A data silo is an isolated repository or system that restricts access to data and prevents effective sharing or integration. In marketing, it resembles a customer puzzle whose pieces are scattered across websites, social platforms, email systems, call centers, CRM platforms, departments, and vendors. section 5.0
Silos become strategically dangerous when teams cannot work from the same customer information:
- Separate teams may use conflicting definitions for churn, primary contact information, or suppression criteria. section 4.4.4
- Duplicated customer profiles can become inaccessible, stale, noncompliant, or difficult for data teams to manage. section 4.4.4
- These inconsistencies can produce duplicate or noncompliant campaigns and weaken audience trust. section 4.4.4
The preferred response is a single, shared source of truth: keep customer data in one accessible profile rather than copying partial profiles into multiple tools. When organizational or technical constraints prevent that design, synchronize secondary profiles with a central source and recognize the resulting latency and scaling costs. section 4.4.4
A practical compromise
A travel company maintained a central customer profile in its marketing data warehouse and modeled it to match the email platform’s profile. This hub-and-spoke arrangement met immediate needs, although latency and scaling problems emerged later. section 4.4.4
Table 4.5 Data trust and reliability considerations
| Solution |
Considerations |
| Composable CDPs |
(+) Composable CDPs focus on connecting directly to your central customer profile rather than creating a secondary customer profile. Alerts and monitoring can be delegated to the marketing data lakehouse, which is helpful. |
| Marketing clouds/engagement platforms |
(-) While there are virtualized views, MCs require teams to manage a hosted customer profile, which may add latency and discrepancies compared to a primary customer profile used by analytics teams. |
| Monolithic CDPs |
(-) While there are virtualized views, monolithic CDPs require teams to manage a hosted customer profile, which may add latency and discrepancies compared to a primary customer profile used by analytics teams. |
| In-house builds |
(+) Build solutions often connect directly to the organization’s unified first-party data, which means they work on the same source of truth as analytics teams and other functions at the organization. This is often the deciding factor for companies that choose to build. |
Compare how composable CDPs, marketing clouds, monolithic CDPs, and in-house builds handle primary and hosted customer profiles, latency, and data reliability. section 4.4.4
