For marketers looking to build a modern, best-of-breed growth stack, Ematic highly recommends looking at Segment as a starting point. While “CDP” or Customer Data Platform has practically become a buzzword recently, the essential need isn’t the actual data platform. It’s simply the data integration and data unification layer that is the foundation of today’s growth stacks.
CDP serves as a single source of truth of your data that enables you to leverage them in real-time for marketing purposes. While the concept is simple, CDP consists of a few components:
Some CDP solutions like Segment offers these three components individually. With Segment’s “Data Connections” product, the dream of using the best tools and leveraging a unified data set across the entire digital ecosystem becomes possible. It is not only an affordable solution, but it can potentially reduce costs overall and fundamentally reduce a fair amount of manual work for your IT team to collect and connect customer data from multiple data sources (e.g., GA/FB pixel/Intercom) using Segment’s unified tracking code.
Once you’ve set up Segment’s “Connections” product, adding or changing components of your growth stack goes from “complex and expensive” to “plug and play” which means whether you’re leveraging 3rd parties or your own team to perform the setup, your costs go down dramatically.
If you’re looking at Mixpanel, Amplitude, Iterable, Braze, Adjust, Appsflyer, or other best of breed marketing technology, integrating Segment first allows you to rapidly develop the entire stack and get your time to value down to an absolute minimum.
We still very much like Tealium as a more full-featured CDP play, but for marketers who aren’t quite ready for that level, consider Segment as an excellent utility play that can completely change the trajectory of your growth stack both now and into the future.
If you are interested in understanding more about Segment, Ematic can help organize a demo and provide consultation. Talk to our buyer’s agent and get yourself a demo!
