How To Get Started With Twilio Segment

How to Get Started With Twilio Segment

If you are running a business big or small, you have customers. And if you have customers, you have data: marketing insights that you can use to improve your customer experience to increase retention and personalize your customer experience. To really make use of all these insights, you need a Customer Data Platform, or CDP.

Enter Twilio Segment. Segment is the leader in CDP because Segment can aggregate and organize first-party customer data from multiple sources - web, mobile, cloud, and more - and ingest that data with a common API. Segment can then send that data to any of Segment's integrated destinations. This can enable personalized marketing using real-time insights, which improves your customer experience across all channels. Segment syncs with hundreds of different data destinations and allows you to provide multiple simultaneous sources using one API.

Why Use Segment

There are a lot of tools on the market to collect business data and give you insight about your customers. But each tool requires that you send that data in a slightly different format, which means that you have to write code to track all of this information for each tool, on each page of an app or website. This can lead to bloated pages and long load times.

Segment eliminates this process by introducing an abstraction layer. You send the data to Segment, and we translate it to send it to any destination. You enable destinations from the catalog in the Segment app, and user data immediately starts flowing into those tools. This allows you to build dynamic user profiles across your data sources with only a single source of tracking, and no redundant code.

Setting Up Twilio Segment

If you've read this far and have data aggregation needs, you might like to give Segment a try. Here's how to get started, with no payment required.

First, you will need to register for a Twilio Segment account. If you are already a Twilio customer, this can be the same as your Twilio login. Segment allows the creation of free trial accounts to get you started. For more information on pricing, check here.

Go through the signup process until you see a Segment dashboard. If Segment asks you to add team members, you can skip this step for now.

Log into Segment using your Segment credentials. Once you are logged in, you might also want to check out Segment's documentation and guides. This documentation has been recently updated to make sure Segment works for you, whether you have a lot of customers or are just getting started with data and analytics.

Segment works on connections, using data Sources and connecting them to Destinations. Let's look at some examples of each of these things in action.

What's a Source?

In Segment, you create a source for each website or app you want to track. Segment recommends creating a Source for each unique source of data (each site, app, or server), though this isn't required. You can also create more than one source for each website or app if you desire.

A Source can:

• Tell you where a user is on your web site or mobile app
• Track what action the user is doing
• Identify that user by their actions and tell you more about their overall behaviors
• Send data in real time flowing to the data sources debugger

You can create new Sources using the button in the workspace view. Each source you create has a write key, which is used to send data to that source. If you want to use front-end data tracking, Segment can create code snippets that will work with your web site and can be pasted directly into the web site header. Those code snippets are easily accessed on your Segment dashboard.

In addition to tracking on the web and front end of your mobile app, Segment can also do server-side tracking. This is the preferred method to decrease page load times for people visiting your site since it requires no extra code on your front end. You can track from .NET, Go, Node.js, and more.

Segment also supports Cloud Sources, which usually require no code from you. Generally, you only need an authorization token to prove that you have the right to that data. You can read more specifics about Cloud Sources in Segment's documentation.

Are you already a Twilio or SendGrid user? Segment can also easily use SendGrid and Twilio as data sources. You can get tracking analytics on email open rates, engagement, SMS and push notifications, and everything that Twilio provides sent directly to Segment and analyzed in combination with other data input sources.

For a full list of Segment library sources, check out our Sources catalog.

What Are Destinations?

Having a source of data, or more than one source, is a good start, but now that data needs somewhere to go.

Destinations are tools or apps you can connect to the data flowing through Segment. Segment supports many categories of destinations, from advertising to marketing, email to customer support, CRM to user testing, and even data warehouses. Some of our most popular destinations are Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Kissmetrics, Customer.io, Intercom, and KeenIO.

Once data has been sent to a Destination, you can better understand that data. You can do analysis on large chunks of data and learn more about your customers in real time.

Segment has three types of Destination connections: Storage, Reverse ETL, and Event Streams. Storage lets you store raw Segment data, enabling analysts to work with the raw information. Reverse ETL (or Extract, Transform, Load) Destinations are business tools or apps that can do additional data processing. You can use Reverse ETL to elevate your marketing campaigns, enrich customer profiles, and make warehouse data accessible to business teams.

Event Streams are a type of data that uses Destination Actions. An action can be triggered by data events, processing data immediately when it arrives. This includes standardizations, transforms, and filtering, removal of duplicate data, and more, which happens automatically when triggers are fired. Actions are easy to set up, and provide a lot of customization.

You can view a complete list of destinations in the Destination Catalog or check out the Destination page in your workspace for a searchable list broken down by category.

What's Next?

This article walked you through the basics of Segment and how you can get started using it, as well as some common use cases for businesses. In future articles, we'll show you how to add multiple data sources and give more specific examples of analytics that Segment can provide. If you want to build something that tells you what your customers need and love, you can get started building with Segment today with a free account. We can't wait to see what insights you'll be able to receive by trying Segment!

Amanda Lange is a .NET Engineer of Technical Content. She is here to teach how to create great things using C# and .NET programming. She can be reached at amlange [ at] twilio.com.