What is Reverse ETL?

Your data warehouse typically stores KPIs, customer definitions and a lot of customer data. The goal of reverse ETL is to sync this customer data with your downstream tools. Thereby increasing the significance of your data centre. Rather than waiting for your data as it is maintained in a reporting tool, Reverse ETL enables you to take proactive actions and place customer data within the grasp of your operational teams.

Instead of transforming and aggregating the data, Reverse ETL focuses on preserving the original form and granularity of the data. You can obtain the most recent and detailed data available, allowing your team to arrive at real-time choices, personalise customer experiences, & adapt quickly to market developments. Reverse ETL allows one to discover new perspectives, experiment with alternative analytics, and obtain a thorough picture of their customer’s behaviour patterns rather than depending exclusively on pre-aggregated and converted data.

What is Hightouch Reverse ETL?

Hightouch is intended to meet the rising requirement for marketers to obtain and analyse data at the finest granular level possible, allowing for real-time decision-making & personalised experiences for customers. Hightouch ETL, as opposed to standard ETL methods that require data transformation & aggregation, emphasises capturing and using high-throughput interactions, allowing you to delve into the diversity of raw data without the downtime associated with transformations of data. It integrates seamlessly with a variety of data sources, including CRM (customer relationship management) systems, platforms for marketing automation, web analytics solutions, and others. It also enables you to understand how customers behave, their preferences, & engagements at a granular level.

Hightouch provides data cleansing & enrichment features that ensure the extracted data is correct, comprehensive, and accessible for analysis. You can conduct in-depth studies and acquire useful insights into customer behaviour, product effectiveness, marketing campaign efficacy, and more with powerful data modelling & segmentation tools. Hightouch also allows real-time data visualisation and reporting. This aids in the monitoring of important metrics and KPIs, campaign performance tracking, and making data-driven choices on the fly.

How does reverse ETL activate your marketing data?

With a reverse ETL solution, you can facilitate a wide range of use cases on top of your collected customer data.

1. Extraction of Real-Time Data from Data Warehouses:

A data warehouse is an excellent tool for storing large amounts of data over time. This allows data engineers along with data scientists to access and analyse this information. However, without a mechanism to connect this data to the platforms that are important in day-to-day customer interaction, the data warehouse is useless to non-technical internal departments such as sales, marketing, and customer support. Reverse ETL solutions can copy data from the data warehouse, and alter it to fit the standards of external APIs. Bridging this gap allows non-technical employees to access information stored in the data warehouse, boosting its value. 

2. Enrichment and Enhancement of Data:

Reverse ETL systems frequently include data enrichment and improvement features. This entails supplementing the retrieved data with further context and insights in order to present a more complete picture of your customers. To enhance customer profiles, enriching the data might involve adding demographic details, location-based data, past purchases, or integrating external data sources.

3. Activation & Integration:

After all the information has been extracted & enhanced, reverse ETL allows the marketing data to be integrated and activated. It syncs the data into marketing systems like data centres, customer data platforms, or marketing automation systems. Making the information accessible for analysis & campaign execution.

4. Campaign Optimisation and Analytics:

You can use real-time analytics & personalisation strategies utilising the activated marketing information at your disposal. In-depth research, audience segmentation according to particular criteria, and insights into customer behaviour and preferences are all feasible. This allows you to design highly focused, personalised marketing campaigns which can resonate with specific customers, resulting in increased engagement & conversions. It is also simple to manage key performance indicators & metrics, track campaign efficacy, and swiftly change plans as needed. This agile strategy enables you to adapt quickly to evolving market dynamics, customer behaviours, and emerging trends.

5. Greater efficiency in data engineering:

Information in the data warehouse could potentially be made accessible to non-technical teams even without the usage of a Reverse ETL tool. But without the presence of a pipe connecting the data centre to downstream platforms, data engineers would be required to devote a lot of manual effort in the form of creating and sustaining each and every API connection separately to enable marketing teams to make use of the data whenever they want. This could soon build up to unsustainable technical costs and considerably increase the time it requires for your team members to obtain the data they want when they want it.

How Does Hightouch Reverse ETL Function?

Hightouch Reverse ETL operates by querying your data centre and sending the results to your preferred downstream tool. Sources, models, syncs, & destinations are the four basic components of the Hightouch Reverse ETL. In this section, we will dive deep into all these 4 parts. 

1. Sources 

This is the place where your company’s data is kept. Hightouch Reverse ETL extracts data from a broad variety of sources. Customer touchpoints like websites, mobile applications, social media networks, email marketing platforms, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, POS (point-of-sale) platforms, software for marketing automation, and others might be included. The purpose is to collect data from every relevant source wherein useful marketing data and customer interactions are created.

2. Data Models

The SQL statements in these data models determine how your data is presented and extract the data you want from your source. A versatile data model is used in Hightouch reverse ETL to assist in successful data management & integration. This approach ensures that the retrieved data can be properly formatted and processed for easy interaction with various applications. The data model describes the structure and relationships between distinct data components. In return helping you to analyse and activate data more efficiently.

3. Syncing and Integration

After transforming and enhancing all the information, Hightouch Reverse ETL focuses on synchronization and real-time integration. It enables you to define your model’s data and specify how you’d prefer these records to be translated to the relevant fields in the final destination. It guarantees that data is synchronised close to real-time with all your different destinations or intended systems. This synchronisation can take place through APIs, connectors, or other connection methods. This would guarantee that the information is up-to-date and ready for analysis & activation.

4. Destinations

Hightouch synchronizes and activates the reverse ETL data before putting it into multiple destinations for analysis, customization, and decision-making processes. Data centres, CDPs, marketing automation systems, business intelligence platforms, and even real-time dashboards are examples of these destinations. You can view & analyse information in its active form by uploading it to these locations. Which would in return allow your team to extract insights and take decisive moves.

5. Constant Data Updates

Hightouch Reverse ETL intends to facilitate ongoing data modifications. This ensures that the information stored in the destinations is up-to-date & pertinent. This method collects and synchronizes the newly created data in the sources with the locations. This results in allowing your entire team to access the most current insights as well as activate the most recent data for their marketing activities.

Use Cases for Hightouch Reverse ETL

While Hightouch Reverse ETL relieves engineering teams of all burdens, it also opens up a wide range of applications across business departments. This allows your team to extract more value from your data.

1. How does Hightouch Reverse ETL ease the life of Marketing Teams?

Every marketing team’s primary aim is to figure out how to boost ad platform match rates, optimise return on advertising expenses (ROAS), and reduce customer acquisition costs (CAC). You can create customised audiences in your data centre & synchronise them across all of your marketing platforms using Hightouch Reverse ETL. You can also utilise the exact same audiences for your lifecycle marketing initiatives. This will boost personalisation based on your every customer’s unique history and behavioural data.

2. How can Hightouch help Sales Teams?

Your sales staff wants and requires access to your warehouse’s unique behavioural data and product use statistics (e.g., workplaces, last-login time, current users, page views, & so on). With Hightouch, you can transfer this data immediately to your CRM. This will give your sales team an extensive understanding of your customer & will allow them to initiate an action in real-time. You can also utilise this platform to inform sales representatives when users or customers show a specific behaviour in your product/app using other applications such as Slack.

3. How is Reverse ETL Useful to Product Teams?

Experimentation & optimisation are essential for enhancing your product and boosting its acceptance in the market. To fuel your customer-related use cases, you must sync customer information with your production dataset in order to optimise your on-site customisation. You can pass on customer characteristics to your production system with Hightouch Reverse ETL. This enables you to provide customised experiences that seem unique to each distinct user. This might be as basic as displaying the billing details in your application or providing a special deal to your most frequent customers.

4. How can Hightouch Enhance the Performance of Customer Support Teams?

Every customer success team’s ultimate aim should be to prioritise the correct tickets and reduce churn. Hightouch Reverse ETL enables you to sync critical data like LTV, ARR, or rate of churn to your support tool. This allows your success teams to prioritise problems with the greatest impact.