Think of the most impressive marketing campaign or customer engagement strategy you've come across in the past year. In addition to the brilliant minds at work behind the scenes, customer data is the foundation that powers these meaningful connections between customer and brands. But brands are only able to surprise and delight loyal customers if they know who they are (and also what they find surprising and delightful). Similarly, they're only able to guide new users from onboarding to brand loyalty if they understand what they're trying to do—and what types of onboarding campaigns might help them along their journey.

The problem is four common issues often prevent brands from understanding their customers and delivering exceptional customer experiences.

• Some brands fail to collect the right customer data, such as customer attributes, interests, and activity.

• Other brands may collect these kinds of insights but not put them to use—unfortunately, that's an all too frequent occurrence: More than half of customer data that gets collected sits unused.

• Some brands are unable to get a full picture of their customer data because of disconnected tech stack layers and channel silos.

• Many brands lack north star metrics and KPIs, making it difficult to assess, understand, and optimize the impact of their customer engagement efforts.

To overcome these challenges, brands are building out best-in-class, cloud-based customer engagement tech stacks that make it possible to:

1. Capture key customer signals (altogether in one place)

Marketers need to build out customer engagement stacks that can capture and centralize useful data from a variety of different sources, making it immediately available for key actions like segmentation, triggered message, and deep personalization. Ideally, you want to be able to pull in data from:

• First- and third-party data warehouses and CRMs

• Recommendation engines

• Point-of-sale and loyalty systems

• Product backend platforms

• AdTech platforms

• Customer service platforms

• Internal database systems

• ...and other key elements of your data ecosystem

2. Eliminate channel silos

When data for email marketing lives within an ESP, SMS insights are buried within a text marketing platform, and mobile marketing lives within yet another system, it makes the job of understanding and engaging customers all the more challenging. The best platforms today empower true cross-channel messaging, enabling brands to boost customer lifetime value by 94%.

3. Share data in real-time across all systems included in your stack to optimize the end-to-end customer experience

With systems powered by streaming data, marketers are able to leverage actionable first-party data to curate personalized campaigns and experiences that are relevant in the moment for each individual consumer. Brands with less advanced systems, powered by data that's batched and processed over periods of time, may experience data latency (as opposed to the desired data agility) and broken customer experiences as a result.

4. Understand key performance indicators (KPIs)

Without a clear understanding of customer data, marketing, growth, and engagement teams can—unintentionally—make poor decisions based on the incomplete picture of the customer journey they have. They may be in the dark about what's driving engagement (and churn). That's why today's best marketers have access to the insights that help them create and send more effective campaigns.

Final Thoughts

As consumers increasingly demand relevant, personalized experiences from the brands they patronize, getting your data house in order is moving from a nice-to-have to table stakes.

"Across industries, businesses need to keep pace with shifting customer behaviors and deliver personalized experiences,” says Vince Trotta, Head of Data Marketplace at Snowflake. “Data silos stand in the way of these efforts. Centralizing data from disparate sources and channels in the Data Cloud not only improves operational efficiency, but also unlocks insights to drive growth and deepen customer relationships."

Ready to put forward your best marketing efforts? Learn how an engagement stack built on real-time data can support your brand and how to use Braze and Snowflake in tandem to support true data agility for your company.