Marketing Cloud Audience Builder has allowed marketers to create granular segmented audiences based on behavioral and demographic data. So now it is being retired, the question on everyone’s mind is “what’s next?”.
As with any tool retirement, we need to find a new solution capable of complex segmentation – and we’ve got some options.
I was joined by Anthony Lamot, CEO & Co-Founder of DESelect, for this conversation – and honestly, I couldn’t ask for a better guest on this topic. Anthony cares so much about how marketers segment in Marketing Cloud, which led to founding one of the first apps on the AppExchange for Marketing Cloud.
Were you aware Audience Builder is on the way out? In a recent poll, only around 40% of respondents were, with 60% not knowing that this tool is scheduled for sunset. Whether you’ve known it for a while, or this is news to you, it’s never too early to put a plan in place for the future…
What is Marketing Cloud Audience Builder?
Audience Builder in Marketing Cloud allows marketers to create granular segmented audiences based on behavioral and demographic data.
- User interface: The Audience Builder UI is easier to use than having to leverage SQL queries which makes it a good option for less-technical marketers.
- Data volumes: Audience Builder is a robust solution which can handle large volumes of data, whereas SQL queries often time out.
- Integration: Being fully integrated with Marketing Cloud, Audience Builder allows marketers to segment data across a number of what Audience Builder calls “dimensions”.
Having said this, Audience Builder is not without its sticking points:
- Setup: Its initial setup requires support from Salesforce professional services, which pushes the price point up, and also means effort is needed internally to support the implementation.
- Maintenance: If your data model changes often, you would need third-party support to adapt Audience Builder.
- Database sync: The data is stored in a separate database. There are benefits to this type of database (it’s much faster than other native segmentation options, for segmenting against millions of data points) – however, this syncs with Marketing Cloud every 24 hours, so you may not be leveraging the most fresh data! If you think about certain use cases, like unsubscribes or recent transactional behavior, that becomes a drawback.
More importantly, around 2 years ago, Salesforce announced that Audience Builder will be retired. This means that Salesforce no longer sells Audience Builder to new customers, and are working towards retiring the tool for existing customers. A hard date for when it’s finally being decommissioned has not been communicated.
Who Uses Audience Builder?
Is there a particular size of a company or a type of marketer?
The strong use case for Audience Builder is when you’re doing plenty of outbound activities, and therefore, you have heavy segmentation needs (that’s why audiences are based on a combination of behavioral and demographic data). Marketing Cloud users may be familiar with data views (e.g. opens, clicks) that are gathered in Marketing Cloud, so they are all usable.
This need is seen across various industries. The classic example, for me, is insurance, where there’s cross-sell activities, and similarly in retail, media, other financial services firms and more.
Usually larger teams with larger budgets would justify using Audience Builder. As we mentioned, its initial setup requires support from Salesforce professional services, which pushes the price point up.
Contact Builder vs. Audience Builder
Audience Builder is one tool which can be used to segment Marketing Cloud data. In comparison, Contact Builder is the tool you use to define your data model in Marketing Cloud. It lies at the heart of how data is managed within Marketing Cloud – and unlike Audience Builder, it will remain.
In Contact Builder you can define how a number of data extensions are related. You can also introduce populations, where you structure data in such a way you can use it for your campaigns (a whole topic in itself!).
Audience Builder pulls in a number of defined data extensions that were agreed, and added dimensions (your filter criteria).
Data model attributes act the same as a field and are used in Contact Builder. Attribute groups won’t be affected by the Audience Builder retirement.
How Segmentation Works
On the Audience Builder overview page, you can view the different segments that have already been created. You can see the names and the audience count – the example segment below with 4.5 million contacts in it illustrates the scale that Audience Builder can support.
You can see when it was updated, and when it was published to make it available in the core Marketing Cloud database (which, reflects once again, that this is a separate database).
Once published, the audience data arrives in a data extension, which you can use in a journey, an email send, etc.
Migrating from Audience Builder: What to Expect
The aim of Audience Builder is to create complex, granular segments.
- Complex: You have many data extensions with multiple data relationships, for example, customers with orders, with order lines, with store visits, with agents.
- Granular: You have lots of criteria to filter against, for example, how much in purchase value, how many visits, how many email clicks.
It’s important to remember that Audience Builder uses the data stored in Marketing Cloud. When looking for an alternative, you’ll need a solution that can leverage that data. The alternative options you have are as follows:
- SQL queries: Directly access Marketing Cloud data by manually writing SQL (available to all Marketing Cloud customers). As we mentioned, these are not the most ‘friendly’ to work with:
- SQL in Marketing Cloud has its limitations, only supporting certain functions.
- SQL queries often timeout when querying large volumes of data (after 30 minutes). Some people may know that if you contact Salesforce support, they may be willing to extend the timeout window. However, most Marketing Cloud users end up using it to break up SQL queries.
- Segment as a service: Enlist a consultancy or agency to handle your organization’s new segmentation requirements. Again, this comes at an extra cost and requires effort internally to liaise requirements and manage iterations.
- Custom solution: Build a custom solution either in-house, or enlist a consultancy or agency. As with any custom solution, there’s upkeep to consider and a risk that the solution could break whenever there are changes to the Marketing Cloud platform. It may seem like an attractive solution that you control, however, with that control comes responsibility.
- Salesforce Data Cloud (formerly CDP): Think of it as a data warehouse that can house not just marketing data, but also service, customer experience, sales, etc. – and also merge that data together, known as unification. If you are looking to leverage anonymous data (e.g. website visits by people you don’t necessarily know), that’s a perfect use case for Salesforce Data Cloud.
- There’s a data migration involved.
- The team roles required to operate it may differ/extend across the organization. In theory, a CDP could be operated by marketing – however, in reality, there are business intelligence, data science, and even IT involved.
- AppExchange solution: A turnkey platform, created by a third-party app development company, that’s easy to get-up-and-running with, and can adapt to your needs.
Now, let’s flip this on its head. What should you avoid when deciding on a new solution?
- Data sync: Remember that with Audience Builder, data updates once every 24 hours (so you may not be leveraging the most fresh data!). In terms of getting segmentation when you need it, external teams (e.g. consultancies) may set an SLA – which is the time you should expect for delivering the segment. For example, if you have to wait two days (and where Audience Builder has a 24-hour sync), you don’t want to take steps backwards in terms of your segmentation agility.
- Unreliability: SQL queries often timeout when querying large volumes of data (after 30 minutes). You don’t want this level of uncertainty when creating segments that have a risk of failing.
“We had a client who had switched from Audience Builder to SQL queries, which were timing out. They had monstrous data extensions with dozens of millions of contacts. To manage that challenge, the data extensions and queries were broken up into chunks. We worked with them to first filter out contacts that were relevant to their segment, before applying more logic to break it up. It’s like going from cable to streaming – the legacy cable package (like Audience Builder) is very comprehensive, but it’s expensive and needs maintenance. If you are dependent on technicians to visit (professional services), it becomes less adaptable to your needs.”
– Anthony Lamot, CEO & Co-Founder of DESelect
- Implementation: As Salesforce Professional Services need to set up and configure dimensions with Audience Builder, a plus point would be if your internal team can do the implementation of the new tool themselves.
- Maintenance: You cannot add new dimensions or data extensions in Audience Builder without Salesforce Professional Services. In your organization, do people currently have the skills to run SQL queries? Is there a marketing technology product owner that can handle that process? You will want to bolster your teams so that they can look into the segments that have been built, and talk with the people who are doing the day-to-day segmentation. There may be a lot of opportunities for optimization – perhaps segments are no longer optimal, or the setup was overly complex for the business needs.
- Privacy and compliance: Organizations have to own their data to ensure that they are not at risk of data breaches.
“We’ve seen many organizations migrate towards internalizing marketing operations. On the one hand, that’s due to data privacy. Ten years ago, it was okay to have a marketing agency manage your database – now customers have to own that data, but they also want to own their data.”
– Anthony Lamot, CEO & Co-Founder of DESelect
Internalizing marketing operations is an important point to ‘double-click’ into. It’s all too easy to sit behind a screen and to not see the impact of your marketing.
How’s your database adapting? This tells the story of how the world outside is adapting. And enabling marketers to understand the database, and segment in different ways, gives them a license to experiment and reach subscribers in more effective ways. It’s one step to keeping creative marketers motivated, with autonomy over their work.
Spotlight on the AppExchange
Now, let’s turn the spotlight on the AppExchange, the Salesforce app marketplace to extend products, such as Marketing Cloud. The market leader in the marketing data enablement for Marketing Cloud space is DESelect.
- Offers the strengths of Audience Builder: Ease-of-use, granular segmentation, can handle large data volumes.
- Improvements from Audience Builder: A turnkey platform that’s easy to implement and adapt (you can get up-and-running in one day!).
- Delivers results: Marketers can model data the way they want, without getting distracted from their work. Results from DESelect’s customers include:
- 50% marketing efficiency increase.
- Non-technical marketers get desired segmentations 50% faster, technical marketers save 15% of their time.
- Campaigns have stronger personalization and quicker time-to-market.
“I think people underestimate just how complex segmentation can get ‘under the hood’. For those who know DESelect Segment, there’s a lot of SQL that is running against Marketing Cloud services. Thanks to the great partnership we have with Salesforce, we’re able to use certain API calls that allow us to bypass queues and go faster. We’ve also done a lot of work to make sure that the queries are already optimized.”
– Anthony Lamot, CEO & Co-Founder of DESelect
Summary
Audience Builder in Marketing Cloud allows marketers to create granular segmented audiences based on behavioral and demographic data. Audience Builder has its strengths, with its user friendly UI, ability to handle large volumes of data, and being fully integrated with Marketing Cloud. However, it’s not without sticking points, including the initial setup, difficulty maintaining it in line with changing data models, and a sync to your core Marketing Cloud database that’s restricted to once every 24 hours.
In light of Audience Builder being scheduled for retirement, when looking for an alternative, you need a solution that’s efficient and effective. Think critically about choosing an alternative that will serve you in the long run, especially when hyper-personalization is increasingly important to keep your marketing competitive.
“We have one customer that knows that if it was not for granular, personalization segmentation, they would lose $2 million in revenue. That’s crazy. So that justifies investing, especially when you’ve reached this scale, and you have a dedicated marketing operations team.”
– Anthony Lamot, CEO & Co-Founder of DESelect
Another reason to invest into an Audience Builder alternative (versus going for a ‘free’ alternative), is to avoid team attrition. Marketing leaders are concerned about losing talented people from their teams, often due to friction when using tools that don’t enable them to work at the speed they want, or support them to their full potential as creative marketers. As more organizations opt to internalize their marketing operations, you want everyone to understand how your database is adapting, which tells the story of how the world outside is adapting. Give marketers a license to experiment and reach subscribers in more effective ways.
Finally, consider a tool, like DESelect Segment, where the creators have done the heavy-lifting for you. In terms of the strengths you should replicate from Audience Builder, pitfalls to avoid, and generally meet trends surrounding modern marketing operations, DESelect ticks all the boxes.