The Composable CDP: The fastest way to Automate and Unblock Marketing Teams

Every company has data. Every marketing, ops, sales, success, and finance team has use cases for that data. The problem: it’s challenging to get your data from where it lives today to the tools where you want to use it. 

Traditionally, teams have relied on manual CSV exports/uploads or custom API integrations to connect various systems together. Then, packaged Customer Data Platforms (CDPs), like Segment, became the default solutions as they promised to solve this problem.

Unfortunately, none of these options actually solve the whole problem. CSV exports aren’t scalable, API integrations are inconsistent and prone to failure, and CDPs fail to live up to their promises.

In fact, 90% of marketers say their CDP doesn’t meet their business needs because their rigid data models only let companies solve a portion of their use cases. Additionally, CDPs create a second store of data, introducing security risks by storing data externally and doubling the cost. Even worse, it can take a company anywhere from six to twelve months to implement a CDP before any value is realized.

Marketers need and want access to more data than ever before so they can power personalization at scale. Where your data lives shouldn’t be a blocker when it comes to powering your downstream operational use cases.

In this blog post, you’ll learn how you can use Hightouch to automate existing processes and unlock new use cases you’ve been putting off, all in a matter of hours–not months.

What is a Composable CDP?

A Composable CDP is simply a way for you to move the rich insights you’ve collected about your customers from your data store(s) to your downstream marketing tools. As long as your data is structured in a table with columns and rows, you can move that information anywhere. This could be anything from a data warehouse to a series of Google Sheets. 

While the Composable CDP has different connotations, the most important thing to understand is you only need two components: some customer data and an activation layer to push that data to your destinations. This simplicity means your marketing teams can begin improving personalization and targeting using their best data in any tool immediately. Meanwhile, data and marketing operations teams can focus on continuously improving the breadth, depth, and quality of the data that is available to marketers, knowing that it will be immediately usable.

Why You Need a Composable CDP

Simply put, a Composable CDP is the fastest way to automate your existing processes and unlock new marketing use cases. By adding an activation tool on top of your existing data store(s), your marketing teams immediately have access to all of the data your business has, from basic engagement data like pages viewed to more complex datalike propensity scores or lifetime value models.

Here are a few examples of what this looks like in practice:

• Paid Advertising Targeting: With Hightouch, your marketers can access and curate any set of users from your data store (warehouse, database, spreadsheet, etc.) and then immediately sync those users to any ad platform for targeting. This unlocks much faster time-to-value, optimizations, and time-to-learning for more rapid testing.
• Paid Advertising Conversion Tracking: With Hightouch, your marketing ops teams no longer have to remember to upload CSVs to all of their ad platforms or work with your data team to create and maintain a manual pipeline. Your teams can also achieve higher match rates by easily sending multiple user identifiers and include additional fields like conversion value.
• Marketing Automation Personalization: By adding Hightouch as an activation layer on your existing customer data, your marketing ops and data teams can work more on finding insights and spend less time passing new personalization tokens to platforms, enabling your marketing team to send personalized copy and filter workflows granularly. 
• Suppression: At some point, every marketing ops professional has gotten a Slack message asking why a specific user got an incorrect message. Typically this occurs because a marketer in a downstream tool used incorrect logic when building a suppression audience. A Composable CDP allows you to manage all of your suppression audiences centrally across your teams so that you can deliver better customer experiences.
• Omni-Channel Audience Management: Most marketing teams today manage their audiences in each of their downstream tools. For example, your email team may be sending an invite for a webinar to a list they created in Iterable, while your ads team might be targeting a slightly different list based on a recent CSV file they got from your data team. With a Composable CDP, you can create and manage audiences centrally so your omnichannel campaigns are targeting the most effective list, and you’re not needlessly wasting ad dollars or messaging users with irrelevant offers.
• Lead Enrichment: A core responsibility of marketing ops teams at B2B companies is making sure the sales team has a full picture of every lead that is routed to them. There are always ad-hoc requests for more data or to clean up existing data. With a Composable CDP, you can easily enrich Salesforce or other sales interfaces with additional fields and attributes that you define.
• Alerts: A Composable CDP is a simple way to centralize all alerting for your business with Slack, Microsoft Teams, or email integrations. This can include alerts on errors, customer signals, or anything else important to your business.

These examples are just the tip of the iceberg. The flexible nature of a Composable CDP means you’re not locked into the time constraints or rigid data structures of traditional CDPs.This allows you to get more creative and implement far more complex use cases than the ones listed above.

Benefits of a Composable CDP

A Composable CDP lets you start exactly where you are with the data you have so you can get value immediately without having to undergo a lengthy implementation or a complicated onboarding process. Since a Composable CDP runs on top of your existing data stores, you can start powering your use cases immediately. This modularity provides several added benefits:

• Time-to-Value: You don’t have to implement or onboard another tool. With a Composable CDP, you can remove any added complexity and start getting value out of your data immediately. 
• Flexibility: You can leverage any and all of your data where and when you need it, and you can model it in the way that makes the most sense for your business. This means you’re not locked into the feature limits of a CDP
• Cost: Since you’re just activating your existing data, you don’t need to pay for an additional platform to manage your data, and you’re not forced into paying for features you don’t need.
• Scalability: Most CDP  implementations fail because it’s too difficult to optimize the platform for various use cases. The simplicity of the Composable CDP enables you to tackle one or many use cases with rapid customization for your needs.
• Ownership: A Composable CDP gives you full control and transparency over how your data is managed because it never has to leave your existing cloud environment.
• ROI: Instead of purchasing another tool, you can maximize and build on top of your existing data investments, driving alignment between your data and marketing teams.
• Collaboration: Taking advantage of your existing data investments drives cross-functional alignment between teams because you can ensure that everyone in your organization is working off of the same data and toward the same goals

Getting Started with a Composable CDP

Hightouch doesn’t care about your data maturity. It doesn’t matter where your data is stored. Hightouch lets you harness the power of your data anywhere exactly when you need it. Getting started is really easy once you’ve connected your data source(s) and your destination(s).

• Define your data: Hightouch helps you organize your data across all of your various systems and map the relationships between your data so it’s easily accessible.

• Create an audience: Once your data model is set up, you can easily build audience cohorts using simple and/or statements with granular filters.

Build your data sync: Once your audience is ready, all you have to do is choose a primary key and select which fields you want to sync to your end destination.

• Schedule and run: You can run Hightouch syncs manually or schedule them to run on a set schedule on a minute, hourly, or daily basis.

If you want to start taking action on your data immediately, you can sign up for a free Hightouch workspace or schedule a demo today!