Gaining a 360 Degree View of Your Customer Data

In a recent post, we shared how, while marketing automation platforms can help businesses grow, migrating to new platforms is often a headache. CData SSIS Tasks allow businesses to easily move contacts, leads, and customers from one marketing platform to another.

Often, organizations use multiple marketing technology (Martech) platforms (whether concurrently or historically), with the entirety of their customers' journeys spread across these platforms. The real-time access provided by CData Drivers enables analytics and reporting on the current state of customers. CData Sync, however, allows organizations to replicate all their marketing data into a single data store, building a 360-degree view of their customer journeys to enable more comprehensive, historical analytics.

This article walks through replicating live data from a variety of marketing platforms to a database to build a holistic view of customers based on their activity.

Connecting to Your Marketing Data

Connecting to marketing data from CData Sync is as easy as entering credentials for the services being used. Navigate to the Connections tab in CData Sync. In Sources, select the services you wish to replicate. As with all CData connectivity, user-level permissions and security are maintained in each connection, ensuring that exactly the right data is accessible and replicated.

Connecting to Data Warehouses

Connecting to a database or data warehouse to store the data is just as straightforward as connecting to various marketing services. Again, navigate to the Connections tab and in Destinations, select the service or database you wish to use

Replicating Data

After connecting, create data replication jobs. Navigate to the Jobs tab and create a new job for each service you wish to replicate. Simply choose the service as the source and the database or data warehouse as the destination.

Inside the job, select the entities to replicate. If the services are in active use, you can schedule the replication to repeat as often as needed. In the interest of warehousing best practices, replicate the data to staging tables. In this example, we copy customer and contact data from Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, and Salesforce into our SQL Server data warehouse.

Gain a 360-Degree View of Your Customers

Once the data is replicated, custom views can be created to build a complete picture of each customer or contact. For example, you can collect the contacts into a single view using the email address to identify each unique entry.

CREATE VIEW [dbo].[Contacts_View] AS   
SELECT   
   dbo.STG_MC_ListMembers.EmailAddress,   
   dbo.STG_MC_ListMembers.FullName,   
   dbo.STG_MC_ListMembers.Status AS MailChimp_Status,   
   dbo.STG_MC_ListMembers.TagsAggregate AS MailChimp_Tags,   
   dbo.STG_AC_Contacts.Organization AS AC_Organization,   
   dbo.STG_AC_Contacts.ScoreValues AS AC_ScoreValues,   
   dbo.STG_SF_Contact.AccountId AS SF_AccountID,   
   ...   
FROM   
   dbo.STG_MC_ListMembers   
   INNER JOIN dbo.STG_SF_Contact ON dbo.STG_MC_ListMembers.EmailAddress = dbo.STG_SF_Contact.Email   
   INNER JOIN dbo.STG_AC_Contacts ON dbo.STG_MC_ListMembers.EmailAddress = dbo.STG_AC_Contacts.Email   

With these custom views created, the data is ready for comprehensive analysis and reporting. Thanks to CData Sync, organizations can gain deeper insights into their marketing automation, building a more complete picture of each of their customers and where they are in their customer journey. From there, marketers can make more informed decisions on where to guide their customers, which campaigns to include them in, and how to best close any open opportunities.

With the entirety of their customer data consolidated into a single location, organizations can even analyze customers historically and make determinations on which steps, campaigns, and programs best guided leads into customers.

The CData Difference

No matter which marketing platform a business adopts, CData connectivity solutions help marketing teams increase their ROI, whether by migrating customers through different platforms, connecting to live data for analytics and reporting, or consolidating marketing data into a data warehouse.

For a more detailed walkthrough of using Sync, read our Knowledge Base article: Automated Continuous MailChimp Replication to SQL Server

Check out CData Sync and download a free trial to start replicating your marketing data today.

Reach out to the CData team for a personalized demo and learn how to better connect, integrate, and automate your marketing data.