Malwarebytes Accelerates Marketing With Rich Customer Data

Trust is an important watchword for businesses in the cybersecurity space. As a customer, you’d expect your cybersecurity vendor to market to you intelligently — use the data related to you to better create highly personalized messages, and send them at the right time and on the right channels. That’s a key factor for Malwarebytes, a new Blueshift customer that I had the pleasure to speak with at our recent Blueshift Engage event. 

I had a great conversation with Samantha Turner, director of growth marketing operations and automation at Malwarebytes. Here are three learnings that I took away from our discussions.

Malwarebytes’s mission is to bring cyberprotection to everyone — from grandparents to geeks, to small businesses and large enterprises. Even though Malwarebytes markets to different customers using different channels — for example, its sales teams establish high-touch relationships with enterprise customers, while its marketing team engages consumers via email and drives conversions through product trials — Turner said the goal is to connect all customer data together. 

As Turner explained: “There’s a possibility that we have users that are on the consumer side as well as the corporate site. Currently we’re marketing to them differently on different systems and sending them different offers. We want to be able to look at that 360 view of the customer, which will allow us to be more relevant and better marketers.” 

An important step to creating rich customer data is to integrate data that might be in separate data warehouses. Malwarebytes is using Blueshift’s direct integration with Snowflake, which allows businesses to unify data in real time. The result provides marketers with immediate access to a rich source of customer data that in many businesses, are only available to data science teams. 

Of the Snowflake integration, Turner said: “That’s really going to help us utilize the speed of data from our Snowflake platform into the Blueshift platform. It’s going to give us a lot more real time messaging possibilities, updated data, and additional content that we can utilize for and to the customers.”

If rich, connected, and actionable data is the foundation to modern marketing, then AI is the big enabler of it all. AI underpins everything that the Blueshift platform enables marketers to do, because it learns from customer data and from all the cross-channel interactions with customers. As a result, marketers have richer data to drive activities such as predictive segmentation, predictive recommendations, and to deliver connected cross-channel 1:1 campaigns.

Rich and connected customer data is also the foundation for personalization, which has become a high expectation of consumers. According to the McKinsey 2021 personalization report, 76% of consumers get frustrated when companies don’t personalize interactions. Companies that do personalize are rewarded: McKinsey found that customer-first businesses drive 40% more of their revenue from personalization than their slower-growing counterparts. 

Turner said Malwarebytes is seeing first-hand an expectation of personalization from its customers. “People expect us to know who they are, how they’ve engaged with us – or how they haven’t engaged with us – what channels they want to be talked to, when they want to be talked to, including the day of the week and the time of day. For us, utilizing our data is really a balance of what data we want to communicate with users, how we want to utilize that data, and what the best touchpoints are.”

Turner believes effective personalization will enable brands to stand out in their industry and build trust among customers. 

As we mentioned at the beginning, marketers can become much more effective when they’re marketing with rich customer data. For Turner at Malwarebytes, that means understanding which are the best channels to engage customers, right down to day and the hour that customers are most likely to interact. 

Malwarebytes has also been able to use rich data to segment customers and build lookalike models, which allows marketers to apply the same marketing successes to a new set of audiences (as Slickdeals has also done successfully – read the recap of a separate Engage session with Slickdeals). Turner says the result has been the ability to deliver more campaigns and to design more customer journeys. “It’s really allowed us to take our business to the next level,” she said. 

The challenge of modern marketing doesn’t end when marketers have gathered and connected customer data; the challenge is how to take intelligent actions from that data. In our Smart Guide to AI Marketing, we break down the science of AI and how it can help marketers become more effective and more successful. Download the guide to learn more and to hear from more brands that have shifted to marketing with AI.