Your data storage solution is at the heart of your martech stack – or at least it should be.
In today’s modern approach to martech, everything around your brand’s data cloud is either feeding it with data or running on top of it as a connected application in the composable environment. Most everything you’ll do from a cross-channel messaging perspective starts with your data warehouse, and everything else should revolve around your data.
This makes a modern data warehouse one of the most crucial investments for any enterprise brand prioritizing data for building messaging campaigns.
Some examples of cloud data warehouses include:
As with any investment like this, there’s a responsibility to make sure you’re getting the best possible return; in fact, the C-Suite will demand it. So, the question is this: Are you maximizing your investment in a modern data warehouse? Or are you encountering the warning signs that indicate you may not be getting the expected return on investment?
Warning sign 1: Multiple copies of your data are making things messy
The magic of a modern data warehouse is that it organizes your data, making it highly performant and accessible across your organization. To take full advantage of that, though, you need to be able to use your data right where it is – live and in real time – rather than copying pieces of it and shipping it somewhere else.
If your current tools require you to copy data and send it elsewhere to build audiences for targeting, you’re throwing away a lot of your modern data warehouse’s potential. You’ve spent all that money and devoted so much time to securing your data in a single, structured location, only to duplicate it and send it elsewhere. This complicates things operationally and it also effectively doubles your costs since you’ll be paying for the same data to be stored in two different places.
Solution: Use your data precisely where it lives so that you’re:
- allowing your modern data warehouse to work as intended
- maintaining your data security by keeping it behind your firewall
- saving money by only paying to store your data once
Warning sign 2: The tools in your martech stack don’t work together
Almost any martech tool you look into buying will have their salespeople telling you they connect directly to your data. They don’t make a lot of sales by telling potential customers no. But, in virtually all cases, it’s a half-truth at best.
Some will connect to certain data warehouses, but not others — most don’t play well with Snowflake and BigQuery, for instance. Others will connect, but it’s incredibly painful and time-consuming to make it work because of language rewrites and complex operations adjustments.
What does it mean for your team if you have your data in Snowflake and then sign a contract with a CDP that either can’t connect to your data warehouse or can with a frustrating level of difficulty? It means neither tool will work as intended, and you’ll struggle to get much out of either one while your team has to spend countless hours trying to connect them.
Solution: Make sure the tool you’re using integrates directly with any data warehouse, Snowflake and BigQuery included. Even better, make sure it does so without any language rewrites or operations issues. A tool that’s agnostic about how you store your data and will simply allow you to use it how it stands, making it plug-and-play.
Warning sign 3: You can’t use your data the way you need to
Inside your data warehouse, your data is formatted in the way that works best for your team. Your columns are labeled with language structures that make sense for your business and were likely that way even before you purchased your data warehouse. Capital letters, commas, pipes, and other symbols are where you expect them to be.
But many CDPs and other tools you may work with have prescribed schemas, forcing you to convert your data to use it. This creates significant (and completely unnecessary) operational work and frustrating QA to get it straight, especially when something breaks and you don’t quite know why.
Solution: List this one as another benefit of a tool with a direct data connection. These tools won’t have prescribed data models because they’re not storing your data. You are. So however your data is structured now is how you’d continue to utilize it, building dynamic audience segments without frustrating formatting work.
Data activation and engagement for the enterprise
If you’re struggling to maximize your company’s investment in a modern data warehouse, we invite you to see how things could be different using tech built to help you access your data where it lives.
Today’s data warehouses are terrific tools with incredible potential for ROI if used correctly, but we’ve talked with plenty of teams using tools that make it impossible to reach that potential.
By directly connecting to your data warehouse, MessageGears can help you leverage your brand’s investments in customer data, modeling, and machine learning to empower marketing activities that activate everything you know about each customer.
If you’d like to learn more about how a direct data connection can help you better tap into that potential, reach out to talk with one of our experts.
Elsbeth Russell
Elsbeth has nearly two decades of experience helping brands attract and engage audiences through content. For the past six years, she’s been dedicated to helping B2B companies in the email marketing space connect with audiences through community building and social media marketing.
