Today’s digital experience marketers want to maintain control over their first-party data to help scale real-time personalization across channels. With a dual-zone approach that combines Amazon Web Services’ data lake infrastructure and Adobe Experience Platform’s activation capabilities, it’s easier than ever for teams to integrate data storage, data processing, and activation platforms.
Customer experience leaders recognize that enterprise marketing technology, also known as martech, must be able to scale their digital personalization capabilities and remain nimble for the future. By adopting a “bring your own data lake” (BYODL) approach on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and integrating it with Adobe Experience Platform (AEP), organizations can leverage AWS' robust data infrastructure while maintaining ownership of their data to deliver personalized digital customer experiences at scale. This approach can help solve a challenge that many of today’s organizations face when attempting to collect, process, and store their first-party data to create a unified customer view, which can then be ready to build audiences and activate omnichannel customer experiences.
The dual-zone approach
A dual-zone approach to customer data platforms (CDPs) can help bridge the all-too-common gap that tends to exist between IT and the business. This strategy not only optimizes workload management, but also clearly defines team roles and responsibilities. It is about finding the perfect balance between what packaged CDPs offer, and what the organization's internal teams can bring to the table—to deliver, manage, and analyze memorable digital customer experiences.
Zone One: BYODL on AWS
To get started, Zone One of a modern data stack architecture can be built on AWS cloud technology. It focuses on entity/identity resolution and data management—and this is where the BYODL concept comes into play. A data lake on AWS allows organizations to store massive amounts of data in a central location, making it readily available to be categorized, processed, analyzed, and consumed by different teams throughout the organization. Since data can be stored as-is, there is no need to convert it to a predefined schema, and organizations no longer need to spend time and resources determining what questions they want to ask of their data beforehand.
AWS’ secure infrastructure can help offer a broad set of scalable, cost-effective services to collect, store, categorize, and analyze data to help business leaders gain meaningful insights. Once data lakes are included, AWS can then help break down data siloes and maximize end-to-end data insights, giving organizations access to the most complete platform for their data.
Zone Two: AEP on AWS
Next, Zone Two can leverage AEP for building audiences, journey orchestration, and campaign activations. AEP is a comprehensive CDP designed to unify customer data across various sources, enabling marketers to deliver personalized digital experiences across all channels, making it a powerful tool for omnichannel customer experience platform activations.
With a set of applications built natively, AEP can help provide best-in-class tools for insights, engagement, audience creation, activation, omnichannel customer journey analysis, and journey optimization. These shared composable services for powering batch and real-time data workflows in multiple applications and channels help marketing leaders deliver the digital experiences that matter most to today’s customers.
Enhanced real-time personalization
By integrating BYODL on AWS with AEP, today’s organizations can achieve enhanced real-time or near-real-time personalization. This integration enables timely data collection from disparate sources and the creation of a single, unified view of the customer. It offers complete insights into digital customer experiences and the impact of their relationships with the organization. By effectively eliminating data siloes within the enterprise, marketing leaders can deliver improved digital customer experiences.
A primary benefit of real-time or near-real-time personalization is the value that it can add to user experiences, keeping customers engaged and making their digital experiences as rewarding as possible. Timely personalization starts with collecting data from disparate data sources in real time and creating a unified customer profile from it. This integration allows marketers to deliver relevant content at the right moment and, ultimately, improve user engagement.
Implementation steps
Implementing an impactful dual-zone approach for digital customer experience personalization involves several key steps.
Case Study: Retail giant boosts conversions
A leading retail company implemented this dual-zone approach, resulting in significant improvements across its marketing efforts. By leveraging real-time data from its AWS data lake and AEP's activation capabilities, the company delivered highly personalized product recommendations and timely offers across web, mobile, and email channels.
The results were impressive: The company saw a 30% increase in email open rates as their messages became more relevant and timelier. Online conversions improved by 25%, driven by personalized product recommendations and optimized customer journeys. Perhaps most importantly, customer retention improved by 40% as the company delivered more value and better experiences throughout the customer lifecycle.
This case study demonstrates the power of combining robust data management with advanced activation capabilities. By having a single source of truth for customer data in their AWS data lake and leveraging AEP's real-time activation features, the retail company created more memorable, personalized interactions at every touchpoint.
Looking ahead
Integrating BYODL on AWS with AEP can offer a potentially powerful solution for marketers seeking to deliver personalized, omnichannel experiences at scale. This approach combines the flexibility and scalability of AWS with the robust activation capabilities of AEP, enabling organizations to maintain control over their data while driving impactful customer engagement. By adopting this dual-zone approach, organizations can break down their data siloes, gain deeper customer insights, and deliver timely, relevant experiences across all channels. The potential results are improved customer satisfaction from elevated and connected digital experiences, increased engagement, and, ultimately, better business outcomes in the long-term.
If you want to learn more about how this dual-zone approach can benefit your digital customer experience platform strategy, feel free to reach out to our professionals any time to discuss our relevant solutions and offerings.
About the authors
Kenneth Marzin is a principal and marketing & customer experience transformation lead at Deloitte Digital. Kenneth has a passion for transforming the way his clients market to their customers. He helps them leverage their customer data so they can engage with customers in a more authentic and personalized way and, ultimately, increase their marketing ROI. Kenneth helps clients create more personalized marketing experiences. This in turn optimizes their marketing and media spend, reduces wasted dollars, and increases marketing conversion.
Shival Kulshreshtha is a madtech principal solutions architect at Deloitte Digital with more than 22 years of IT industry experience in data architecture, data strategies, cloud adoption strategy, data monetization, conversational AI, and more. He is a forward-focused architect with experience in the concepts of end-to-end project planning and implementation, including scope management to activity sequencing, effort and cost estimation, risk analysis, and quality management for businesses and stakeholders.
