The Red Planet : Powerful Customer Experiences Created With Data At The Center
LA VIE EN REDSHIFT
With the rise of big data storage, super-boosted processing speeds, and the evolution of analytical tools to match, information no longer exists as a static entity solely to be visited, handled and decoded unilaterally by data scientists, engineers and specialized analysts — data now informs all departments and functions synchronously.
The new frontier: using data in such a way that it ceases to be the co-pilot (informing communication practices) and becomes the pilot (driving the communications itself). Staying ahead of the communication curve is key for businesses to remain competitive however, to use data optimally you have to give it a high-quality home. Amazon’s Redshift (a fast, secure, scalable, fully managed data warehouse) makes it both simple and cost-effective to analyze all your data using your existing business intelligence tools, by delivering fast query performance using columnar storage technology to improve I/O efficiency and parallelizing queries across multiple nodes.
BI TOOLS ARE YOUR NEW BFFS
For a long minute, data analytics solutions were not very marketer-friendly. Which is a travesty since marketing professionals are directly impacted by their ability to piece together the big picture using data collected across various channels in real-time.
A new class of BI solutions — intuitive as they are interactive — have emerged and ameliorated their approach (e.g. Looker, Amplitude, Mode). These tools offer compelling features such as: responsive dashboards, interactive reporting, automated generation of elegant data visuals, and most alluring of all: support in building, editing and saving SQL queries. Querying raw data with SQL gives one the advantage of diving deeper into a vast but singular pool of information which has been extracted from all sorts of interactions (including web, mobile, physical events). From this desirable vantage point, one can drive more creative analysis, this creative analysis will lead to more unique discoveries and insights, and these insights will inform and empower more sophisticated campaigning.
THE INTERCONNECTION
The same queries being built to pull data from the warehouse and into BI tools can be easily copied into sendwithus. Our email platform allows you to maintain an all-access pass to all of your customer data (at the source) pulling relevant information in real-time to send emails with growing levels of personalization.
Reaching the right person, at the right time, with the right message is compulsory to building an amazing customer experience, but to do so one needs to run their campaign on volumes of fresh data. The Connect feature allows email marketing professionals to develop multi-dimensional, continuous segments by querying data straight from the data warehouse. Sure you can use a CSV, that is if you want your data to be static and unresponsive to change (umm no). The goal is to help you reach target audiences with ever-increasing precision, and our system allows you to not only segment like magical pegasus-unicorn but to experiment with messaging, content, offers, and pitches with minimized risk.
Let’s take a tour through example-land!
Ipsy is a personalized monthly makeup & beauty sample subscription box service. Each month, an Ipsy subscriber can expect to receive a deluxe sampler of products, plus a full-sized series of products, plus access to video tutorials created by Ipsy’s own stylists.
And…
With the use of Connect, Ipsy can A/B test highly specialized email campaigns! That is, Ipsy could run two simultaneous promotions against their customer data to see which campaigns reign superior. The segmentation used to run any email campaign with sendwithus can be incredibly advanced: taking into account the data that a customer had filled out during the onboarding process, records of how many friends (if any) a customer has brought into buying the service, recorded likes on social media, watched/liked/saved video tutorials, any other past activity, or survey data. All you have to do is query the required data (and chances are you already have working queries saved in your BI tools).
A quick query sample, inspired by the Ipsy example from moments ago:
This would be a simplified version; usually you would probably have to join 2 tables together (i.e. one with the user data and another with the recommendations), but let’s keep it simple for now… In this statement we are are pulling the custom variables to be filled in the email: first name, email address, the store they designated as a favorite during the onboarding process, then some product recommendations. This statement will capture everyone who watched a specific video tutorial on bronzers. There you have it; happy querying!
P.S. THIS HAPPENED
Just yesterday, Amazon announced that it will unleash a majestic capability upon the world of business (albeit only in several U.S. states). Redshift Spectrum is a new feature that allows you to run SQL queries against exabytes of data in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).
This means Amazon has effectively extended the analytic power of Amazon Redshift beyond the data stored on local disks in your data warehouse, to query vast amounts of unstructured data in your Amazon S3 ‘data lake’ without having to load or transform any data. Because Redshift Spectrum supports the same SQL syntax of Amazon Redshift, you can reuse, reduce, recycle sophisticated queries using your regular business intelligence (BI) tools.
To learn more about sendwithus and how our platform can help you surpass all of your email personalization goals, please drop us a note at sales@sendwithus.com … or if you’re the shy type, lurk our website at www.sendwithus.com
