Retailers are constantly investing in marketing campaigns, but answering the big question—“Is it working?”—remains a challenge. Fragmented data, legacy systems, and a lack of real-time insights often leave marketing leaders with an incomplete picture. Without a unified view of campaign performance and customer behavior, it’s difficult to fine-tune efforts or prove return on investment.
Databricks, combined with zeb’s expertise, offers a smarter way to manage and measure marketing effectiveness. By consolidating diverse data sources into a single platform, retailers can move beyond gut instinct and surface-level metrics to understand what’s really driving performance.
A unified data platform built for retail
zeb’s implementation of the Databricks Lakehouse gives retailers a centralized, AI-ready foundation that brings together data from every corner of the business. Sales transactions, customer interactions, marketing metrics, and web analytics—everything flows into a single source of truth. This unified approach eliminates data silos and provides complete visibility across the customer journey.
With support for structured and unstructured data ingestion, zeb helps retailers integrate information from platforms like Salesforce, Google Analytics, Oracle, and POS systems. The result is a consistent, high-quality dataset that enables better campaign planning, customer targeting, and budget allocation.
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Real-time insights with streaming analytics
Retail is fast-paced, and marketing decisions can’t wait days or weeks for reports to update. Databricks empowers teams with real-time data processing and streaming analytics, so campaign performance can be monitored as it unfolds. Whether it’s tracking engagement from a social ad or analyzing in-store promotions, marketing teams gain instant insights to pivot strategies or double down on what’s working.
Delta Live Tables and Auto Loader allow for scalable streaming pipelines, while visual dashboards built in Databricks deliver up-to-the-minute views of campaign KPIs—clicks, conversions, foot traffic, and much more.
Smarter attribution with Machine Learning
Understanding which channels are truly driving sales is critical—but traditional attribution models often fall short. Databricks enables advanced attribution modeling using machine learning, helping retailers go beyond last-click logic. By factoring in all customer touchpoints—email opens, ad views, website visits, and purchases—marketers can pinpoint what’s influencing conversions and where to focus their spend.
zeb supports this with custom attribution frameworks built directly into Databricks, allowing businesses to run multi-touch and algorithmic attribution models tailored to their strategies.
Building a composable CDP with Databricks at the core
Rather than relying on rigid, off-the-shelf CDPs, retailers can now build a composable CDP that fits their exact needs. Databricks acts as the central data layer.
Retailers today operate with a diverse array of source systems that generate valuable customer and operational data. Building a composable Customer Data Platform with Databricks at the core serving as the centralized data repository, this offers unique to retail companies by unlocking advantages and unifying these disparate data sources, ensuring robust governance, and supporting dynamic data requirements.
Key components of a Databricks composable CDP
- Data Integration and Removing Data Siloes – Retail companies typically manage data from multiple systems, such as:
- Point-of-sale systems
- E-commerce platforms
- Customer relationship management tools
- Inventory and supply chain management systems
- Financial systems and accounting
- Centralized Data Repository – Leverage the data lakehouse architecture to consolidate, assimilate and then aggregate data for business and AI consumption, some activities included but are not limited to:
- Identity resolution and mapping of customer interactions across channels
- Modeling of customer events (e.g., purchases, logins, support tickets) as a unified timeline
- Enhanced analytics and personalized engagement by analyzing the full customer journey
- PII data masking and customer data retention/deletion processes
- Data Governance for Dynamic Data Needs – Ensure data governance and security when working with first-party or third-party customer data:
- Centralized data asset management and fine-grained access controls
- Data lineage tracking and comprehensive audit logs for compliance
- Role-based access control and automated monitoring to ensure data quality and regulatory adherence
This architecture supports clean, scalable customer data management—from collection to segmentation to activation—without vendor lock-in. zeb enables this with pre-built integrations and governance-ready frameworks to ensure data quality and compliance from day one.
Creating 360° customer profiles for personalization
Personalization starts with knowing your customer. Databricks makes it possible to create unified customer profiles by merging behavioral data, transaction history, demographics, and loyalty data. These rich profiles allow marketing teams to tailor content, offers, and experiences across every channel.
Databricks’ ML capabilities also support real-time segmentation and predictive modeling. For instance, zeb helps businesses identify high-value segments, predict churn, or estimate customer lifetime value—all within the same platform.
Dashboards, prebuilt solutions, and marketing ROI
Databricks isn’t just about backend capabilities. It offers interactive, user-friendly dashboards that give marketers control over their data. From real-time campaign views to ROI reports, these dashboards enable faster, smarter decisions without relying heavily on data teams.
In addition, Databricks provides a growing library of prebuilt solutions tailored for retail marketing use cases—like churn prediction, propensity scoring, and customer journey analytics. zeb customizes these to fit each retailer’s unique workflows and goals.
And most importantly? Retailers can finally measure marketing ROI with confidence. By connecting spend to performance across campaigns and channels, Databricks equips teams to optimize budgets, refine strategies, and demonstrate business impact.
From data to decisions—with zeb and Databricks
With zeb and Databricks, retailers gain a marketing analytics foundation that’s scalable, composable, and built for speed. Whether you’re looking to personalize campaigns, fine-tune attribution, or unify customer data, this platform transforms raw data into actionable insight—fast.
Let’s move past disconnected systems and fragmented insights. Together with zeb, you can turn your marketing data into a strategic asset—and finally answer the question: Is my marketing strategy really working?