Twilio debuts Linked Audiences & Data Graph for Segment CDP

Twilio has unveiled two new product features, Linked Audiences and the Segment Data Graph, to enhance the interoperability of Twilio Segment with data warehouses. These features are designed to facilitate businesses that rely on data warehouses for customer data storage, providing a unified, real-time view of their customers.

The new features are set to empower technical marketers by merging the benefits of real-time data from customer data platforms (CDPs) with comprehensive data warehouse datasets, which are traditionally difficult to access. According to Thomas Wyatt, President at Twilio Segment, these advancements bring critical customer data to life and make every customer touchpoint actionable, akin to turning an analog map into a real-time GPS system.

Data warehouses and lakehouses, often used for analytics, are now becoming essential for operational activities such as predictive AI due to their extensive data storage capacities. Integrating these platforms with Twilio Segment's CDP is increasingly popular, with an impressive 1 trillion rows of data being synced to data warehouses monthly. Collaboration with industry leaders like Snowflake and Databricks underscores the importance of CDP integrations for advancing customer capabilities.

Combining real-time insights from the CDP with comprehensive relational data from the warehouse transforms these static repositories into dynamic operational hubs. This enhanced interoperability enables businesses to convert disparate data points into complete, identity-resolved profiles, improving customer understanding and engagement. In the highly competitive AI-driven landscape, immediate data-driven interactions are crucial for enhancing customer loyalty and marketing return on investment.

Linked Audiences is an intuitive audience-building tool that allows both B2B and B2C marketers to leverage real-time data from Segment CDP and batch data from data warehouses. Marketers can do this without writing a single line of SQL, ensuring access to a more complete and precise view of customer interactions. This leads to more accurate targeting and improved ROI. By enabling marketers to query and segment data directly within their data warehouse through a no-code interface, Linked Audiences speeds up responses to market changes, significantly enhancing marketing agility and effectiveness.

The tool bridges the gap between real-time operational data and historical data stored in data warehouses, which facilitates a dynamic information exchange and streamlines workflows. Businesses like LegalZoom and Mural can fully leverage their data architectures, ensuring data is actively used to drive personalised customer interactions and stronger business outcomes.

At the core of this innovation is the Segment Data Graph, a sophisticated framework that turns data warehouses from static repositories into dynamic engines that enhance business intelligence. It enables data teams to dynamically define and manage relationships between datasets, ensuring a comprehensive view of customer data essential for effective decision-making. Companies can create detailed audience segments and use this data for advanced analytics, advertising technology, and marketing automation.

This new development is seen as a significant step forward in the collaboration between Twilio Segment and Databricks. The enhanced interoperability enriches Databricks' analytics and machine learning capabilities, empowering customers to integrate sophisticated analytics into their marketing workflows for data-driven business outcomes. Similarly, Snowflake's collaboration with Twilio Segment amplifies the value within the Data Cloud ecosystem, enabling marketers to effectively activate platform data in real-time at scale, ultimately improving customer engagement and business operations.

LegalZoom's VP of Engineering, Timothy Hobson, highlighted the benefits of Linked Audiences in breaking down silos across customer profiles and speeding up audience creation, which helps deliver daily customer experiences. Analyst Mila D'Antonio from Omdia emphasised the importance of unified customer data in meeting high customer expectations and delivering exceptional experiences through proactive communication and hyper-personalisation.