Maximize the value of your first-party data, no IT required
Why is first-party data more critical than ever for modern marketers, and what’s getting in their way?
Shaun Memon: First-party data is at the core of modern marketing. It’s accurate, privacy-compliant, and reflects real customer behavior. But for many teams, using that data effectively is still a challenge. It’s often locked away in disparate systems, accessible only through complex ETL processes and dependent on IT to move or transform. That creates delays and limits marketers’ ability to respond in the moment.
Adding to the challenge, many modern customer data platforms and customer experience solutions require that customer data be moved into the vendor’s cloud environment for analysis and segmentation. While this might appear simple on the surface, the backend reality is quite different: It introduces costly, complex ETL pipelines managed by IT. Adding new data sources becomes slower and harder, and marketers face increased lag times when trying to adapt to real-world changes.
More importantly, this model creates yet another data silo that needs be governed, maintained and reconciled with the organization’s broader enterprise data strategy. For organizations moving toward modern cloud data lakehouses with zero-copy architecture and write-on-change architecture, this kind of duplication and detachment from core data platforms adds unnecessary risk and overhead.
Instead, marketers should aim to access data in place, aligned with enterprise IT architecture, to enable fast activation without creating a parallel system that adds friction.
How can marketers activate first-party data without relying on IT or complex ETL processes?
Memon: Marketers can easily do this using SAS® Customer Intelligence 360, along with its companion real-time decisioning engine, SAS Intelligent Decisioning. This combination is built to access data directly where it resides, whether on-site or in cloud-based environments. Its hybrid architecture allows marketers to activate and segment customers using live data from multiple sources, without requiring that data to be copied or moved into the vendor’s platform.
This approach helps organizations align with enterprise IT strategies and maintain privacy compliance. Instead of replicating entire data sets, all segmentation logic, calculated fields and decision rules can be executed at the enterprise data layer, keeping processing close to the source and minimizing overhead. Only the customer identifiers needed to associate an individual with a given segment are sent to the SAS Customer Intelligence 360 cloud.
In cases where real-time personalization is required, such as personalizing a web session, select attributes may be temporarily loaded into the software for faster access. There are controls to ensure privacy compliance, including one-time, read-only usage of personalization fields and the ability to store data as transient files that are automatically deleted after use. This balance gives marketers the speed and agility they need, while keeping data movement minimal, secure and compliant.
How quickly can marketers go from data to audience? Would it be possible in as little as 20 minutes?
Memon:Â The short answer is yes when using SAS Customer Intelligence 360, which was built with speed and simplicity in mind. The audience builder uses a visual interface with drag-and-drop logic, so marketers can quickly define who they want to reach using behavioral, transactional or demographic filters without writing a single line of code.
Because it works directly off real-time data where it already exists, without the need for it to be shifted into the software’s platform, there’s no waiting for data to be refreshed or synced. Audiences can be created, tested and activated within a single working session.
What makes the data abstraction layer and UI in SAS Customer Intelligence 360 more accessible to nontechnical users?
Memon: A key reason it’s so accessible to nontechnical users is due to information maps. Typically, working with enterprise databases requires familiarity with cryptic field names and complex schema structures – something most marketers shouldn’t need to navigate.
Information maps solve this by abstracting away the underlying database structure. They present meaningful, marketer-friendly names for data attributes and organize them into logical folders organized by marketing relevance rather than technical structures. For example, attributes related to customer behavior, preferences or transactions can be grouped together in ways that make sense for campaign planning and segmentation, even if they live in different places in the source system.
This abstraction helps marketers focus on what matters – defining segments and triggering experiences – without worrying about how or where the data is stored. It also supports multiple audience levels and use cases, including individual and household-level segmentation, which can be mapped and surfaced distinctly within the interface.
The audiences module in SAS Customer Intelligence 360 builds on this by providing direct, no-code access to cloud-based databases and real-time data sources. Marketers can quickly explore, define and activate segments, all within a single UI that’s fast and easy to use.
How is first-party data turned into orchestrated, personalized experiences across channels in real time?
Memon: We already talked about how the software’s drag-and-drop interface makes audience creation simple and intuitive, but the real strength lies in what happens next. Once those audiences are built, marketers can immediately put them to work across outbound and inbound use cases.
Marketers can activate those audiences directly in multiple channels for batch campaigns or use them in real-time, inbound personalization without reconfiguring audiences across separate systems. This eliminates redundant work and ensures consistency in how segments are defined and executed.
There’s no need for manual exports or system handoffs. Marketers can define the audience and personalization fields they need and apply them directly to real-time experiences.
These audiences and offers are activated across channels through the software’s shared data model. This ensures that personalization is consistent, journeys are coordinated, and results are measurable across every touch point.
Since everything happens from a single UI, teams have a centralized space to manage segmentation, activation and orchestration. These audiences can also be embedded directly into customer journeys, giving marketers greater control over customer experience design. And with new enhancements to journey capabilities in SAS Customer Intelligence 360 on the way, including tighter integration with audiences and expanded orchestration capabilities, this workflow will become even more powerful.
Looking for more information about the challenges and opportunities marketers face on their modernization journey?
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