Twilio Invests in Enhanced Interoperability with Data Platforms, Data Warehouses

Twilio, the customer engagement platform that drives real-time, personalized experiences for today’s leading brands, announced at Snowflake Summit 2024, Linked Audiences and the debut of the Segment Data Graph – new product features that enhance Twilio Segment’s interoperability with data platforms and warehouses – driving efficiencies for businesses that rely on them for managing customer data, and need a real-time, unified view of their customers.

These capabilities allow technical marketers to easily combine the benefits of real-time data from CDPs with the comprehensive, yet often harder to access data platform and warehouse datasets. This not only supercharges marketing strategies, but also unlocks the transformative potential of AI, ensuring marketers can fully leverage advanced models to drive better customer engagement results.

“Enhancing interoperability between Segment’s CDP with data platforms and warehouses helps businesses unlock the full power of their customer data," said Thomas Wyatt, President at Twilio Segment. "The combination brings this critical data to life, making every customer touchpoint and insight immediately actionable. We think of it like turning an analog map into an active GPS system that provides real-time guidance when you need it most."

Data lake, data warehouses, and data lakehouses, traditionally used for analytics, are increasingly crucial for operational activities like predictive AI, thanks to their expansive storage of organizational data. Integrating these with Twilio Segment’s CDP is becoming increasingly popular, with upwards of 1 trillion rows of data being synced to the warehouse monthly on the Twilio Segment Platform. Industry leaders like Snowflake, the AI Data Cloud company, and Databricks, the Data and AI company, recognize the importance of advancing their customers’ capabilities with CDP integrations.

By merging real-time insights from Segment’s CDP with the comprehensive relational data from the warehouse - businesses can transform data platforms and warehouses into a dynamic source of operational application. This interoperability enables businesses to seamlessly convert disparate data points into complete, identity-resolved profiles to better understand and engage with customers. In an era where leveraging AI effectively is key to competitive advantage, such immediate, data-driven customer interactions are crucial for enhancing customer loyalty and driving marketing ROI.

Linked Audiences: More Timely and Accurate Audiences

Linked Audiences, currently in public beta is an intuitive audience-builder tool, equips both B2B and B2C marketers to seamlessly leverage the full spectrum of customer data—integrating real-time data from Segment’s CDP with comprehensive data from the warehouse—without writing a single line of SQL. This capability ensures marketers can access a more complete and precise view of customer interactions, leading to more accurate targeting and better return on investment.

This tool transforms how marketers engage with data, enabling them to directly query and segment within their data warehouse using a straightforward, no-code interface. Linked Audiences empowers technical marketers to quickly create and refine audience lists, making data-driven decisions faster and more efficiently. This direct access to data speeds up the response to changing market dynamics and customer preferences, significantly enhancing marketing agility and effectiveness.

Moreover, Linked Audiences bridges the gap between real-time operational data from Segment and historical data. By enhancing the interoperability between these data sources, Twilio Segment’s new tool breaks down traditional data silos, facilitating a dynamic exchange of information. This not only streamlines workflows but also enriches the insights available for customer engagement strategies. Such comprehensive data utilization is crucial for businesses like LegalZoom, aiming to fully leverage their data architecture, ensuring that data is not merely collected but actively employed to drive smarter, more personalized customer interactions and stronger business outcomes.

Introducing the Segment Data Graph: A Core Innovation

At the heart of this new tool is Segment’s Data Graph, a sophisticated framework that builds on Segment’s legacy of unifying customer profiles, and transforms data platforms and warehouses from static repositories into dynamic, actionable engines that enhance business intelligence. It empowers data teams to dynamically define and manage relationships between datasets within the data platform and warehouse. The Data Graph connects and activates all customer data points—like company accounts, subscriptions, products, and household information—providing a comprehensive view, essential for effective decision-making. This enables companies to create detailed audience segments, and pass this data to the downstream tools of their choice to be used for advanced analytics, adtech, and marketing automation.

"Our collaboration with Twilio Segment is strategically aimed at amplifying the value we deliver within our AI Data Cloud ecosystem,” said Onil Gunawardana, Head of Product Marketing Data Cloud, at Snowflake “With the enhanced interoperability, we enable marketers to access and utilize our platform's data in new channels and effectively activate it in real-time at scale, ultimately leading to improved customer engagement and optimized business operations.”

"Breaking down silos across customer profiles and speeding up audience creation has been an area of focus for our team, and with Twilio Segment's Linked Audiences, we're able to deliver experiences on behalf of our customer every day," said Timothy Hobson, VP of Engineering at LegalZoom. "With exciting new efficiencies, accessible insights, and integrated account data, we're eager to see what new opportunities lie ahead for the LegalZoom ecosystem.":

“Gaining access to unified customer data across a spectrum of activities is the key to meeting customers’ high expectations, especially in the age of digital engagement where proactive communications and hyper-personalization are top enterprise priorities," said Mila D'Antonio, Analyst at Omdia. "Delivering exceptional customer experiences depends on having complete customer profiles, understanding each customer's unique history and preferences, and having the ability and tools to act on such information in real time. Linked Audiences transforms customer engagement by giving leaders access to connected and complete CX customer data, essential tools for building lasting relationships.”