Marketer's Secret Weapon: Semi Structured Data
For those marketers lucky enough to work within an organization that has implemented Snowflake, they have a newly emerged opportunity that will make them the envy of their marketing industry peers.
What’s changed is how easily marketers can now access a treasure trove of semi-unstructured data, which were previously exclusively within the domain of developers, or hardcore data scientists. Snowflake makes these previously difficult to access data sources easy to consume, by exposing them as a “VARIANT” data type.
Previously, the only way that marketers would be able to access these sources would be to wait for IT to undergo a complex and costly data modeling and data management project (“ETL”). Instead, these sources can easily be explored and used to create powerful new marketing segments.
What are the top Semi Structured use cases?
Semi-structured data sources and their corresponding use cases are as varied as there are organizations. A good place to look in your organization is anywhere that you see new channels (e.g. mobile apps), or new ways for customers to interact with your brand.
| Industry | Use Case |
|---|---|
| CPG | Detailed consumer usage statistics for connected devices. Use these to detect drops in engagement as part of onboarding campaigns. |
| Travel | Detailed search history (e.g. departing city, destination, number of passengers etc.). Use for "abandoned search" campaigns. |
| Gifts & Delivery Services | Detailed search history for recipient, type of gift or product, occasion. Use for abandonment campaigns, or anniversary reminders. |
| Retail | Capture detailed website engagement history for educational and how-to content. Build new targeted segments based on personalized customer research and purchasing phase. |
Taking Action with Salesforce Marketing Cloud
The ability to query Snowflake and identify new segments and opportunities is only half the battle. To make these segments actionable, they need to be made available to customer engagement systems like Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC).
Snowflake offers a variety of manual export methods to accomplish this. Alternatively, SpadinaBus offers SnowSelect.io, which makes the integration between the two platforms seamless for marketers. In addition, SnowSelect provides a “low-code” point-and-click interface for query building for those marketing campaign analysts that lack SQL-writing skills, or are rusty.
Together, Snowflake and SFMC married with SnowSelect offer a powerful “soft technology” solution that empowers marketers.