Software company Slack is on a mission to make work simpler, more pleasant, and more productive. Millions of users across more than 150 countries use Slack to collaborate with team members, connect other tools and services, and access information.
Marketers at Slack rely on large amounts of data to build custom audiences, manage subscriber consent preferences, and measure campaign performance. Slack turned to Snowflake to implement a modern marketing data stack, reduce data complexity and accelerate business outcomes.
Building a Scalable Marketing Data Infrastructure
Managing a multitude of data sources, data structures, file formats, and APIs from 45+ vendors was operationally burdensome for Slack’s data engineering team. Siloed data made it difficult to achieve a comprehensive view of the customer journey. Creating custom audiences required support from technical staff, which led to delays for marketers, and ultimately hindered the customer experience.
Seeking to empower marketers and reduce administrative effort, Slack rearchitected its marketing data infrastructure with Snowflake. Snowflake’s near-infinite scaling of storage and compute aligned with Slack’s need to ingest and analyze large amounts of marketing and product data from a variety of different sources. “We can just focus on data modeling,” Slack’s Senior Manager Software Engineering (Data), Joohee Yoo, said. Centralizing Slack’s marketing data in Snowflake reduced time-consuming data wrangling and enabled marketers to run campaigns with less assistance from advertising agencies.
Snowflake Secure Data Sharing enabled live data sharing without moving data sets. Controlling data access with Snowflake’s RBAC bolstered Slack’s efforts to ensure marketing security, privacy, and compliance. Standardizing campaign names and marketing attributes with User Defined Functions freed up marketers and data engineers to focus on higher impact work.
Advancing Data-Driven Marketing with Snowflake
Slack relies on Snowflake to support numerous data-driven initiatives that impact marketing performance:
Data governance. Slack’s semi-automated metadata framework powered by Snowflake and Matillion standardizes attributes from multiple systems and diverse data sets to enable scalable data models for a growing number of marketing use cases. For example, Slack consolidated 185 management levels into 10 standardized values in Snowflake, which marketers use to perform enhanced targeting with less effort.
Multi-touch attribution. Combining user, event, and campaign data in Snowflake provides additional context for understanding Slack’s customer journeys across email, web, mobile, and direct sales channels. Reliable customer journey data helps marketers gauge the effectiveness of their campaigns and connect interactions to purchase.
Personalized marketing. Enabling self-service access to firmographic, demographic, and product usage data with Snowflake and visualizing it through Tableau empowers marketers to efficiently create custom audiences for personalized marketing campaigns.
Consent management. Ingesting consent data into Snowflake helps Slack send the right communication to the right people. According to Yoo, “Now we have a single source of truth for user attributes and consent.”
Conversion optimization. Sharing conversion data back into Slack’s marketing systems helps marketers optimize existing campaigns, identify new audiences that are likely to convert, and boost conversion rates.
Data as a Service
Leveraging the Snowflake SQL API will enable near real-time access to marketing data to help Slack’s marketers maximize engagement. “We’re on a long journey, and the next destination involves sharing our data as a service internally at Slack,” Yoo said. Using Slack bots to surface marketing insights directly in the Slack UI—instead of linking to external dashboards—will lead to a more interactive experience for marketers and other users at Slack.
Enhancing Slack’s multi-touch attribution model is also on the roadmap. According to Yoo, “We plan to add additional flexibility so data science and marketing teams can use it with different weights or variables.”
Learn more about Snowflake’s Data Cloud and Slack.
