What is our primary use case?
My main use case for Segment is to share a practical experience about how we used Segment at XP Investimentos bank to transform behavioral data into business intelligence and high-impact marketing campaigns, where we worked in the MarTech arm with a very clear goal: to turn Segment into our CDP, making it the main source of truth about our customers while understanding how they interacted with the XP app to personalize the end-to-end experience.
Before giving a specific example of how I used Segment to personalize customers' experience in the XP app, I will talk about the challenge and the technological solution, where my role as a software engineer was directly tied to implementing, maintaining, and optimizing this pipeline. I knew the tool very well inside and we created and configured sources, structured the receipt of events via HTTP calls or webhooks, and developed specific scripts to trigger two fundamental types of events: track, focused on capturing behavioral events within the app, and identify, responsible for capturing customers' registration data, ensuring we continuously used and updated customers' registration data for a solid, enriched, and always up-to-date base. The architecture of the solution and the data flow was the way to make this work at bank scale, managing millions of daily events through a robust architecture where events generated in the app passed through an intermediary application responsible for collecting these actions through messaging services like Kafka and RabbitMQ, allowing us to format the events with custom fields for proper identification, processing, and standardized sending to Segment, which let us segment and create highly qualified audiences crossing in-app browsing behavior and product acquisition with the client's investor profile, opening a huge range of operational and marketing opportunities like abandoned cart campaigns and personalized banners displaying real-time customized offers.
The process to create those qualified audiences involves a multidisciplinary approach seeking a successful final impact, where building this ecosystem is not a one-person job and requires deep integration between multiple technology and business fronts, as we worked side by side with the Mobile, interface, hub, advisors, BFF, backend, and database teams to ensure that front-end collection was performant and did not impact the app experience, while serving the Revenue team directly as it used Segment as its main work tool and source of truth, enabling them to create dynamic audiences, trigger targeted campaigns, and extract precise reports for strategic decision-making in a summarized implementation of Segment at the XP bank, transforming our communication approach into a fully personalized strategy focused on the investor's journey, an enriching technical project where I applied software engineering to leverage MarTech results generating real business value.
I believe that the offer banners were successful cases from my experience with Segment, as we tracked the entire flow from click, view, and conversion of marketing campaigns, which brought in significant revenue reaching about 650 million in monthly revenue.
What is most valuable?
In my opinion, the best feature that Segment offers is the creation of audiences focused on the investor's profile, which was the biggest differentiator enabling us to cross a large number of behavioral and customer profile data points, generating increased engagement in marketing campaigns.
Regarding audience creation, I consider Segment CDP interface itself the most valuable feature, as it allows the marketing team to work with a business-focused profile without needing deep programming knowledge, greatly facilitating the creation of marketing campaigns while integrating with tech solutions.
Segment allowed for the organization of the entire source of all audiences, making it a very robust tool where the cost pays for itself through return on investment, highlighting the tool's cost-benefit ratio as a major differentiator.
Segment has a very significant positive impact on my organization as it provides robust data to understand our consumer's profile and needs, focusing on the customer's needs in various life stages, ultimately maximizing our efforts on the customer, which is where the main gain with Segment lies.
What needs improvement?
I have not used Segment for more than a year, so I am not aware of its current evolution, but I know there was a migration from Segment to Adobe as a strategic decision by XP bank, which pointed out unified databases as an improvement area compared to Segment, where they effectively utilized AI for creative marketing campaign generation.
The necessary improvements in Segment based on my experience focus on providing more tools for the marketing team, particularly using AI to create campaigns through images and short videos, enhancing communication with end customers via offer banners in a more automated and effective manner.
For how long have I used the solution?
I used Segment from December 2022 until around the end of 2025.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Segment is very stable with no major issues encountered, aside from avoiding Friday deployments to prevent losing any event capture, ensuring stability throughout our operations.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Segment's scalability is very good given the large processing capacity handling millions of events from around 10 million customers daily, where every in-app navigation and various accesses were tracked and sent to Segment CDP without encountering issues.
How are customer service and support?
Customer support for Segment was satisfactory, as communication happened through tickets and scheduled meetings with support staff who sometimes spoke Portuguese, with a need to adapt to the tool's capabilities rather than having fully customized solutions. I would rate customer support around seven or eight due to what I perceive as limited availability for immediate assistance compared to the overall value derived from the tool's capabilities.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I did not use a different solution before joining XP as we directly employed Segment CDP, which was later replaced by Adobe.
How was the initial setup?
My experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing was smooth, though I did not know the total expense, estimated around 1 to 2 million per month, with licensing restrictions on access to Segment CDP tool, experiencing a negative aspect when triggering numerous tests that exceeded our monthly limit resulting in a 5 million fine.
What was our ROI?
I have already shared measurable results demonstrating this positive impact of Segment at XP Investimentos, highlighting our ability to increase engagement and conversion in marketing campaigns by 30-40% depending on the campaign, generating monthly revenue of up to 650 million through triggers sent via email, WhatsApp, and push notifications in the XP app itself.
I have previously detailed the return on investment from our relevant increase in revenue attributed to Segment, where for every 1 to 3 million invested, we generated 650 million, with no staff reduction but an increase of advisors from 17,000 with goals now surpassing 20,000, while we also aim for a target of 2 trillion in investments under custody, highlighting our solid knowledge base for relevant marketing campaigns.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
My experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing was smooth, though I did not know the total expense, estimated around 1 to 2 million per month, with licensing restrictions on access to Segment CDP tool, experiencing a negative aspect when triggering numerous tests that exceeded our monthly limit resulting in a 5 million fine.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
I do not recall which other options were evaluated prior to Segment, but I recognize that Adobe was in the same tier, and the challenge was that multiple applications had already integrated with Segment, leading to a migration project lasting about six months.
What other advice do I have?
My advice for those considering using Segment is to thoroughly research the market and understand the tool's benefits as it is a strategic investment that necessitates discussions with other businesses to benchmark their experience and success post-implementation. My final comment on Segment is that it was a very enriching experience that taught me about event-oriented applications and how behavioral events and registration data are stored in Segment, allowing me to appreciate the potential for creating marketing campaigns based on a deep knowledge of our customer profiles. I would rate this product an 8 out of 10.