Twilio Segment broadens multichannel marketing capabilities, analytics and other features that will ensure your customer data is AI ready

Twilio Segment broadens multichannel marketing capabilities, analytics and other features that will ensure your customer data is AI ready

This post originally appeared on the Twilio Segment blog.

New native WhatsApp and EU data residency in Twilio Engage unite marketing and data teams around unified customer data to unlock new opportunities for efficient growth.

• Twilio Segment is unlocking a huge number of new multichannel marketing capabilities for customers this quarter with eight general availability releases.
• Build compliant, data-driven personalized experiences for your global customers with Twilio Engage on EU infrastructure.
• Power advanced lifecycle marketing campaigns in Twilio Engage with native MMS & WhatsApp support. Connect to customers on a social advertising powerhouse with TikTok Audiences. Go beyond message-level analytics to understand the complete customer journey with Journey Analytics in Twilio Engage.
• These features enable compliant delivery of powerful personalized experiences on every channel and lay the foundation of clean, consented data that drive AI models and build trust with global consumers.

When it comes to customer data, businesses are caught in a double bind. They’re expected to collect massive amounts of data to target their customers and personalize campaigns, while simultaneously keeping their hands off that same data to respect customer privacy and comply with regulations. As data teams and marketers the world over know, systems that can elegantly solve for consented data collection and omnichannel marketing are few and far between. But that’s exactly what our new releases make possible.

According to the latest State of Personalization Report, 41% of consumers are less likely to shop with a brand if they received an impersonal experience, but 49% don’t trust businesses to keep their personal data secure and use it responsibly.

On top of the privacy challenges, creating personalized journeys across multiple channels is difficult operationally, because every channel has different tools for crafting and delivering messages. Not to mention that now we’re supposed to use AI for everything.

So how does a marketer achieve growth in a fast-moving and privacy-conscious world? It’s a two-part answer.

1. Build off first-party data collected with consent
2. Engage where your customers are

That may sound oversimplified, but we’ll even double down. With Twilio Segment, you get one enterprise-scale customer data platform that provides exactly the modern data infrastructure needed to deliver on both pillars. Segment CDP provides real-time first-party data collection, governance, and regionalized infrastructure to earn customer trust. On that bedrock, Twilio Engage is the multichannel marketing platform where you can build audiences from that data, orchestrate and analyze campaigns, and engage with your customers on all their favorite channels.

Create smiles, not eye-rolls, and deliver engagement that matters to each customer on the channels they like best.

Since we’re just as customer obsessed as our users, we’re continually investing in our platform to introduce new capabilities that let you deliver KPI-smashing results.

Our latest set of features are designed to bring marketing and technical teams together around unified data. They power greater precision, allowing you to target the right customers on the right channels. With a native WhatsApp channel and a TikTok audience integration, you now have direct access to two powerful, relevant channels for cultivating meaningful relationships with your customers. With EU data residency, you can respect consumer privacy and comply with regulations to engage with customers in the world’s largest single market. Combined with our other releases this quarter, Twilio Segment customers have the tools to power the trust, scale, and efficiency that will unlock growth for years to come.

Incidentally, these are exactly the same tools required to make Artificial Intelligence (AI) work. The one thing that ties together every AI acronym you might want to use (ML, DL, NLP, LLM, GPT) is another one we’ve known for years: GIGO - Garbage In, Garbage Out. Your AI will only ever be as good as the data it was trained on. Which is why having a platform that creates a unified source of trustable, consented, first-party customer data is a bit of a secret weapon right about now.

So whether you’re building audiences directly in Engage, or using Reverse ETL to bring them in from an ML model in your data warehouse, you can now leverage the power of first-party customer data to craft personalized experiences that connect with customers and earn their trust.

Precise personalization unlocks growth as your customers recognize that you understand their needs, engage as you reach them on the channels they prefer, and stay loyal as you earn their trust. Our releases this quarter put these capabilities, and more, right in your hands.

• Native WhatsApp: WhatsApp is the most popular messaging app in the world and for many people, if you’re not using it you may as well not be online. Twilio Engage now includes WhatsApp as a native channel that you can use to reach new markets and increase conversions. WhatsApp joins email, SMS/MMS, custom channels, and 400+ integrations built into Twilio Engage so that you can orchestrate and deliver personalized customer journeys on a single, consolidated platform.
• Twilio Engage EU Residency: This month, we’ve made new Twilio Engage features available on our EU infrastructure. If you’re currently using or considering Regional Segment, you can now personalize customer interactions with our native channels such as email, SMS, and WhatsApp directly within Twilio Engage to deepen customer relationships and grow your brand efficiently. For more information on data residency for Twilio Engage Premier, please consult our documentation here.
• Native SMS Enhancement: Few things are more engaging than fun, richer multimedia content. Engage Journeys can now go beyond basic text with rich MMS messages. Images, video, and audio can now be sent directly in Twilio Engage, giving your customer communications the same life as the conversations they have with everyone else they talk to.
• Journey Analytics: Metrics matter. Doubly so when it comes to your complex, multi-channel campaigns. With Journey Analytics, marketers can now understand conversion rates for every step of their Journeys —- and better optimize the experience for end-users.
• Broadcasts: We also know that not every campaign is multi-step, multi-channel, multi-persona. Sometimes you just need to act fast, with a one-off promotion or message. With Broadcasts, you can run “batch and blast” emails and SMS with the same data sophistication as your advanced lifecycle marketing, in the same centralized platform.
• TikTok Audiences: TikTok went from ‘snackable video curiosity’ to ‘must-use ad platform’ in just a few years. With this release, you can send audiences built in Twilio Engage directly to TikTok. Lookalikes, retargeting, exclusion lists — it’s all there, just waiting to improve your targeting and spike your RoAS.
• Segment Organizations: For large enterprises subject to data residency and compliance requirements, it’s now possible to keep multiple Segment workspaces under one roof. Your Organization will provide unified authentication and simple administration of bulk actions, like assigning access or deleting users.
• Auto-hashing sensitive data to Destinations: If you’re operating under HIPAA, there’s nothing more important than keeping control over the personal health data of your customers. Auto-hashing lets you choose PHI and PII to be hashed before it’s sent to a Destination, which is key to compliance for healthcare companies.
• Consent Enforcement for Destinations: Customer consent is at the heart of a privacy-first approach to customer engagement. With Consent Enforcement, you can easily integrate third-party consent management tools, like OneTrust, pass customer consent preferences to Segment and enforce them across Destinations.

Get started with Twilio Engage

Ready to power real-time personalization and drive efficient growth?  Request a demo from one of our experts to see how you can get started today with any of the features listed above.

We can’t wait to see what you build.