The goal of every marketer is to deliver personalized customer experience that will drive engagement and loyalty. To create a great experience that will deliver the desired results, marketers need to understand their customer behavior and expectations. In 2013, Tealium set out to help businesses achieve this objective with its market leading customer data platform (CDP) Tealium AudienceStream. However, a great CDP needs to do more than ingest and segment data, it needs to connect to your existing marketing stack.

Introducing Tealium Functions

Tealium Functions is a new tool available at no charge to Tealium AudienceStream and EventStream API Hub customers. Tealium launched functions with a feature called “Custom Actions” that allows the creation of “Functions” for data destinations and integrations on post-processed data. Tealium also enables custom JavaScript to be inserted to move data and access destination APIs. Actions can be created at the event, visitor, and audience levels.

 

Simplifying Custom Integrations

For those that have worked with Tealium AudienceStream, while connectors are available for a large number of marketing tools, sometimes that connector won’t work for very specific use cases or custom implementations of a marketing tool. That is where Functions comes in. Functions can be used to customize existing connectors simply using JavaScript or to set up brand new connectors.

One of the challenges our CDP engineering team has experienced is API limits. When you are sending audiences to marketing automation tools like Marketo, you will quickly reach these limits. We may set up as many as 10-15 connectors depending on the use cases. Functions allow us to quickly set up batched data requests in the Tealium interface and avoid API errors. Tealium Functions empowers developers to be less dependent on data engineers.

More Game Changing Features to Come

Tealium has plans to continue enhancing Functions, adding the ability to do transformations at the point of data collection. This has been one of the most requested features. Any major data cleansing should always be done at the source to ensure consistency across tools, however, imagine that being able to fix inconsistencies between data sources or to fix tagging errors prior to importing the data. Having the ability to validate and modify events before they are processed is a game changer.

If you want help getting started with Tealium Functions or custom connectors, reach out to our Customer Data Platform experts today.