If you’re responsible for customer data infrastructure, then the choices you make as a builder have a profound impact on how successful your partners in sales and marketing are. Getting the architecture right means opening up new possibilities for business teams to drive growth and personalization.
And yet, too often there are silos separating goals and processes between technical and marketing teams. The day-to-day concerns for most technical teams are around data quality, security, and compliance, while the marketing team is focused on things like revenue and retention. Failing to bridge these worlds makes life harder because the quality of data directly affects revenue and retention, and the tools for data management directly affect marketing timelines. In short, better data means better results.
The best way to bring together the goals of the two different sides of the business is to combine customer data tools, marketing tools, and a Data Lakehouse, an architecture we call Lakehouse CDP. This combination makes your marketing team’s activities more effective and your job managing infrastructure easier.
There are a number of benefits to this:
Shorter timelines. When marketers need a new data source or destination, it’s easy for engineers to configure without worrying about stability or fidelity.
More reliable data. Marketers access data from the same central location where data engineers work on it, so they have confidence that it’s the freshest version available.
Easier to get campaigns into market. Self-serve tools for business users and a connector library means marketers can move faster without inundating data teams with requests.
Let’s dig into each of these benefits to paint a vivid picture of how your infrastructure decisions can supercharge marketing.
Shorter timelines
With Lakehouse CDP architecture, marketers won’t have to submit nearly as many requests to data teams in order to get their job done, and the requests they do make can get handled much more quickly.
What kinds of things get faster?
Adding new data sources when there’s a new channel
Generating attributes to create better-tailored segments
Pulling segments and audience lists to run campaigns
How much faster? We see speed improvements of 70-85% or more when working with customer data shared between a Lakehouse CDP and a Data Lakehouse.
Here’s why it’s so much faster:
Dedicated tools to validate change orders with built-in testing and version management means fewer errors and less rework
Tools built specifically to manage customer data means fewer custom jobs to build (i.e., no lengthy ETL or reverse ETL processes)
Lakehouse CDP architecture using existing storage eliminates the need for copying data
All together, that’s less tedious work for data teams and less waiting for marketing teams, resulting in time savings and efficiency improvements across the business.
More reliable data
Lakehouse architecture makes it so that marketers are getting the highest quality, most up-to-date customer data.
This is because the marketing team is accessing the data in the same place that the engineering team is working on the data — in other words, it’s all the same data. No incomplete copies and no version control issues.
Then there’s the fact that with the right data unification capabilities, the Lakehouse CDP produces a higher quality data asset with more comprehensive customer profiles (something a Lakehouse or Warehouse doesn’t do on its own). This leads to more accurate analytics and personalization for stronger marketing returns.
By democratizing access to more reliable data, the Lakehouse CDP helps data engineers and marketers collaborate better and banishes the uncomfortable feeling that there are different versions of customer data floating around the company.
Easier to get campaigns into market
A Lakehouse CDP makes it far quicker and less cumbersome to activate customer data and get campaigns live.
A business-user-friendly UI lets marketers self-serve accessing and analyzing customer segments, so that they can move faster and data teams don’t need to pull every customer list.
Pre-built connectors to all of the channels marketers use, like email tools, web personalization tools, and advertising networks, let them simply pick destinations and activate. There’s no need to go through outside intermediaries like onboarders or to wait for engineering to perform extensive routines.
Working with centralized and unified data in the Lakehouse means that marketers can create a single campaign and send it to multiple channels. This lets customers have the same personalized experience no matter where they engage.
Infrastructure matters
It’s understandable if marketers haven’t been most concerned with their customer data infrastructure. On top of their many tasks and targets to worry about, a decade of software vendor claims about data quality and accessibility that technology couldn’t back up might make marketers feel disillusioned with data management tools.
But the Lakehouse CDP concept is architecture that’s worth the whole business paying attention to, not just the engineers. It means marketing teams won’t have to submit so many requests or wait so long for results. Data teams will be able to focus on revenue generation instead of copying data between tools. Match rates go up and personalization gets more accurate.
There have been different versions of customer data infrastructure over the years. By combining data quality with flexibility, the Lakehouse CDP offers the strengths of the previous methods without the drawbacks. It finally makes good on the original promise of Customer Data Platforms: data that’s both accurate and easy to work with.