For E-Commerce leaders looking for opportunities to grow and become more profitable, developing a reliable analytics engine that consistently generates insights about your customers, products, supply chain, and fulfillment operations is critical to your success.
Over the past five years, cloud data warehouses (like BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift, and Synapse) have become the central hub for various software-as-a-service (SaaS) tools and in-house operational systems to come together and deliver those critical data insights. 🤝 Data extraction tools such as Fivetran cohesively streamline the process of bringing this data together, while data warehouses provide the computational horsepower and flexibility to deliver the answers E-Commerce companies need to identify problems, remove bottlenecks, and build their businesses. 💪
But the data warehouse cannot be a “be-all end-all” in itself. Actually generating value from data requires four elements:
💯 The right data
⏰ At the right time
📍 In the right location
✅ To take action
It’s easier than ever to ensure data warehouses have the right data at the right time, but getting that data in the right location to take action remains problematic. That’s where reverse ETL (rETL) comes in.
So, how can data and operational teams leverage rETL to put together the second half of the value chain for your E-Commerce business? Read on. 👇
Passing conversion tracking to advertising platforms
Starting at the top of the funnel, app tracking transparency and similar browser ecosystem changes have added noise to every company’s ability to track potential buyers through their website traffic.
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In particular, attribution of conversions to specific marketing activities has become less reliable, especially through in-browser cookie tracking, making marketing optimization even more difficult than usual. As the ad ecosystem searches for better solutions to the problem of missing attribution, you can take advantage of advertising platforms by leveraging your customer data to guide advertisers toward better ad targeting and spending.
The platforms you already utilize for advertising, including Google, Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok, Criteo, Pinterest, and Twitter, can all deliver better return-on-ad-spend with improved visibility into your website’s conversions. 🔍👀
Reverse ETL empowers business teams and analytics users as they manage the process of pushing data to advertisers. So, when you pair rETL with your data warehouse for conversion tracking, you:
- Put the ownership of your conversion data in the hands of the people who know your customer best, giving marketers and data teams the power to be creative and drive performance. 🚀
- Remove barriers to website updates that come with your housing conversion tracking codes. Your marketers and data teams can iterate on what works, so changes to your conversion-tracking ecosystem don’t require expensive developer time (since you most likely have these conversions living in your data warehouse already!) 🚧❌
- Expand and refine your definition of what “counts” as conversion, allowing advertisers to see offline conversions, products added to the cart, conversations with your sales team, or whatever constitutes a meaningful milestone in the customer journey for your business. If certain products are returned to the warehouse frequently, you can delay reporting and adjust your conversions for whether or not someone returned the product. You are not confined to when, where, and how someone clicks on your website. 🔓
Nurturing potential and existing customers with targeted outreach
Now that you’re generating high-quality traffic and using discounts to gather email addresses, you want to customize the messaging to resonate with each audience and (re-)convert them. This is applicable in two different contexts:
- Targeted paid advertising – Reverse ETL enables optimized digital campaigns for your user base by syncing to ad tools’ customer lists. This works double duty: It gets rid of manual CSV uploads and enables you to run targeted ads for users that might have abandoned their cart, haven’t returned to place an order, or made an account and never added anything to their cart. 🛒
- Marketing automation system – This is only as intelligent as the data housed within it. Moving data from your touchpoint on your website and SaaS providers into your data warehouse only gets you halfway there. By incorporating information about customer search terms and product page visits into systems like Marketo and Hubspot, you can enable your email marketing team to deliver the specific promotions that lead to sales. 🤑 For example, you can send relevant, personalized notifications to users in the hours that they have previously interacted with your platform. Because email marketing data is your own, you can feed what you learn from these messages into your top-of-funnel systems as described above.
Guiding sales, customer support, and customer success operations
Once potential or existing customers visit your website and research your products, they may need that extra nudge from a one-on-one connection to get them to make the first purchase or to resolve an obstacle that's currently preventing them from repeat purchasing. ✉️ Putting the customer profile, order & return history, and recent site interactions at your team’s fingertips can help them to prioritize interactions and deliver the experience that wins a long-term customer relationship with higher lifetime value.
Keeping customers apprised of their orders
Your company can improve the customer experience by creating better app integrations between fulfillment operations and customer notifications. Suppose fulfillment information is already in the data warehouse via your ERP system, Shopify Fulfillment, or direct integrations with fulfillment vendors. In that case, your company can provide updates to customers based on your vendor information, and rETL can push relevant fulfillment information into your email automation providers, such as Sendgrid, Sailthru, and Mailchimp.
Regardless of where you drive value using your data, you want your operational leaders to own operational processes with a single source of truth. When you implement rETL into your modern data stack, you put those processes in the hands of the people who know the customer best and understand how the customer journey should work, not just how it does work.
And in E-Commerce, it pays to be nimble. When you leverage your data warehouse with a tool like Census, you operationalize your analytics and turn the flexibility of your analytics system into the flexibility of your business as a whole.
If you want additional data expertise to drive value from your data, CorrDyn acts as your extended data team, helping you to connect all the pieces of the E-Commerce data value chain, from data acquisition 👉 analysis and modeling 👉 action.
✨ Want to get started using rETL to drive more effective ad targeting? Book a demo with a Census product specialist.
✨ Want help connecting the pieces in your E-Commerce data value chain? Get in touch with a CorrDyn expert.