How Did Dialpad Build a Self-Serve Marketing Engine From Broken Infrastructure?
A complete foundation overhaul transformed broken identity systems and siloed teams into a unified, self-serve lifecycle marketing engine—reducing 1200 tracked events to 22 while dramatically improving data trust.
Quick Facts
Key Takeaways
Fix identity first—when your UUID structure is broken, every downstream tool suffers. Identity resolution must precede optimization.
Less data beats more data when teams actually use it. Reducing 1200 events to 22 improved trust and enabled action.
Self-serve marketing templates unlock velocity. When non-technical marketers can build without engineering, campaigns ship faster.
Dialpad is a leading cloud-based business communications platform. Their UCaaS (Unified Communications as a Service) solution powers voice, video, and messaging for distributed teams worldwide.
Like many fast-growing SaaS companies, Dialpad's marketing infrastructure had evolved organically—scrappy solutions that worked early on had become technical debt, preventing the sophisticated lifecycle marketing their scale demanded.
Broken Data Foundation + Siloed Marketing Execution
The Business Problem
Dialpad wanted to implement modern lifecycle marketing, but their data infrastructure couldn't support it. Nobody trusted the data enough to build on it—and marketing couldn't execute without constant engineering support.
What Was Broken?
The infrastructure had grown organically over years. Fixing it required a complete foundation overhaul—not patches.
Complete Stack Overhaul + Self-Serve Enablement
We approached this as a layered transformation—each phase building on the previous one. Identity first, then data quality, then activation.
UUID Overhaul & Identity Resolution
We established a standardized SHA256 UUID as the primary key across every system. This included strategic guidance for implementation in Segment and BigQuery, a comprehensive project plan breaking down tasks by team, enabling Profiles Sync to eliminate complex multi-source SQL queries, and managing rollout across engineering and vendor teams.
Data Tracking Optimization
We rebuilt their tracking plan from scratch—manually auditing all legacy events from Unify and Amplitude, then optimizing from 1200 events down to 22 prioritized events. Each event maps to specific Growth use cases. We created and enforced a comprehensive Protocols Tracking Plan with governance policies.
Lifecycle Marketing Enablement
With clean data in place, we evaluated lifecycle marketing tools, selected Customer.io, and built a complete self-serve system. This included custom subscription state management between Marketo and Customer.io, the first-ever complete user journey map, 17 detailed communication briefs, and self-serve templates for non-technical marketers.
Website Conversion Analysis
Using Amplitude, we uncovered systematic conversion patterns—building workbooks tracking anomalies and traffic, developing user journey maps highlighting dropoff moments, and identifying CTA performance disparities (7.2% vs 0.8% conversion). Delivered executive dashboard with optimization recommendations.
Destination Re-Integration & Journey Migration
With the new UUID in place, we audited all 223 Segment Audiences and Journeys, manually recreating the most valuable ones with new targeting and orchestration. We executed custom workarounds to prevent Pendo double payment overages, re-connected destinations using new Actions methods, and conducted comprehensive QA.
Self-Serve Marketing Engine + Trusted Data Foundation
Transformation Outcomes
Key Discovery: CTA Performance Gap
Website conversion analysis revealed a 9x performance gap between CTAs—7.2% conversion vs 0.8%. This kind of insight was impossible before the foundation work. With unified identity and clean tracking, optimization opportunities become visible.
