In the era of big data and digital transformation, Master Data Management (MDM) is pivotal in helping businesses extract maximum value from their data. Data onboarding, a crucial aspect of MDM, involves integrating offline or external data into a digital format, matching it to online identifiers, and using it for purposes like Entity Resolution, advertising, marketing, and analytics. This article delves into the concept of data onboarding, its importance, workings, best practices, use cases, and the tools and software that can aid in this process.
TL;DR: You are already doing Data Onboarding and don't know it. What you need to do is add more sources of data, ensure they are of high quality, and merge them into a unified golden record.
Understanding Data Onboarding
Data Onboarding is a fundamental process that involves gathering data from various sources, including CRM systems, Marketing Automation Platforms, and offline sources like event data and retail transactions. The goal is to centralize this data, clean it, transform it, and merge it to create a single, accurate view of your customers. This unified 360-degree perspective enables you to enhance your marketing strategies with better ad targeting, personalized emails, and more.
The Significance of Data Onboarding
Integrating offline and online data through data onboarding offers businesses a more holistic view of customer behavior, thereby improving advertising targeting and optimizing customer experiences. Without this, businesses are restricted to acting on a subset of data, limiting their reach and efficacy.
What are the benefits?
Simply put, data quality. If your data is more complete, fresher, and more comprehensive, it benefits the business.
Marketing teams are more efficient as they can run better-targeted campaigns, improve conversion tracking, and send more timely and personalized emails.
Sales teams benefit as they better understand and view their contacts, accounts, and what they are doing with their product.
Leadership teams have more access to deeper and more trustworthy data to make the best decisions for their teams and departments. They can iterate faster as they can get feedback from their decisions faster.
You are already doing Data Onboarding, Probably.
There are multiple ways to onboard and bring offline & online data together. Typically, you will have to buy a constellation of apps that people call their Data Stack, from ETL, Transform, Storing, and Reverse ETL.
- Data Collection: Gathering data and centralizing it in a single place, typically a Cloud Data Warehouse such as Snowflake or Databricks
- Identity Resolution: It involves tying together data points and identifiers from different sources and resolving them to a single user profile to achieve a comprehensive view of each customer through concepts like Entity Resolution or Identity Stitching.
- Data Transformation: This step involves converting data into a consistent format and structure for easy integration. Nowadays, most businesses are adopting dbt to centralize their transformation logic.
- Data Activation: The transformed data from the centralized database is then synchronized with all marketing tools and advertising platforms with a reverse ETL tool like Census.
Don't forget about Security and Compliance
During the data onboarding process, ensuring security and compliance is paramount for generating reliable data that businesses can rely on. Security measures are critical to safeguard customer data, minimizing risks associated with external storage. Additionally, maintaining observability and alerting mechanisms is vital for detecting errors in data transformations and ensuring transparency in the data pipeline. Establishing strong governance policies is essential to uphold data quality and compliance, mitigating risks like data leaks or incorrect data usage. These aspects collectively contribute to the integrity and trustworthiness of the data utilized by organizations.
Conclusion: What's next?
In the modern era of data-driven decision-making, mastering data management through efficient data onboarding is no longer an option but a necessity for businesses. By integrating offline and online data, businesses can gain a comprehensive understanding of their customers, drive personalized marketing campaigns, and ultimately enhance their bottom line.