Visual Segmentation for the Data Cloud with Census Audience Hub

Leveraging first-party data is a priority for marketing teams, but many companies fail to use their data as a competitive advantage. Marketers find themselves frustrated that they can’t activate personalized customer experiences because their data is fragmented across dozens of systems. 

Marketing teams lack a single view of the customer that empowers dynamic audience targeting and rapid experimentation. According to a BCG study, only 30% of companies are creating customer 360 profiles across channels, and just 1-2% are using data to deliver a full cross-channel experience for their customers.

On the other hand, data teams have to strike a delicate balance between enabling self-service and ensuring governance and security. The Snowflake Data Cloud is the single source of truth for the enterprise and the primary engine for reporting and analytics for all teams, but accessing that customer data often involves a battle between go-to-market and IT teams that results in reduced agility and low autonomy for business teams.

Data activation is the missing link that enables business teams to unlock valuable first-party insights from the Data Cloud. Census has long been a leading reverse ETL tool that helps data teams do more with their data. But empowering technical teams alone isn’t enough. 

That’s why Census collaborated with Snowflake to launch Census Audience Hub—a suite of features purpose-built for marketers to create, explore, and activate dynamic audience segments.

Snowflake’s flexibility and near-zero maintenance combined with Census’s visual segmentation and activation enables marketers to bring the power of the Data Cloud to all of their customer interactions. Say goodbye to siloed data, endless tickets, and manual CSV uploads. 

With direct access to 360-degree customer data in the Data Cloud, marketers can build audiences confidently and quickly, leveraging the full breadth of their data in alignment with governance standards set by the data team.

Audience Hub enables marketers to:

• Power personalized omnichannel campaigns
• Build audiences on top of a complete, single view of the customer
• Unify messaging across every MarTech platform

Plus, audiences and customer attributes will always stay fresh in 160+ SaaS destinations such as Braze, Iterable, HubSpot, Salesforce, and Google Ads. When source data changes, dynamic segments are updated automatically, ensuring that MarTech tools always reflect the latest source of truth.

Activating customer data allows teams to easily personalize real-time engagements and create consistent customer experiences that drive growth. For example, Canva uses Snowflake to hyper-personalize messaging to 125 million monthly users, and Zip uses Snowflake to target granular audiences and unify offers in Braze.

With Snowflake’s modern data-sharing capabilities, organizations can share data back to Snowflake from Braze seamlessly and in near real time, reducing data latency and eliminating the need for multiple copies of data while creating a fluid customer data flow across the marketing stack. 

The core of Audience Hub is the latest version of Census’s no-code audience builder, which enables any user, regardless of technical skill level, to easily create, explore, and manage segments. These segments are powered by real-time data sourced from Snowflake and can be created across multiple business entities; for example, users, companies, orders, and products.

Audience Hub has a marketer-friendly, point-and-click interface with a visual sidebar that displays a full set of data points, including conditions that span related data without having to worry about the technical details of JOINing. To make the power of the Data Cloud even more accessible, advanced users can build complex business logic such as multi-object segmentation, many-to-many relationships, and nested and/or statements. And unlike other segmentation tools, users can view the underlying SQL queries and specify SQL conditions.

Data enrichment: Connect third-party enrichment data directly to your first-party data in Snowflake, then use those attributes to build audiences. Census partners with B2B intelligence companies Clearbit and Apollo.io to bring over 400 million contact and company records into Audience Hub. For even broader data coverage, leverage Snowflake Marketplace, which offers over 1,800 diverse data sets from more than 390 providers (as of January 31, 2023), including transportation, weather, demographic, financial, household data, and more.

Segment inclusions and exclusions: Segment inclusion enables marketers to reuse existing conditions and build on top of them. They can define segments with broader characteristics as a baseline (such as “All Paying Customers”), then drill down by adding further targeting conditions. Additionally, segment exclusion helps marketers avoid specific audiences, like removing opted-out users or excluding VIP customers from a first-timer discount campaign.

Many-to-many relationships: Without a single line of code, users can segment across business entities with many-to-many relationships, such as “users and products” or “companies and workspaces.” Marketers can now target extremely granular audiences across complex and interrelated data sets, without having to worry about JOINing. 

Quick syncs: Streamline audience activation from Snowflake to all your marketing and advertising tools. As seen in the animation below, you can sync any audience to multiple destinations with just one click, saving time and reducing manual work.

Warehouse writeback: To give marketers and data teams more visibility into how audiences change over time, segment membership is now tracked on a user-by-user and sync-by-sync basis. These detailed logs are combined with all your other data in Snowflake to measure performance of campaigns and individual segments. Easily get a bird’s-eye view of which users are entering and exiting any particular audience.

Segment size tracking: One of the most important indicators of segment health is size. Audience Hub immediately recalculates audience size as users build segments, and also tracks how segment size changes over time. 

Audience comparisons: Marketers use Census to build and activate customer audiences across multiple destinations like Facebook, Braze, TikTok, and Google. Audience comparisons help teams avoid targeting customers with multiple campaigns. Marketers can compare new audiences to existing ones within Census, ensuring that their audiences are getting the most targeted messages.

Audience Hub permissions: To help marketers be more productive, a new marketer-first view only displays the features that matter to them: building segments and syncing data they can trust. When users log in to Audience Hub, they have all the tools they need at their fingertips without being overwhelmed by pages they don’t need.

We believe the future of marketing is the Data Cloud, and the foundation of effective customer engagement is the ability to accurately segment audiences and personalize messages based on real-time, first-party data. Legacy architecture customer data platforms (CDPs) promised an all-in-one solution to collect, unify, and activate customer data. Sadly, they fell short on that promise.

Now, the rise of the Data Cloud and data activation means that companies have access to best-in-class solutions for each component of a CDP. As a result, the Composable CDP has emerged as a solution for marketing teams looking to unify data, and for data-forward companies looking to maximize their existing data investments. 

In the Composable CDP model, data is collected, centralized, and transformed in Snowflake. Census Audience Hub is the activation layer that makes first-party data accessible, enabling marketers to activate the 360-degree customer data that already lives in Snowflake.

More teams now have access to and confidence in their customer data, and marketing and data teams can collaborate more closely than ever before—an essential step toward meeting today’s high standards for personalization. And we’re excited by the potential to change the way marketers work with data. 

Learn more about Audience Hub from Census and explore Snowflake for Marketing Analytics today.