communications. Giving marketers the ability to create and tweak customer segments allows for more accuracy in speed in marketing campaigns.

Integration

With a CDP, marketers can immediately and seamlessly integrate segments into their end channels, like ESPs or advertising platforms. Additionally, this integration results in a truly personalized experience that avoids redundancies and extra work.

Combining these capabilities into a single, accessible platform for marketers shortens the path from idea to execution and measurement. Or, as we like to say, what a CDP does is help get the right data into the hands of the right people to make informed decisions, quickly.

How Does a CDP Help Marketers Make the Most of Their Customer Data

CDPs make connecting the dots between customer events and overall behavior easier to better strategize and deliver experiences at customer expectations.    

CDPs Help Marketers Understand Their Customers

Consumers are acutely aware of the amount of information you have about them. They expect you to use it to enhance their customer experience. They expect marketers to go past personalization and tailor experiences uniquely for them. This level of personalization is the exact type of experience a CDP enables. In other words, a CDP should help you understand your customers on a personal level but at scale.

Rather than use the customer data you have to tell you about how a customer is currently behaving, a CDP can use this information to predict future wants and create extraordinary customer experiences. Genuinely connecting with your customer is about anticipating their wants and needs and delivering on them.

      Customer Data Platforms Make Segmenting Data Easy

CDPs achieve an aggregated view of all customer data across all sources. CDPs have an intuitive interface for targeting and personalizing this aggregated data. These abilities allow marketers to orchestrate customer experiences across channels and provide rich insights into customer behavior and campaign performance.

     CDPs Provide Access to More Insightful Customer Analytics

When your siloed data doesn’t communicate, and you can’t get a full view of the customer, you will inevitably waste spend targeting campaigns to the wrong people. On the other end of the cost-saving spectrum, what a seamless customer data platform does is make measuring campaig, channel, or medium-specific ROI easier. Having centralized customer data offers critical insights into opportunity sizing and experimentation.

Who Needs a Customer Data Platform?

      How Other Companies use CDPs

Companies use CDPs to serve several of their campaign needs. The primary outcomes you can expect from finding the right CDP for you are:

• Unified Customer View: Bring all disparate data together from various sources and organize it into a single customer view
• Segmentation: Break down your audience into groups that go beyond demographics, geographics, and firmographics by tapping into customer behavior to create richer segments

• Dynamic personalization: Get much more granular personalization with a CDP unifying your data and integrating with BI and analytics tools; you can automate around endless parameters

• Orchestration: Orchestrating from one place, where the unified customer view is updated in real-time, gives the right information at the right time to the right person.

• Cross-Channel Experimentation: having all your data in one place means iterating on existing segments or flows is quick and easy

How to Choose a CDP

Like everything else, the customer data platform is not one-size-fits-all. The CDP space is vast and there are several types of CDP that focus on different business outcomes. The first thing to do when choosing a CDP is to make sure the functionality meets your business needs. Do an internal meeting with the decision-makers to be sure everyone is on the same page. Then, start the RFP process to find out which CDP is the best fit for your business. These steps are an essential part of assessing the problems a CDP will solve for you.

Regardless of which type of CDP you buy, make sure it can ingest, unify, and integrate your data, enabling you to create audience segments.  

Easily Start with Simon

Simon Data is an orchestration CDP. An orchestration CDP focuses on advanced segmentation and campaign orchestration across multiple channels. Simon Data has an intuitive interface that allows non-technical users to create segments easily based on their data. This design helps marketers tailor and strengthen customer experiences independently of other teams.

Download the guide to learn more about what a customer data platform is, and why you need one.

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This post is written by Dylan Flye, VP of Sales at Simon Data. Dylan Flye has been the VP of Sales at Simon Data for the past five years. He has seen and written about the changes and trends in this rapidly shifting category.

The other week, Klaviyo announced a re-brand. On the surface, they changed their logo and color scheme. However, reading deeper, they’ve repositioned themselves as a unified customer platform with infinitely scalable customer infrastructure. While there have been many CDP entrants recently, this marks an exciting move for Klaviyo and the CDP space. I’ll explore further in this blog post.

Three years ago, I wrote a blog post about trends shaping the CDP space, the different types of players, their origin stories, and their fit within the broader category. In that post, I talk about big marketing clouds acquiring data technology and moving closer to the CDP space. This move is in response to businesses looking for better and more data-driven ways to engage with their customers.

This move has prompted me to revisit that blog and question whether any martech can just call itself a CDP.

Key Trends: An Update

Reflecting on the post three years ago, key trends shaping the CDP space today are essentially the same.

1. Brands are more DTC-focused and looking to develop a better 1–1 relationship with customers. Check.
2. Stacks are unbundling, and teams are looking for best-in-class technology. See: Twilio, Snowflake, Attentive
3. Omni-channel isn’t enough. Businesses don’t need to just be in every channel but understand the customer across all channels. Double-check.
4. Cookies will go away. X_X
5. Data privacy and regulation will continue to focus businesses on their 1st party data strategy.

What I Got Wrong- The Marketing Cloud Category

In talking about the marketing cloud space and how marketing clouds are moving closer to the CDP space, I wrote:

“Marketing clouds are increasingly under pressure to deliver on the breadth of channels in which marketers want to engage their customers and the data demands of the modern enterprise. It’ll be interesting to see what happens to this space as businesses continue to focus on centralizing data capabilities and increasingly view message delivery (once the remit of marketing clouds) as commoditized (see: Twilio acquiring Sendgrid).”

I wrote this six months after Salesforce acquired Datorama and nine months after they acquired Mulesoft. I anticipated big cloud players would compete further up the value chain from data organization to experience delivery. Specifically, I expected the big clouds to amalgamate (as they don’t build tech these days) something like a CDP. I also expected disruptive smaller players in the multi-channel marketing hub category to develop or acquire CDPs.

To be clear, I’m not surprised that no prominent cloud player has acquired a CDP. The category (excluding Segment) isn’t yet mature enough. Also, Segment wouldn’t have fit with the buyer persona or go-to-market motion of the Salesforce, Oracle, or Adobe sales brigade. Note: I’m intentionally excluding Salesforce’s acquisition of Evergage in 2020. Evergage is a web personalization tool marketed as a CDP, which is now part of Salesforce’s Experience Cloud.

What I didn’t see coming but definitely should have, was Twilio’s acquisition of Segment in 2020. The most mature player in the CDP space with a developer-first angle, Segment fits perfectly with Twilio’s buyer persona. Twilio now poses the greatest outside threat to the big cloud players. They are making a push to become the Atlassian of MarTech (i.e., a developer-first bundle of packaged offerings).

What Surprised Me  

I am surprised that the big clouds still don’t have CDP offerings, despite marketing these offerings for years. I expected first-movers in this space would use mature CDPs to win market share in the marketing cloud category. However, despite what these companies market or sell, they still don’t have CDP products.

Another element is that the disruptive multi-channel marketing hubs still lean heavily on CDP partnerships. Surprisingly, they don’t have answers of their own. These players also haven’t made as much of a splash in the enterprise as I would have expected. The reality is these companies continue to double year over year by staying in their lane. Until the “great panic” of 2022, they could achieve mid-double-digit revenue multiples just focusing on their ICP.

The Newest “CDP” in Town

This point brings us back to the catalyst for this post: Klaviyo is calling itself a quasi-CDP. Laggards from other categories have unsuccessfully tried to pivot into the CDP space. Meanwhile, otherwise wildly successful businesses have failed to deliver CDPs. However, this announcement marks a successful ESP’s first attempt to re-brand its core business as a “CDP.”

On its website, Klaviyo interchangeably refers to itself as a data management platform and a customer data platform. I understand the SEO play relative to each of those terms. However, I’m sure Klaviyo’s product team is not investigating building a DMP. For Klaviyo’s ideal client profile (SMB e-tailers), Klaviyo may provide all of the data capabilities the business needs. Therefore, in the eyes of the jury that is their customer, they can credibly call themselves a CDP or DMP. This fact is because they meet 100% of the data needs of the buyer. And, this fact is true regardless of meeting some industry-standard definition or not. No technology can be “infinitely scalable”. That is unless “infinite” in the eyes of the buyer is some measurable amount of scale the technology achieves. I never made it past Calculus I; therefore, my TI-89 had “infinite compute.”

So, Can Anything Just Call Itself a CDP?

Unequivocally, data is the riptide among currents in the marketing technology space. I can’t listen to a podcast without hearing how some company I’ve never heard of “collects all data from any source, organizes it, and integrates with everything in the relevant ecosystem to [do what the business does].”

Closer to the point, enterprise marketing clouds have been marketing their CDP capabilities for half a decade. Yet, they still don’t have a product in the market. SMB marketing tools now market themselves as “unified customer platforms.”

But, in this case, the only jury is the business that applies the technology to their use cases and customers. Can anything call itself a CDP if it meets 100% of the data needs of the clients it serves? I don’t see why not. Enterprise marketing clouds service clients with many use cases requiring deep feature support in numerous areas. When these clients have use cases that involve leveraging complex data, they integrate a CDP into their marketing cloud.

To the extent that they don’t, their marketing cloud collects all necessary and relevant data. It makes it actionable and facilitates the flow of data anywhere the business wants to send it. That workflow sounds like a CDP to me. Klaviyo does the same with primarily e-commerce data and helps small businesses send emails and SMS messages. For example, a company wants to segment by historical and real-time data or leverage data from a customer support tool. In that case, they need a CDP. If they don’t, Klaviyo handles their data needs.

What Does This Mean For the CDP Category?

The CDP space already suffers from a nebulous definition. It’s the only tech category where vendors pay a 3rd party to certify they are part of that category. This process is done without commenting on the quality of the service. As I wrote in my original blog, somewhere near 100 companies are calling themselves CDPs. The fact that more players from adjacent categories call themselves CDPs doesn’t help.

But, the fact is more businesses in adjacent categories are positioning themselves as CDPs or marketing their CDP capabilities. This fact is a testament to the market momentum behind solving challenges at the intersection of data and marketing.

Related to the above is the practical reality- anyone can claim what they want to be, within the boundaries of how buyers could assess them. The CDP category will likely start to see deeper segmentation over the next few years. We’ll also probably see further consolidation and M&A by companies whose alternate paths aren’t doubling year over year or whose business models are fundamentally threatened by ongoing data privacy trends and regulation.

One thing is for sure: we’ll continue to see more companies marketing themselves as CDPs.

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NEW YORK – In a groundbreaking move, Simon Data, a customer data platform designed to let marketers easily build personalized cross-channel customer journeys, has launched a decentralized platform allowing consumer brands to finally, literally, own their customer data – as a Non-Fungible Token (or NFT).

With web3 at the forefront of conversation in e-commerce circles, this revolutionary news marks the first example of an established SaaS company bringing a blockchain-built product into market.

“Many vendors promise brands the ability to ‘own your customer data’,” noted Jay Nakamoto, Chief Cryptography Officer at Simon Data. “We concluded that the only real way to make that possible would be with something truly tangible like an NFT.”

Simon’s initial release of 10,000 NFTs represent customer profiles that clients already had in their CRM, but that are now minted as avatars of crocodiles, koalas, and even kangaroos donning all kinds of adorable accessories. And so, while they offer no legitimate value add in terms of personalization, early adoption and interest has been remarkably strong.

“We’ve built our company around allowing retailers to unlock and activate the data that they do have, but I’m not sure that anyone except the consumers themselves can ever really own their data.” Nakamoto elaborated. “So even though the owners of these NFTs still don’t technically own anything, they feel like they do, and that seems like a win for both parties.”

The platform’s roadmap remains unclear (due to the countless possibilities that lie ahead), but Vitalik Buterin, founder of the Ethereum blockchain on which all NFTs are built, has taken notice.

“It’s exciting to see innovative companies like Simon Data start to unlock the potential of web3,” remarked Buterin. “The future certainly seems incredibly bright.”

The price of Ethereum was down 27% on the back of the news.

Simon Data is the marketer-first orchestration Customer Data Platform (CDP) allowing e-commerce, travel, marketplace and retail brands to easily use data to build unique customer journeys across channels without the need for an all-in-one cloud solution. The platform leverages real-time. historical data and machine learning to power turnkey communications. Leading brands ASOS, JetBlue, Equinox and Vivino, rely on Simon to build one-to-one personalization across multiple channels at accelerated speeds. Simon Data’s growing team of 140 employees has been honored as both a 2022 BuiltIn NYC and San Francisco Best Places to Work, Great Places to Work Certified, and is a G2 Leader in the CDP space for four consecutive quarters. Request a demo today.

Happy April Fools’.

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Great marketing is seamless, reaching customers wherever they are with personalized, data-driven campaigns. Reaching the right people at the right time requires the right data. In other words, it’s not enough to only have customer data; data is only valuable when you can do something with it. Enter Simon Journeys. This blog will look at Simon Journeys, customer journey challenges, and Simon Journeys’ solutions.

What is Simon Journeys?

For marketers, easily managing cross-channel experiences is quickly becoming table-stakes. What is lacking is the ability to power these customer journeys with robust user data. That’s where Simon Journeys comes in. Simon Journeys is a cross-channel orchestration tool powered by a leading customer data platform (CDP). It allows marketers to create more complex, highly-segmented campaigns easily. These journeys engage customers in a personalized manner across diverse touchpoints via an array of sophisticated integrations. Simon Journeys also enables marketers to collaborate more quickly, optimize campaigns with robust experimentation, and iterate on user journeys with easy versioning capabilities. The workflow design ultimately helps marketers think like data scientists but act like themselves.

While there are many specific things Simon Journeys enables, at a high level, its core competencies are:

• Use real-time and historical data customer data to drive behavioral, relevant, and timely customer experiences
• Coordinate messages across different end-channels
• Build sophisticated cross-channel journeys easily and quickly via a marketer centric UI

Common Customer Journeys Challenges Marketers Face

Having data is one thing, but acting on it is another. At Simon, we know it’s difficult for marketers to implement complex, rich data into customer journeys. Lack of data access causes issues with targeting. Hence, a one-size-fits-all approach to customer experiences ultimately leads to missed opportunities and weak customer relationships.

Effectively engaging with customers is no easy feat. Here are some of the most common challenges marketers face when building customer journeys —  

Challenge One: Powering Your Journey With the Right Customer Data

It’s not uncommon for marketers to struggle to get the right data to inform effective customer journeys. Marketers are stuck with poor data or can’t access the right data making results difficult to achieve.

Simon’s Solution- Data Availability

Simon Data’s CDP works to unify customer data that lives across disparate sources. Therefore, marketers have easy access to all their data in one place. By unifying data into single customer views, marketers can better understand their audiences, and build better personalized, hyper-segmented campaigns accordingly. With access to better historical and real-time data, marketers can make more personalized, relevant, and timely customer experiences with Simon Journeys. Built atop our core CDP, Simon’s journey management tool improves cross-channel journey orchestration in several ways:

• Integration: Enable marketers to integrate any data source (relational, streaming, batch, or real-time) into a unified customer view
• Real-Time Triggers & Segment-Based Journeys: Create customer journeys using either configurable behavioral triggers or dynamic segments
• Cross-Channel Identity: Automatically identify customers across channels, ensuring that marketers always identify customers to send on the right journey

By making all data available, marketers can make endlessly customizable customer journeys tailored to individual needs.

Challenge Two: Creating Memorable Customer Experiences at Every Step of the Journey

Once having better access to comprehensive data, marketers often find it difficult to improve or expand on existing journeys. If a marketer wants to revamp a customer journey, their options can be minimal. They can start from scratch, but that is time-consuming and risks losing historical knowledge. Going this route also typically means marketers cannot look back at previous journeys in strategic decision-making. The result is often customer journeys remaining stale, unmemorable, and outdated.

Simon’s Solution: Seamless Journey Iteration and Optimization

Simon offers a seamless journey builder made with marketers in mind: catering to their specific workflows and needs. Simon allows marketers to react quickly by easily experimenting, building upon previous journey versions, and directly editing within existing workflows.

• Quickly iterate: Join branches, add touchpoints, and set up new experiments anywhere within an existing journey
• Advanced versioning: Automatically saved iterations allow marketers to access previous versions anytime, making workflow collaboration easy
• Experimentation Suite: Run insightful experiments across different customer segments through complex branching, multi-variant tests, and dynamic time delays
• Optimized results: Quickly act on real-time customer data to create more timely and relevant customer journeys

Challenge 3: Establishing an Effective Cross-Channel Marketing Strategy

Getting a customer’s attention isn’t as simple as it used to be. In addition to having compelling content, marketers must establish a personalized cross-channel experience to stand out, or at least compete, in the crowd. Yet, many marketers struggle to effectively target and personalize customer journeys, which first stems from having the right customer data. Then, engaging with users on the platforms they want is another road bump marketers must tackle. Most tools don’t support complex, multi-journey experiences, which means inefficient marketing workflows and mediocre customer experiences. The results are time-consuming back and forths, disconnected channel actions, and more siloed data.

Simon’s Solution: Journey Orchestration Made For Marketer Scalability

Simon has created an easy way for marketers to do it all in one place. Simons Journeys answers complex marketing needs. Marketers can now make meaningful, cross-channel customer journeys that result in:

• Richer customer experiences: Flexibility to create complex branching, experiments, time delays, and cross-channel messaging
• Diverse integrations: Make journeys that scale by seamlessly connecting to third-party tools and end channels at any time
• Fewer resources: Buildable, data-driven campaigns that don’t require help from engineering or IT teams

Start with Simon Journeys

Simon Journeys helps marketers solve everyday problems by enhancing their customer experiences every step of the way. Built for marketers, Simon Journeys helps you quickly brainstorm, build, and version many different journeys. Additionally, unique customer data powers this product to connect customers at crucial lifecycle moments that drive higher ROI. For more examples of Simon Journeys’ use cases, keep an eye out for this blog series. See how Simon’s clients have successfully used our cross-channel marketing platform to enhance their customer experience, 0r request a personalized demo to see Simon Journeys in action!

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In the newest installment of the Data Unlocked Podcast, Jason Davis, Simon Data’s co-founder and CEO links up with the co-founder of Actable, Matt Greitzer.

The Big Question

As always, Jason asks Matt how marketers can unlock opportunities with better data capabilities.

Matt’s thoughts on becoming data-driven

Well, there are a bunch of challenges in doing so. Some are obvious and some are not. A lot of what we find is that data, in theory, exists in organizations. But in reality, it’s really like locked away in various places, and it’s not necessarily deployed at business goals. It’s more of an esoteric exercise in a lot of cases. And there’s sort of technical reasons for that, and there are organizational reasons for that, and then there are practical reasons for that.

We’ve tried to work on a sort of organizational perspective with clients really to how you figure out how to unstick data from internal pockets within an organization. We can then get it out into an ecosystem where it can be analyzed, deployed, and enriched. And that’s often the gap. It’s sort of the theoretical desire and the theoretical understanding of what to do with data in an enterprise and then the actual practical ability to be data-driven.

There’s a way that we’re starting to see some of our customers come at it, which is by working backwards. They’ll consider first what they are trying to do with the data.

How is it actually going to create value for their enterprise? And what are the specific deployments for that? How is it going to make your customer service center more effective? And what information do they need to be responsive when somebody calls up with a problem?

If you start there, then you can work backwards and say, well, okay, well, what data do we have to surface from what systems in order to make that happen?

And at least that gives you a path. I think when you start the other way and maybe try to go top-down, it can become daunting, particularly with like large enterprises where they’ve got decades of tech debt and data debt that they’re trying to pay off. It can be hard to do that top-down. So use case-driven or what are you trying to do with the outcome approach seems to work well. And we’ve started to see a lot of our customers move towards that.

Tune in here

Check out this recent relevant conversation with thought leaders from Snowflake and Redpoint Ventures. This conversation and more on operational analytics continue on the Data Unlocked podcast. Tune in here:

In today’s “always-on” culture, the amount of time people spend on their phones is staggering. A recent report showed in 2021, consumers estimated they spent on average 5-6 hours on their phone. That’s an increase of 2 hours from 2020 results. Hence, it is clear why SMS marketing has grown in popularity over the past few years.

This blog will define SMS marketing, introduce Simon’s Native SMS Marketing, and show Simon + Attentive create best in class text marketing.

What is SMS Marketing?

SMS, or short message service marketing, is when businesses use text messaging to communicate promotions, sales, product updates, etc. to customers. Over the past decade, SMS has grown in importance as a marketing channel. 96% of marketers using text messaging say it’s helped them drive more revenue. Today, SMS marketing is synonymous with meeting consumers where they are. Yet, while nearly 90% of consumers are open to SMS text messages from businesses, how you communicate matters.

Like email, SMS is an owned marketing channel, meaning you can carefully craft messaging for defined audiences and purposes. However, text is seen as a more intimate channel than email and brings much higher consumer expectations in terms of relevance and timeliness.

How Simon Data and Attentive SMS Work Together

Today, most consumers use mobile devices when shopping online, so marketing through SMS is a no-brainer. Knowing the rising importance behind SMS marketing and channel optimization, we are excited to launch a new Native SMS Channel powered by partner Attentive.

This partnership brings more data and control to marketers’ text strategies than ever before. As most of you already know, Simon Data, a CDP, creates a unified view of your customer data from your various systems in a single place. This solution aligns with our joint belief that marketers deserve a unique, best-in-class channel solution that orchestrates within a single, cross-channel marketing platform. Here’s how we bring that belief to life.

Benefits of Simon’s New Native SMS Channel

Simon and Attentive help marketers make the most of SMS marketing by sending the right messages at the right time to the right people. This new integration allows marketers to activate that data to create highly segmented and triggered SMS messages from Attentive. Joint customers can create texts natively in Simon Data’s multi-channel journey builder.

With combined capabilities in a single, powerful marketing workflow, it is easier and faster for marketers to build hyper-segmented and highly personalized SMS campaigns. By orchestrating SMS alongside other channels, brands can create more connected customer experiences, driving meaningful interactions and increasing revenue and marketing ROI.

SMS Marketing Powers Real-Time Personalization

Simon and Attentive make it easy for marketers to send the right messages to customers with real-time hyper-segmented and personalized SMS campaigns. With Simon’s CDP, marketers have access to real-time data refresh capabilities. These refreshes power more relevant and timely text messaging, connecting to all other channel actions. Meaning marketers can coordinate real-time triggers across multiple customer journeys to connect strategic moves to your SMS channel. This integration provides users with a more streamlined customer journey tailored to individual experiences. Powering highly personalized SMS campaigns encourages increased engagement and builds more intimate customer relationships that last.

SMS Channel You Can Depend On

Another benefit of this partnership is ensuring you send your messages at the right time. With Attentive’s industry-leading speed, marketers no longer need to worry about delivering their text messages. Despite any peak send times, marketers can confidently hit the mark when it matters, knowing that messages will arrive when expected. This assurance allows marketers to worry about the important stuff and put technical operations aside.

Send Rich Media Messages, Smartly

Lastly, be confident you send messages to the right people by optimizing the right amount of interaction. First, ensure texts are engaging with Attentive’s unique rich media messages, including SMS, MMS, and video. In-house URL shortening allows marketers to showcase content better and increase CTA conversions. Once you’ve built-out messages, marketers can send triggered or segmented SMS messages. With Attentive’s combined smart sending capabilities, accounts messaged within a customized number of hours can be flagged and automatically omitted from an upcoming message to eliminate the risk of opt-out. This smart sending capability, combined with Simon Predict’s machine learning models, optimizes every customer interaction to ensure a one-to-one basis with the right amount of engagement and the right content. With Simon’s churn propensity and product recommendation models, marketers can personalize messages and offers based on unique user behaviors. Ultimately, these messages create more relevant customer experiences.

Sophistication and Scalability in Your SMS Marketing Platform

Build sophisticated SMS messages based on real-time and historical behaviors across all customer touchpoints (onsite, email, mobile, etc.). Powered in Simon’s unified cross-channel marketing platform, marketers have higher growth and ROI while building more effective marketing campaigns. Combining unified customer data within marketing workflows allows you to create SMS marketing strategies tailored to individual experiences. By connecting best-of-breed channels to one platform, you can easily measure campaign success. Therefore, identifying areas of improvement in one place.

How SMS marketing works with your Simon CDP

Now that we have a broad overview of SMS marketing and how Simon and Attentive work together, let’s take a look at specific use cases.

Triggered SMS Messages via Simon Journeys

Making SMS messages a behavioral action allows better personalization and timing that makes a difference. By automatically sending triggered SMS messages across different phases of the customer lifecycle, you become more relevant and top of mind on a device most of us spend way too much time on. Marketers can increase SMS effectiveness by implementing trigger and personalized texts based on unique customer data.

One-time or Recurring SMS Marketing Blasts

Whether you want to target a customer segment one-time or recurring basis, Simon and Attentive make that seamless. Through Simon’s advanced CDP and marketer-friendly workflows, it’s easy to set automated SMS messages to send at specific times or based on triggered behaviors at scale.

Opt-out Frequently Messaged Users

Given the more personal touchpoint that SMS provides, marketers must optimize customer engagement with just the right amount of interaction. De-risk over-communicating to customers and understand churn likelihood with combined smart sending and predictive capabilities. Automatically flag accounts that are likely to disengage or have received a high volume of texts. This stopgap ensures communications reflect unique user experiences and optimize satisfaction.

Get Started with SMS Marketing

Knowing the importance of SMS marketing may make it seem like a daunting channel to tackle. However, Simon and Attentive help marketers confidently send the right message to the right person at the right time. Request a personalized demo today to see how Simon helps companies get up and running out-of-the-box.

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Simon Data and Attentive announce a new, dynamic integration, designed to provide more data and control to marketers’ text strategies than ever before. Now, mutual customers can reach their users through personalized SMS marketing powered by Attentive more effectively by triggering and customizing based on historical, real-time, and machine learning datasets created by Simon Data. This enables marketers to drive hyper-segmented messages that coordinate seamlessly across other best-in-class channels and inspire more meaningful customer experiences.

CDP-enabled Personalized SMS Marketing

The integration allows marketers using Simon Data to use behavioral, demographic, and contextual first-party customer data from any source to either segment or trigger messaging from Attentive’s SMS marketing solution. As a result, users have the option to both create texts natively in Simon Data’s multi-channel journey builder, and will soon have the capability to send existing messages already built within Attentive.

“By nature, consumers have a much higher expectation for personalization and therefore the most effective SMS messages are highly segmented and reflect historical and real-time behaviors,” said Jason Davis, CEO and co-founder of Simon Data. “Certainly, Attentive has earned its reputation as the gold standard of SMS marketing in part due to their native ability to provide this experience, and we’re proud to be able to support joint customers by offering our data foundation, experimentation suite, and orchestration capabilities,”

New enhancements and features include:

• Real-Time Personalization: Power relevant and highly personalized messages by utilizing the latest customer data via Simon’s real-time data refreshes.
• Lightning Fast Messaging: Confidently send messages at speed, without slowing delivery times.
• Smart Sending: De-risk over-communicating to customers by automatically flagging accounts that have received a high volume of messages.
• Extensive Scalability: Drive messages based on real-time and historical behaviors across all customer touchpoints (web, email, mobile, etc.) within the convenience of one powerful platform.

“We’ve built a successful platform that helps our clients deliver highly personalized experiences and  tap into consumer behaviors to achieve long-term loyalty,” said Allison Kelly, VP of Partnerships at Attentive. “By joining forces with Simon’s CDP and data capabilities, we are now able to offer more unique touchpoints throughout the customer lifecycle.”

Building Loyalty With SMS

BARK, the data-driven company behind BarkBox devoted to making dogs happy with the best products, services, and content, is leveraging Simon and Attentive’s integration to deliver exceptional customer experiences.

“In order to provide high-quality experiences to dogs and their people, we believe that working with best-in-class marketing solutions that can be orchestrated by a single smart hub is essential,” said Ed Walloga, VP of Lifecycle Marketing at BARK. “This is why Simon Data and Attentive have been critical partners for us, and this enhanced integration capability opens all kinds of exciting possibilities for our partnership to grow, helping us to serve our mission: to make all dogs happy.”

Simon Data is eager to continue to drive joint value to customers by bringing forward additional CDP-enabled personalized SMS marketing capabilities with Attentive. Together, they are powering more impactful customer experiences that result in stronger brand loyalty.