What Every Marketer Needs to Know About Data Warehouses

As a digital marketer, you’re faced with ever increasing constraints on your ability to get time from engineering, whether if it’s to pull a report or add a new data source to a field. According to the Society for Human Resource Management, Data Scientists are one of the most difficult roles to fill — it’s no wonder marketers find it difficult to complete accurate reports. Most marketers don’t even know where reports are generated. Where do your reports come from? Your data warehouse.

Wait, what’s a data warehouse?

Most companies have a data problem, in that they have way too much data. Websites generate page views, clicks, signups, and eventually a purchase. Mobile apps generate installs, daily opens, and activity. Marketing activities drive email opens and clicks, impressions and retargeted ad clicks. Every one of these events is recorded on multiple platforms in most organizations, alongside other data about your customers and prospects. For data scientists, having all these different places with data about the customer can be incredibly frustrating, making it almost impossible to create a complete view of your typical customer. From a business perspective, how can you answer questions like “what’s your customer’s’ Lifetime Value (LTV)” when all your data is inconsistent?

Data warehouses merge data from all endpoints to a central location — which means that you can make more effective data driven decisions. You may have heard of “Amazon Redshift”, which is the technology of choice for data storage today. What’s important is the contrast in capabilities between your data warehouse and the old school Customer Relationship Management system (CRM) that you’re using right now. There’s no way your CRM can handle all the varied types of data the business generates. If new data sources are added, marketers have to spend months requesting new fields get added to the CRM.

Most CRMs charge based on the amount of data you store, which introduces an interesting paradox. Do you add as much data as possible, so that you can provide the best experience for your customers, or do you limit your CRM to only the most important data in an effort to control costs? Data warehouses are designed to house all of your data, in its original form, such that this is never a concern.

Why should marketers care?

Clean data is the core of why every modern marketer should care about data warehouses. You live and breath on data. Data powers your best campaigns, you use data to personalize messaging, and you use data to create audience segments. Once your message is out there, it’s creating even more rich engagement data. As a marketer, if you’re not directly tapped into the data warehouse, you’re missing out on the source of truth about your customer. It’s like the holy grail for a marketer, and you’re kept in the dark.

The most overlooked feature of the data warehouse is that it’s real time. Data in CRMs can take hours, if not days, to sync and can be outdated to make effective business decisions. A customer can abandon a shopping cart but your CRM won’t know for days, or correct the spelling of their name but you’re still sending emails with “Hello Natthew” (it’s Matt, thanks). The data warehouse doesn’t have these issues — data is stored there first so it’s always up to date and ready to go.

Alright I’m convinced, what are the things I need to know?

Okay, first things first, you need to ensure that your data is represented in the data warehouse. “Your data” means all the information you need to perform marketing activities, as well as any data created as the result of your marketing activities.

Another way to think about this is to think about a hypothetical scenario, for example, a retention campaign at a transactional e-commerce company. What information would you need to increase purchase frequency for medium order size customers? Things like average order size and number of orders in the past six months, as well as favorite product categories, would be really useful in order to run that campaign. Running the campaign itself will generate more data, such as what emails or ads a user was presented with, which ones they engaged with, and which ones generated a purchase.

It’s important to ensure all of this data is being properly captured in the data warehouse, so that when the company is making business decisions, it is fully informed about how marketing is impacting revenue (or user engagement if that’s the goal).

How can marketers use the data warehouse?

The current generation of data warehouse tools are designed only to extract insight — which is insanely valuable given the amount of data they contain. The missing next step is turning this insight into action; instead of just monitoring “churning users”, prevent them from churning!

A first step every marketer can take is getting access to the analytics tools your company uses today. There are quite a few that they may be using, Looker being one of the more popular options. If your marketing data is being added to the data warehouse, you’ll now be able to perform fine grained analysis of how your campaigns are impacting specific user segments. You’ll also be able to export specific segments for use in your current marketing platform. Finally, you can compare analytics from your data warehouse against what your CRM reports — it’s great to double check conversion rates and keep your vendors honest.

Going beyond analytics, the next generation of data warehouse products will be focused on actionable data and empowering non-technical team members to leverage the vast amount of data stored. Some key examples of how next generation products will leverage your data warehouse are in prediction (predict users who are likely to churn), marketing automation (build automated email campaigns based on any data field), and marketing personalization (use any data field to personalize marketing emails).

The future of marketing automation in particular is of interest to us Sendwithus. As one of the top 250 email senders in the world, we chat with marketers daily about leveraging their data warehouse for marketing automation, but don’t know where to start. We’re on the cusp of announcing new technologies that allow our customers to do just this. Stay tuned.