If you’re looking for a hybrid customer data platform (CDP) that gives you some flexibility with your customer data, ActionIQ is probably on your list. However, are there better alternatives?
This article will cover:
- What is ActionIQ?
- How does ActionIQ work?
- Pros and cons of ActionIQ
- What are the alternatives to ActionIQ?
What is ActionIQ?
ActionIQ is a hybrid CDP that assists you in collecting and unifying your customer data into a single profile and then leveraging the data to power personalized marketing campaigns. To cater to the industry changes, where more companies are moving to a composable approach, ActionIQ rebranded to a hybrid CDP, offering the capabilities of traditional CDPs with integration features with your data warehouse.
How Does ActionIQ Work?
ActionIQ can help you with your business use cases by giving you tools for data collection, identity resolution, audience segmentation, and activation.
- Data Collection: ActionIQ supports real-time and batch-based pipelines, allowing you to capture behavioral data across web and mobile devices and through API integrations.
- Data Storage: The default for storing data is within ActionIQ infrastructure, just like traditional CDPs. However, you can choose a hybrid approach that leverages ActionIQ's data storage and your existing cloud infrastructure, or you can go completely warehouse-only.
- Identity Resolution: ActionIQ provides three identity resolution offerings: IdentityPlus, Identity Connect, and Identity Edge.
- Audience Management: ActionIQ offers a no-code audience builder where you can create personalized journeys and triggers, build lookalike audiences, and predict customers' behavior.
- Activation: There are two categories for real-time capabilities: Profile API and Personalization. Profile API lets you pull from any system in milliseconds, and Personalization lets you enroll audiences or users in triggers or journeys as they take action on your website. ActionIQ’s warehouse-only architecture provides basic support for Reverse ETL, sending audiences to your marketing tools.
- AI: CXAI is ActionIQ's way of enabling you to leverage AI to improve the customer experience by building audiences through having a conversation and using AI to power recommendations.
Pros and Cons of ActionIQ
Here is a quick summary of ActionIQ's pros and cons to help you decide if it’s right for you.
Pros
ActionIQ is a more flexible than a traditional CDP because of its warehouse compatibility. It also provides an extensive solution for identity resolution with three options that perfectly cater to your needs. To help power your marketing use cases, the no-code audience builder allows your marketing team to build the audience they need for their personalized campaigns.
Cons
If you wanted your engineers to look deeper into ActionIQ before buying, it's impossible, as they've locked their documentation to paying customers. Implementing ActionIQ can be lengthy because of the required technical setup. And there are many times when you have to depend on ActionIQ engineers to help with things like updating schema and setting up new integrations, which removes the self-serve aspect you want in a CDP.
What are the Alternatives to ActionIQ?
Hightouch
Hightouch is a composable CDP that sits on top of your data warehouse and gives you access to 200+ destinations to sync that data to power your business use cases. The platform offers multiple self-serve options, such as the no-code audience builder and identity resolution solution, so you can empower yourself and fully control your outcomes.
RudderStack
RudderStack is an open-source CDP specializing in event tracking, managing ETL pipelines, and building audience cohorts. Initially a low-cost alternative to Segment, it has been repositioned as a warehouse-first CDP designed for technical users who manage and activate customer data in warehouses. Unlike traditional CDPs, it focuses on customer data infrastructure over marketing-friendly features.
Simon Data
Simon Data is a CDP built on top of Snowflake, providing a full suite of CDP solutions to help marketers build audiences and sync them into their downstream tools. Over the years, it transitioned into an enterprise CDP, focusing on messaging and engagement. The platform features a drag-and-drop journey builder for orchestrating customer experiences and can enrich your customer profiles with additional data points like hashed email addresses and mobile ad IDs.
Conclusion
ActionIQ is the next step that most CDPs follow, providing warehouse-native solutions that allow you to access your customer data. However, ActionIQ never started as a fully warehouse-native and now involves them re-architecting their solution, which will inevitably create technical debt.
A composable CDP like Hightouch was built from the ground up to run on the data warehouse and provide you with access to all your customer data with no problems. You can leverage your existing data models rather than having to configure them within a hybrid, which lowers time to value. If you're interested in learning more about Hightouch, book a demo with one of our solution engineers.
