How (and why) to swap data silos for real-time data pipelines

In today’s fast-paced digital world, customers demand personalized experiences from every business they interact with. Attention spans are at an all-time low, while expectations are at an all-time high. This means that brands can no longer delight customers through a personalized greeting tailored only to their basic demographic information. 

Today, in reality, the barrier to entry for modern consumers is anticipation. What your customers are really thinking is: you have to make my next move more convenient than the last. As a brand vying for customer loyalty (and in turn, customer lifetime value), you have to be able to not only predict your customers’ next action, but make it as simple as possible for them to complete it. 

The problem is that most organizations have lots of customer data they can use to engage customers at the right moment of opportunity, but often no means via which to efficiently collect and sort through it, keep it accurate, and leverage it to make immediate decisions. In this case, losing time is losing money. This all-too-familiar challenge is one that is only overcome by deploying a real-time data pipeline.

What is a real-time data pipeline, and why do modern businesses need one?

Real-time, in relation to a data pipeline, tends to be a term that is thrown around and misused these days. At the core, however, it refers to a brand’s ability to collect and analyze data across all engagement channels as it’s generated —and then use that information to make immediate decisions and take action on them. And it’s no small feat considering the rate at which consumers engage, and the sheer breadth of potential channels they can be engaging on.

Globally, the market size of data pipeline tools is expected to reach $19 billion by 2028: hitting an annual growth rate of nearly 20%. These strategic investments are being made for a reason, and the budget organizations are pouring into data pipeline tools stands to reap major returns. But unfortunately, that won’t be the case for every data pipeline tooling investment.

“To build real-time data pipelines, we need infrastructure and technologies that accommodate ultra-fast data capture and processing. We’ll need 1) in-memory data storage for high-speed ingest, 2) distributed architecture for horizontal scalability, and 3) queryable pipelines for instant, interactive data exploration. [That’s how you make the move] from data silos to real-time data pipelines.”

Without the right approach to building real-time pipelines, your investment risks being squandered — or worse — costing even more to address both existing and unforeseen challenges. 

This is where Lytics CDP comes in. For well over a decade, Lytics has helped the world’s most customer-centric brands aggregate data from disparate sources, resolve those interactions into unified customer profiles, apply ML to understand behavioral trends better, and within milliseconds redistribute this insight-rich view of a customer back the marketing tools responsible for creating experiences. 

That said, it’s easy to paint a picture filled with marketing fluff. Let’s walk through a simple example of how Lytics can elevate your brand, unlike any other CDP. 

The benefits of a real-time data pipeline 

But improving individual experiences is just the tip of the iceberg. A real-time data pipeline powered by Lytics has wide-reaching benefits. We’ve narrowed it down to the top 7 that are particularly key to your brand’s success:

1. Customer 360 – Hands down, the most crucial time to work with low-latency data is when a customer is in the loop. Furthermore, quality customer support is impossible if you don’t know what customers do and don’t care about.
2. Marketing – Research from Gartner has shown that real-time data and interactions can mean 2-10x more efficacy in marketing.
3. Machine Learning – ML is used for tons of applications to predict an outcome given observations. Effective predictions require recent data. Imagine trying to predict online user behavior without a full and up-to-date catalog of interactions.
4. Analytics & monitoring – Most analytics use cases don’t require real-time, but some do. Monitoring absolutely does, and most user-based analytics are greatly enhanced with fresh data. It’s even more important when you start thinking about taking action on that data.
5. Fraud – For obvious reasons, you need to detect and react to fraud synchronously, and be able to act and react immediately at the sign of risk.
6. When cost matters – Continuous processing done well means that any event is processed exactly once, yielding vastly lower costs versus reprocessing the world at a cadence. There are techniques for incremental processing using batch systems, but they are notoriously difficult to implement.
7. Impact on your systems – Change data capture has become one of the most important means of enabling analytics from production systems. It offers minimal impact analytics on your production databases without impacting them by using the write-ahead-log.

Lytics’ difference-maker? Affinity- and intent-based marketing

What does real-time data in action look like?

Let’s say a customer visits a brand’s website and begins browsing your product catalog but hasn’t yet made a purchase. Every CDP can monitor these interactions and report on basic details such as what was clicked or what URL was visited, but that will only get you so far. To anticipate, you must truly understand why that content is being consumed. What words are holding a user’s attention? What imagery is catching their eye? 

Out of the box, Lytics deploys a proprietary content affinity engine that is unmatched in the industry. Our affinity engine analyzes the content being consumed, translates that into topics, and then associates topic affinities with each consumer profile individually, all in real time.

This means that as the user continues to browse your product catalog, Lytics will predict and deliver those predictions back to your website to continually tailor the experience based on the growing set of behavioral knowledge. Through a customer’s eyes, the experience no longer feels like a brand is trying to personalize. Instead, it feels second nature. Like the products and information were actually created just for them. The information they seek is naturally right in front of them, and the entire experience is friction-free, which leads to more conversions.

From day one, Lytics has built our business around making it easy to solve real-time data challenges. Our composable approach means you can build on the foundations you’ve already invested in. Our team of solutions experts means you always have a guide and strategic partner, while our platform ensures the investments you make today will continue to pay dividends as the market and demand evolve.