Twilio Segment, the world’s #1 Customer Data Platform (CDP), announced the launch of Journeys, a new product built on the Segment CDP that allows marketers to easily build sophisticated customer journeys and orchestrate personalization at scale, through every channel, and across their entire customer experience stack. A customer journey is the entire experience a customer has while interacting with a brand, over time, and across channels. Adding the capability to design that journey on top of Segment’s best-in-class first-party data foundation is Twilio’s next step in building the leading Customer Engagement Platform.

“Today’s customer journey applications are off-the-shelf products, built on legacy SaaS platforms that cannot deliver the flexibility, scale, or breadth needed to power world-class customer experiences in the digital era,” said Peter Reinhardt, CEO of Twilio Segment. “Built on Twilio Segment’s Customer Data Platform, Journeys takes a new approach that gives businesses the ability to quickly and easily build highly personalized customer journeys based on the most trustworthy and up-to-date customer data possible.”

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“Twilio Segment provides companies with the best data, and we believe the best data wins”

The Limitations of Current Journey Builders

As the world sheltered in place during the pandemic, businesses underwent a great digital acceleration, dramatically speeding up their digital transformation roadmaps so they could serve customers online. Consumers quickly adapted to these new digital interactions, and now their expectations for personalized, relevant interactions with brands are higher than ever.

The stakes could not be higher. According to Twilio Segment’s recent State of Personalization Report, 85% of businesses believe they are offering personalized experiences, but only 60% of consumers think brands are actually providing them. Failing to provide highly personalized experiences has consequences well beyond inefficient marketing spend, such as a loss in customer loyalty and market share.

Part of the challenge in meeting these expectations is that companies are often hampered by ineffective customer journey building tools that are built on incomplete or inaccurate data. Without accurate, up-to-date data, brands have significant blind spots while engaging with customers, building experiences based on limited information and only on a few channels.

Today’s journey builders focus on owned marketing channels over omnichannel experiences; one-way messages rather than continuous conversations; and short-term campaigns instead of long-term engagement. This not only leads to siloed workstreams and inefficient marketing spend, but it also leads to a loss of customers, who are left with poor experiences thanks to generic or inconsistent messaging and irrelevant and annoying offers.

These problems are only exacerbated by the complex, growing customer experience stacks currently required today to deliver great customer experiences. Unifying all customer channels, from email to support, advertising to analytics, is crucial for companies to deliver a truly omnichannel, differentiated experience over competitors.

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Introducing Journeys

Almost half of organizations (43%) say getting accurate customer data for personalization is a challenge for them. Journeys solves this issue. Unlike current journey builders on the market, Journeys is built on top of Twilio Segment, meaning customer journeys are built on clean, real-time first-party data from dozens of customer touchpoints. This gives companies confidence and control over all of their customer interactions.

“Twilio Segment provides companies with the best data, and we believe the best data wins,” said Reinhardt.

With Journeys, Segment users can orchestrate highly sophisticated customer journeys to deliver meaningful personalization campaigns on any channel, at scale, and across 300+ applications with just a few clicks. This delivers a consistent experience across all channels that evolves based on a customer’s actions, preferences, and feedback.

The new product:

• Empowers marketers to deliver personalization at scale across all channels: With Journeys, marketers can quickly and easily launch complex multi-step campaigns across any channel, including email, advertising, in-app, and SMS.
• Saves precious time, resources and marketing spend: Since Journeys is built on highly accurate first-party data, marketers have a clear understanding of who is most likely to convert, enabling them to optimize channel outreach accordingly.
• Increases customer satisfaction and retention: Journeys enables marketers to boost conversion rates, lower cart abandonment, and improve customer win-back. Its data-first approach also helps to drive customer satisfaction, retention, and lifetime value.

For example, an athletic retailer could deliver highly intelligent customer engagement based on a user’s activity across all brands, devices, and channels. Powered by clean, complete, and accurate first-party data, the retailer could use the Segment CDP to target its customers across multiple channels with specific, tailored discounts or product recommendations based on data such as number of miles run. For instance, they could execute a sneaker campaign for users reaching 100 logged miles in their fitness app, delivering a custom discount via email and ads to returning customers, and product recommendations via email to new customers. They could also incorporate customer journey insights into their support center, empowering agents to cross-sell relevant products and develop meaningful customer relationships.

“With Journeys, our marketing and advertising teams were able to map out a meaningful, high impact plan for customers that is truly individualized and tailored for each one of our customers, which majorly improved our ad campaign effectiveness,” said Grayson Bagwell, Director of Business Development and E-Commerce at Rugs.com. “Journeys improved our return on ad spend and allowed us to reinvest part of our budget into other high growth initiatives. This made a huge impact on the business and helped us grow our revenue 400% year-over-year.”

“Journeys makes what we thought was impossible now feel possible, removing the frustration our marketing teams previously felt with personalized outreach. As my team has learned about the product, we’ve been surprised by how quickly and easily stakeholders have been able to orchestrate advanced customer interactions with complex audiences,” said Josh Rab, Vice President of GTM Technology at Intuit. “Ease of use and confidence in our customer data is essential for a business like ours, where a rich, personalized experience is a must-have for our end-to-end customer journey.”