Snowflake Archives

Learnings from CACI’s Activating Data event

Posted on: 18 February 2022

Back at the end of November 2021, during a small window of lockdown restrictions easing, CACI held an event in London for clients and prospects. After 20 months of not being able to meet in person, it felt great to be reunited to share insights and experience.

Given the time that has passed, we wanted to make this event memorable for all the right reasons. To do this we organised client speakers from the RAC, Laithwaites Wines and Domino’s Pizza Group. Recognising that many of you want to hear from your peers rather than us.

“Activating data to deliver seamless customer experiences” was the title of the event we decided on. Granted it’s a mouthful to say, but we felt that the topic of activating data into the customer experience is overlooked. Often falling between the IT, data, and marketing functions. When it comes to delivering a customer experience strategy that connects across all channels and is consistent it requires all these business areas to work together.

In this blog post I want to pick out some of the important client messages from that event. You can watch all the videos here.

Takeaway 1: Need for multi-disciplinary change teams

Ian Ruffle and Jenny Cann spoke about the RAC’s implementation of Adobe Campaign and Snowflake. The project has been a big success for the RAC, delivering new use cases and positive benefits (including a reduction in inbound calls).

To successfully deliver this type of change, Jenny showed how RAC and CACI formed a core decision making team across technical and marketing disciplines. This group provided clear direction for the project and united teams around a single vision for delivery.

Watch the RAC case study

Takeaway 2: Don’t forget the creative

Domino’s Pizza Group shared the ingredients of their journey to deliver personalised messages to every customer. Hayley Pryde of Domino’s introduced how this transformation has been delivered through good technology, having the right people, developing test & learn processes, and then selecting solid agency partners.

An added ingredient was the need for new creative assets that can be personalised in every channel. This required new imagery, a variety of copy options, and strong integration between creativity and technology. Assets needed to work in multiple channels and be relevant to the recipient. For example, if a customer always orders vegetarian options, it’s less effective to use “mighty meaty” imagery in the campaign.

As Domino’s Pizza Group have discovered, having the best technology and processes will only get you so far if the creative assets are all the same. For this reason, they are working with CACI’s creative studio to produce a wide range of personalisable assets for performance and direct channels.

Watch Domino’s Pizza Group talk about creative asset personalisation.

Takeaway 3: Get closer to the customer

Through lockdown Laithwaites Wines saw a change in their customer profile. Whilst their loyal base of wine buyers continued to purchase, new customer groups came to the brand looking for great wine that could be delivered to their home.

With a growing base of customers, Laithwaites Wines worked with CACI to understand the UK market for wine buyers. Using Laithwaites’ data, CACI’s demographics and lifestyle data, and market research we created a market segmentation that could be applied to Laithwaites’ business strategy.

Personas and market plans were built from the segmentation, enabling the business to understand the differences in customer buying habits and needs. For each segment, core value propositions were drawn out and applied to communications. Importantly for Laithwaites Wines, the segments provided a way to calculate addressable headroom for each segment to set very specific targets for growth.

To listen to James and Sophie talk-through Laithwaites Wines’ approach to segmentation, click here.

Migrating your customer data infrastructure to Snowflake

Posted on: 12 January 2022

Snowflake offers unprecedented power for customer marketing and analytics use cases. Its separation of processing and data storage gives scale and accessibility unlike any other solution. The key benefit for customer marketing and customer use cases is that all data users can work from one up to date source of truth.

Migration to cloud data infrastructure is already on the agenda for many CDOs, CIOs and CMOs. With a potentially large cost for migration, and the risk inherent in moving platform, there are planning decisions to make.

Firstly, there are many different types of cloud migration, and you need to pick which one suits the needs of your business.

Broadly these migration options fall into:

Lift and shift cloud migration – exact replica of previous customer platform in a new data cloud for increased resilience and lower cost of ownership
Optimise and migrate route – largely replicating a legacy customer database to the cloud but taking the time optimise key components of your data infrastructure to take advantage of Snowflake’s features
Migrating through a full rebuild – creating an entirely new data infrastructure within Snowflake to give optimum performance

At CACI we have experience of the pros and cons of each approach and can advise brands on how to get the most from a Snowflake and cloud migration. For instance a full rebuild approach is going to be more timely to complete but will offer greater benefits. In other cases the choice to migrate and optimise will offer huge performance enhancement to critical data needs whilst avoiding the larger budgets.

Regardless of route selected there are key stages in successfully completing a migration of customer data infrastructure to the Snowflake Data Cloud. At CACI we’re helping clients along this journey to minimise risk, accelerate benefits and ensure that the needs of marketing are met:

Legacy audit – all organisations will have a pre-existing set of data sources and integration tools that need to be audited in preparation for migration
Identity and quality assessment – reviewing customer data quality to ensure individuals are clearly identified and that data quality is a priority
Impact preparation – preparing for the impact of migration to Snowflake and communicating this within the organisation
Use case execution – moving to Snowflake will enable greater applications of data and more users having access to data. We help you plan for that to ensure that you reap the benefits
End-to-end planning – when making a change of this scale you need to ensure that all functional and technical processes are covered including reporting using the new data.
Operating model and enablement – ensuring teams across IT, product and marketing are able to fully use the capabilities of the new platform
Benefit assessment – post migration, retrospectively ensuring that the migration has achieved its objectives

To hear more about how CACI migrated the RAC from legacy data infrastructure to the Snowflake Data Cloud, you can watch Ian Ruffle, CRM Capability Manager at RAC, and Jenny Cann of CACI speaking at our recent event.

For more on CACI and Snowflake you can read these blog posts

Why organisations need to start their clean room journey now

Posted on: 22 July 2021

Following CACI and Snowflake’s recent webinar on everything CMO’s need to know about Data Clean Rooms, Jon Ede shares his notes on why organisations need to start their clean room journey now.

Data Sharing

There is a trend developing in the Data Industry which is focused on the controlled and secure sharing of data between brands and companies. More organisations are waking up to the benefits that sharing data between collaborating organisations can bring, either through improved and enhanced marketing strategy and comms, better insight, or just better co-ordinated and closer collaboration.

There are several reasons why a brand might want to collaborate with other organisations to share data. Closer collaboration through secure sharing of data can:

Enhance your understanding of your customer base
Enable you to plan and deliver better marketing
Perform joint marketing with co-operative brands
Assess the prospects of potential JVs

Data sharing allows by creating a frictionless operational process for always on collaboration.

Snowflake’s Data Clean Room

Snowflake have recently launched their Data Clean Room capabilities. The Data Clean Room is a feature that anyone running a Snowflake instance has access to. It allows for seamless and secure sharing of data, meaning that you can share your data with 3^rd Party organisations whilst maintaining full control of the data.

Using cryptographic technology, you are able to decide what data you want to expose to your chosen collaborative partner. Using features within the clean room, you can decide to grant access to specific tables, procedures, views or fields.

This allows you to grant access to the data to achieve your use case. For example, you may only want to share data at a specific segment level, rather than at an encrypted individual level. This can then be refined and altered as the use cases develop.

Diagram showing how three brands can come together to create highly relevant messaging

The ability to create this secure environment and share data whilst it is in situ means that the data is immediately actionable. This has historically been a blocker with these types of environments, but with Snowflake’s Clean Room, you can directly integrate the platform into MarTech, AdTech or analytical and reporting tools.

Making it happen

As a Snowflake partner with expertise in MarTech, AdTech and Data Science, CACI is currently working with major brands to guide them on their Data Clean Room journey. We support through Use Case and Strategy planning, all the way through the set up and ongoing execution.

Beginning your Clean Room journey

We help brands by creating standardised and clean data sets, ready for sharing, and then help by creating matching logic to enable better collaboration. At this point our Data Science and Reporting experts are able to work with all data sharing parties to create models and segmentations and analyse the data for insight and collaboration potential.

Using our extensive MarTech and AdTech knowledge we can also help you activate the Clean Room generated insights into new and pre-existing technology.

For more information on Clean Rooms

If you are interested in expanding your data capabilities to include a Clean Room, get in contact with CACI to arrange a call.

Additionally, you can watch the recording of our webinar with Snowflake: Everything CMO’s Need to Know about Data Clean Rooms

Accelerating value realisation with CACI and Braze

Posted on: 6 July 2021

Braze’s recently published 2021 Global Customer Engagement Review is a report worth reading for customer-oriented marketers. Through research and in-depth analysis of customer experience data, Braze has gleaned vital insights into what separates brands that deliver a poor experience with those that excel (Braze titles these the “Ace” brands).

One stat that particularly caught my eye was that Ace brands are 56% more likely to exceed their revenue targets. And this is across all areas of customer activation, conversion, monetization and retention. They are leveraging all the features of Braze’s real-time customer engagement platform to improve the customer’s experience which in turn leads to more customers spending with the brand.

Set out below are the differences between brands delivering legacy customer experiences, and how Braze’s Ace brands are performing. It’s clear that Braze is enabling customer focussed organisations to create experiences and communications that resonate and connect with the recipient.

At CACI we’re helping brands to get the most from Braze. We’re a trusted partner at implementing, optimising, integrating and running Braze for our mutual clients. The work we’re doing with brands who want to be classed as Ace has highlighted five areas where value realisation can be accelerated:

High quality implementation of Braze – without this there may be challenges accessing or relying on the data that Braze holds
Real-time data integration – to deliver meaningful in the moment experiences, Braze requires fresh data
Optimisation not migration – when migrating campaigns from your old platform, take the time to optimise them based on Braze’s capabilities
Accelerate personalisation and optimisation – change business practices to enable more continual improvements to your campaigns and comms
Have the right model of expert support – whether it’s for creative assets or execution of CRM activity; you need the right type of agency relationship

CACI has now developed a set of Braze Accelerators designed for CRM teams who need to achieve greater results in a reduced timeframe.

If you’d like to find out more about how we could enable your brand to achieve more with Braze, get in touch and I will send you a copy of the presentation on our accelerators.

Five takeaways from CACI’s Snowflake for the CMO webinar

Posted on: 3 December 2020

CACI and Snowflake hosted a webinar on the benefits of marketers getting involved in Snowflake’s Data Cloud. Whilst real-time data infrastructure may sound like the focus of the techies, this webinar sets out the why and how of playing an active part in your data infrastructure.

I was fortunate as webinar host to be joined by Paul Coward of the RAC and Jon Ede who leads CACI’s Snowflake practice. As Strategy & Insight Director at the RAC, Paul has been heavily involved in their implementation of Snowflake to drive real-time marketing and insight capabilities. Jon has a wealth of experience in building customer and marketing data platforms, and was an early adopter of Snowflake’s technology.

Five takeaways on snowflake’s data cloud

Failure to engage on data infrastructure may leave marketers with something that is not fit for use.
Data provides an edge for marketers who are seeking to continually optimise marketing activities.
Snowflake enables marketers and IT teams to quickly deliver high value insights.
Optimised marketing comes from a continual cycle of using data to hypothesise, test, measure, learn and improve.
The frictionless data infrastructure that Snowflake delivers connects all the data in your organisation straight to the customer.

Enabling your marketing data transformation

CACI is here to help marketers do amazing things with data. Whether that’s building a Single Customer View, creating clean data feeds for your marketing technology, or augmenting your customer data with demographics and lifestyle variables. There’s a host of technology, consulting and data science work that we can do to improve your marketing results.

If you’d like to see a recording of the event please get in touch!

We will soon be releasing the CMO’s Playbook for Snowflake, if you’d like to register for a copy of that in advance, please contact me with your details!

CACI becomes an official Snowflake cloud data platform partner

Posted on: 23 October 2020

CACI is focussed on doing amazing things with data. For that reason, I’m really pleased to announce that through certifications and client case studies, we’ve achieved an official Select Partnership level with Snowflake.

Our clients have always relied on CACI to combine complex and large data sets to improve their business. Whether we’re bringing together data from across multiple brands and systems to build a 360-degree view of customer data, or analysing anonymous data from the UK’s major banks and lenders, we have expertise that brands can trust.

Snowflake is a cloud-based data platform that is gaining significant traction with CTOs. Snowflake is also one the fastest growing tech companies in the world and recently went public with a $60bn valuation.

Through its unique technology, Snowflake can power critical real-time use cases for CMOs and achieve improved time to value. Jon Ede who leads CACI’s Snowflake practice said:

I’ve built more SCVS and CDPS in my career than I wish to count. A lot of the functionality that a modern platform needs to deliver is out the box with snowflake, allowing for a CMO to cut down on the upfront implementation time and deliver value sooner. As a technologist who has spent most of their career working in marketing, I see immediate benefits of snowflake to a CMO.

CACI AND SNOWFLAKE FOR CMOS

CACI and Snowflake combined bring together a cutting-edge data platform with expertise in delivering customer marketing solutions.

As already demonstrated with our real-time Customer Personalisation Platform architecture that is built on Snowflake, CACI is developing answers for real CMO needs.

CACI has also integrated our identity resolution services into Snowflake, enabling marketers to bring together multiple data sets and, in real-time, combine duplicates. Improving the accuracy of reporting, attribution, and campaign selection.

GET IN TOUCH

Should you need help with your customer and marketing needs, get in touch with me, David Sealey through dsealey@caci.co.uk.

If you’d like to understand more about the data challenges that marketers are facing, I recommend you read our recent article on the challenges of personalised marketing.

Five challenges of personalised marketing

Posted on: 10 August 2020

PERSONALISATION IS A CHALLENGING TOPIC

Some organisations just don’t get it. How do you change things at your company?

Almost two thirds of consumers expect to receive personalised offers as standard and 63% of consumers would stop using companies who provide poor personalisation. Effective personalisation presents a huge opportunity for marketers who can master it. The rewards are potentially great. But so are the risks of delivering it badly.

Marketers are finding it harder than ever to reach and convert consumers across channels. So smarter targeted messaging is an absolute must to connect with customers.

Working with clients in a wide range of sectors, we’ve been helping marketers crack the conundrum. The most successful organisations are combining a range of technologies and expertise in data, campaign management and channels to achieve impactful results.

Typically, we find there are five main challenges to overcome in creating an effective and sustainable personalisation model that can continually adapt to changing customer needs.

MULTIPLE VIEWS OF THE CUSTOMER

Customer data is typically acquired over time and is kept in different repositories and formats. Multi-channel personalisation requires a complete and accurate 360 degree view of every customer. Identifying, matching, cleaning and integrating diverse records and information is a complex challenge.
SEPARATE TOOLS AND CHANNELS

Enterprise businesses currently use up to 91 different marketing cloud services. Marketing technology (even when it comes from a single vendor) is hard to connect, because different tools have their own unique data models and capabilities. To provide a personalised, seamless, omnichannel experience, tools need to work in harmony.
DISCONNECTED DATA

Many customers are willing to provide more data, if they can see that it’s being used to their advantage to provide more relevant communication. Around the organisation, there’s demand for different insights at different times, so teams collect new data from a range of sources to meet a particular need. It’s hard to funnel this relentless deluge of new data into the mix and making it accessible immediately, to match current behaviour and preferences.
SILOED DECISIONS

Communication decisions may be made by a number of different teams – from customer services, marketing and sales to IT and operations. Customers receive communications from several platforms – they can be contradictory and repetitive. This undermines the whole purpose of personalisation, creating an impression that your organisation doesn’t understand the customer and places little value on quality. To compound the problem, feedback from different campaigns isn’t built back into a central knowledge base. Effective personalisation strategies avoid this by using automation to combine technology and decision-making.
OPERATIONAL INEFFICIENCY

Collectively, customer engagement teams aren’t productive because they’re underusing the technology in the business. That’s typically either because of its inherent complexity or a lack of training. Through a single personalisation platform, you can integrate all your campaign and communications systems into a single marketing stack that gives more power and insight to everyone.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

We’ve partnered with Braze, Tealium and Snowflake to combine world-class technologies that create a powerful, user-friendly platform capable of high-volume delivery of sophisticated, personalised campaigns.

CACI’s Customer Personalisation Platform empowers marketers to model and deliver incisive and high-impact personalised campaigns. Our experts help clients customise and deploy it to start delivering ROI quickly.