A Customer Event vs. Cohort-Based Approach to Customer Data
Heap and Freshpaint can automatically track customer actions on your product and site. And both products can send that customer data to messaging and onboarding tools. So what's the difference?
The difference is that Heap only sends cohort-based data to those tools while Freshpaint sends the individual customer events those tools rely on to work fully.
Let's go deeper.
TLDR
- Heap is cohort-based, vs. Freshpaint is event-based.
- You lose a lot of the functionality of messaging & onboarding tools when only sending cohort-based data from Heap.
- Heap's cohort-based approach makes it impossible to create campaigns based on a user's historical actions.
- Heap only updates the cohorts every 4 hours making it impossible to create campaigns that rely on real-time communication.
- Product leaders and marketers want to live in one platform. Heap forces context switching between two.
Messaging & Onboarding Tools Rely On Event Data To Work
Most messaging and onboarding tools rely on event-based data to realize their total value. Sending only cohort-based data can impede their full capabilities.
For example, with a cohort-only approach, you only get a single point-in-time view of a customer. You get zero visibility into a user's history, which seriously limits your ability to message them intelligently based on the sum of their actions over time.
Heap's cohort-based approach will negatively impact your ability to access all the capabilities of most messaging and onboarding tools.
Freshpaint was built from the ground up to send every element of customer data and interaction to messaging and onboarding tools. Customers have the flexibility to create the exact campaign they want without limitations.
Real-Time Customer Data
One of the holy grails of driving user actions is just-in-time messaging. And to send the right message to the right user at the right time, you need a real-time data loop.
Remember that Heap is cohort-based, and they only update the data in the cohort every 4 hours.
Freshpaint updates customer data in real-time. Freshpaint can support messaging and onboarding campaigns that rely on just-in-time interaction with users. Some examples:
- Imagine trying to individualize onboarding for a user in the product right now based on their actions. Because Heap can't handle real-time updates, the user is likely out of the product before the campaign can run.
- Imagine trying to message someone immediately after a conversion event. With Heap, that message could show up 4 hours later. That message could lose all of its thunder and relevance 4 hours later.
Users Want To Build Their Campaigns In One Place
As a marketing leader, I hate switching back and forth between products to build a campaign. When setting up my audience and messaging, I want to live on one platform.
Heap requires you to build your fixed cohorts in Heap, then go back to your messaging and onboarding tool to build the rest of the campaign. Want to make changes to your audience? You have to go back to Heap to build another cohort. Nobody wants to do that.
Freshpaint sends the raw customer data to your messaging and onboarding tool, so you can build the entire campaign, including which events and attributes trigger it, without bouncing back and forth.
Freshpaint's Data Architecture Was Designed To Power Messaging & Onboarding Tools
Heap's data architecture wasn't designed to power third-party tools. Heap created Heap to solve the product analytics challenge, not to power messaging and activation tools.
The sole purpose of Freshpaint, on the other hand, is to make it easier for product and marketing teams to analyze how customers interact with their products and then help them take action on those learnings. That's why our data architecture supports sending all the elements of customer data to more than one hundred tools in your tech stack.
