Zip achieves high-precision targeting through unified customer data

Zip is a global “buy now, pay later” company that helps millions of consumers access fair, flexible, and transparent payment options. Zip integrates with thousands of merchant partners including Amazon, Best Buy, eBay, and Uber to deliver a better way for customers to pay.

The challenge: Delivering consistent, targeted customer experiences

As a B2C business, Zip generates a lot of data about their customers through marketing, product engagement, purchase history. However, unifying that customer data was one of the company’s biggest challenges. Zip’s growth team was already segmenting audiences in Braze, their CRM tool, but they weren’t able to use those audiences to serve up personalized offers in the Zip app. They didn’t have a way to deliver unified experiences through Braze and in-app messaging.

Additionally, Zip’s merchant customers requested more granular targeting that they weren’t able to provide. For example, merchants wanted to run cashback offers but only to granular segments of customers.

The solution: A reliable data stack built on Fivetran, dbt, Census, and Snowflake

As Zip’s team was evaluating data solutions, their top priorities were seamless integration, cost scalability, and real business use cases.

Zip built out a reliable data stack with Fivetran, dbt, Census (a Fivetran company), Snowflake, and Snowplow. One of the biggest benefits for Zip was that each of these tools were the best-of-breed in their domain, while having tight integrations with each other.

Data movement: Fivetran

Zip needed a solution for third-party data ingestion. They didn’t want their engineers spending time wrangling third-party data APIs and wanted to create a central data warehouse where they could create standard models in dbt for third-party data sets where possible. They evaluated a few options in this space, but Fivetran came out on top. Fivetran gave Zip coverage for all their third-party integrations, thorough documentation of data structures and pre-packaged dbt transform availability.

Event collection: Snowplow

With millions of customers, Zip’s previous stack was unable to deal with their sheer volume of raw events. Snowplow appealed to the data team because it delivered the performance and scalability required to handle high event throughput, while remaining open source, flexible, and free from SaaS cost tied to events per month. Zip’s data team emphasized that they needed a solution that wouldn’t force them to limit event tracking due to cost and would allow them to retain full first-party ownership of their data.

Data warehouse: Snowflake Data Cloud

As compute and storage are the core of the modern data stack, choosing a data warehouse was Zip’s most critical decision. They evaluated multiple solutions extensively and ultimately decided on the Snowflake Data Cloud. Zip’s data team has been very satisfied with its ease of use, performance, and seamless integration with dbt.

Data transformation: dbt

To support scalable, future-proof data modeling, the team required a better way to manage business logic and transformations. Dependency management and documentation were both significant pain points of their previous transformation stack. They chose dbt and haven’t looked back, with 1,000+ models in production after their initial 18 months. The cloud-based integrated development environment (IDE) has been a game changer, and they’re also diving deep into the power of macros and incremental models.

Data activation: Census (a Fivetran company)

From a technical perspective, the team’s key requirements for their data activation tool were:

• Sub-3-hour refreshes for more than 4 million Braze records
• Incremental updates that modify only changed fields, ensuring cost efficiency given Braze’s per-data-point pricing model
• Friendly UI to empower product and marketing teams to control what data syncs where

With all of their data centralized in Snowflake, Census helped them build audiences to push into their marketing platforms that were kept up-to-date with scheduled syncs.

“This is the first time we’ve been able to have one unified audience that we sync from Census. We’re more confident in the messages and the offers we provide because we can get more granular with who we’re targeting and what we’re saying to them.”
— Bianca El-Jalkh, Growth PM, Shop & Rewards at Zip

The growth team uses Census’ Audience Hub, a visual audience builder, to segment customers then sync those audiences to all their marketing tools. The simple point-and-click UI makes it easy for non-technical users to activate customer data without a single line of code.

Better access to data also made Zip’s segmentation more granular and powerful. Zip can now offer detailed user audiences to their merchant customers, making their payment platform more robust and driving higher user engagement with targeted offers.

To enable self-service data modeling for activation, Zip’s data team leverages Census Datasets, a simple way to define trusted models in the warehouse, ensure data governance, and expose important data for business action.

“Census Datasets are game-changing when it comes to enabling non-technical people to create segments that would normally need complex joins across a large number of data sources.”
— Moss Pauly, Sr. Product Manager at Zip

The impact: Turning unified data into faster decisions and better customer experiences

• Scalable, high-performance data architecture: Fivetran, Snowflake, and Snowplow enable Zip to manage massive event volumes and keep data up-to-date and reliable without compromising performance or cost control.
• Single source of truth: Ingesting first-party and third-party data with Fivetran and transforming it with dbt provides a centralized repository to power all business operations.
• Self-service data access: By implementing Census, Zip empowered the marketing team with full access to all their customer 360 data in Snowflake, allowing them to build and sync audiences independently, reducing reliance on engineering, and accelerating campaign execution.  
• Consistent, personalized customer experiences: Unified audiences ensure customers receive the same targeted offers across Braze and the Zip app, improving engagement and messaging.

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