If you’ve evaluated a customer data platform (CDP) anytime in the last year, you’ve likely heard that Composable CDPs like Hightouch can activate data directly from your data warehouse. Composable CDPs are gaining traction rapidly, due to massive advantages in security, ownership, and flexibility. The most common (and confusing) objection we hear, however, is “the Composable CDP doesn’t work for real-time.”
This objection is not true, though it has traces of historical accuracy. Data warehouses were originally built to process data in batches and not in real-time. However, with advances in both data warehouse technology and features that we’ve built for our customers, the Composable CDP can absolutely deliver real-time experiences, often with much more elegant, focused solutions.
In this blog, we’ll dive into some common use cases where real-time data matters and how we solve them.
When does real-time data matter?
In short: real-time capabilities matter when you need to reach a customer with an experience immediately (or shortly) after they complete a particular action. What counts as “fast enough” depends entirely on your use case. There’s no universal definition for “real-time;” interpretations of this phrase range anywhere from milliseconds to hourly.
Common low-latency or “real-time” use cases include:
- Trigger-based messaging: Send emails or texts immediately, based on some new transaction or user event. For example, send an order confirmation email immediately after a purchase (should be done within seconds) or kick off an onboarding sequence right when a new user signs up.
- Onsite next-session personalization: Change a user's experience as they browse a website or app based on their attributes or data from prior visits. Strategies could include dynamic product recommendations or customized search results. If you have historical data on a customer, this can be used to create even more relevant experiences. For example, Netflix could pre-load recommended movies to a logged-in user, and these recommendations could be retrieved for each user upon login.
- Onsite same-session personalization: Change a user’s experience as they browse a website or app based on their actions during that visit. For example, a media company could change advertising content, or an ecommerce company could display pricing dynamically based on specific browsing behavior.
- Industry-specific operations: Complete actions that matter for your particular industry. Airlines need to send real-time alerts for gate changes and flight updates. Food delivery companies need to do the same for order updates and to tell customers that drivers have arrived. The exact channels and timing of these actions fully depends on the use cases that matter to you!
No matter what your real-time use case is, it's essential to define the level of personalization and latency required, and make sure your CDP is up to the task.
How Hightouch solves real-time use cases
Since “real-time” use cases are so varied, we’ve built several solutions that can solve anything from sub-second to multiple-minute latencies. With Hightouch, you can trigger personalized messages to your downstream channels, tailor your website and in-app experience to user preferences, and update digital content and offers in real-time.
Real-time solution #1: Trigger personalized marketing across your downstream channels
When users complete actions on your website or mobile app, forward them directly to downstream tools like Iterable or Meta, in less than a second. Depending on your goals, you can also combine these event triggers with enriched warehouse data to create an even more personalized experience across your channels.
Real-time solution #2: Power onsite and in-app personalization based on pre-defined audiences and traits
Capture attention by tailoring your digital experience to user intent and preferences. Use Hightouch to build affinity audiences that are “always-ready” for your website or app to retrieve via API. Whether you want to customize search results, product recommendations, or make a unique landing page, you can use the full power of your customer 360 data to deliver a truly personalized in-app or website experience.
Real-time solution #3: Update content and offers in real-time with same-session personalization
Same session personalization gives marketers an opportunity to respond in real-time to customer behaviors. This user case relies on a parallel architecture (outside of the warehouse) to incrementally compute audiences and aggregations immediately as behavioral events occur. Hightouch merges live behavior data with historical user data in a matter of milliseconds, giving brands even more opportunities to create specific user experiences that drive conversions and make an impact.
When not to use real-time
It’s worth noting that plenty of use cases actually are better served when you don’t solve them in real-time. When you take more time to merge and enrich data in the data warehouse, you can improve quality. For example, you get better match rates (and therefore performance) when syncing audiences and conversion events to ad platforms that have as many correct identifiers and customer attributes as possible. Instead of streaming these conversion events in real-time directly to the ad platforms.Especially for use cases in the paid media realm, completeness, accuracy and auditability is much more valuable than latency!
Ultimately, you should evaluate each of your data use cases to determine which ones actually benefit from real-time processing. We’ve seen that the majority of business use cases don’t need truly real-time solutions and may perform better (or run at a lower expense) with some intentional batch-based processing.
The Composable CDP 🤝 Real-Time
Hightouch is building the Composable Customer Data Platform centered on the data warehouse. We’re thrilled to share these innovations that will make the warehouse more useful, and real-time, than ever.
If you’d like to explore how you can turn your data warehouse into a source of value for your marketing, sales, and operations teams, book a meeting with our solutions team.
