Reverse ETL benefits and use cases

Every enterprise brand strives to be more data-driven, but actually translating your analytics and insights into action can be really difficult. In fact, only 32% of data available to enterprises today is put to work. The remaining 68% goes unleveraged, locked inside a data warehouse, where non-technical teams have limited access and visibility.

With data being the pathway to engaging customers, streamlining operations, and driving revenue, it seems bewildering to have two-thirds of your data virtually inaccessible to the teams that need it the most.

To leverage all of the customer data brands have collected and stored, it needs to be available in the tools and systems teams use every day. This is where reverse ETL comes in.

What is reverse ETL?

Reverse ETL (extract, transform, load) is the process of taking data that’s stored in a central repository like a data warehouse and moving it back into downstream tools and operational systems – like a CRM, marketing platforms, and other business applications – for activation.

It’s the reverse of the traditional ETL process, where data is extracted from operational systems, transformed, and loaded into a data warehouse for analysis.

Here’s a more detailed breakdown of how reverse ETL works:

Extraction: Data is extracted from the data warehouse where it has been previously stored after undergoing ETL processes. This data typically includes aggregated and processed information that provides insights into business operations.

Transformation: Before loading the data into the operational systems, it might need to be transformed to fit the schema and requirements of the target systems. This can include formatting the data, enriching it with additional context, or structuring it in a way that the target application can consume and decipher.

Loading: The transformed data is then loaded into the operational systems. This can be done via API integration, manual upload, batch processing, or by using connectors provided by reverse ETL tools.

Benefits of reverse ETL

Reverse ETL offers several key benefits that can significantly enhance a brand’s data operations and decision-making processes:

Prevents data silos

Reverse ETL ensures data isn’t confined to its repository and, instead, becomes a powerful resource for internal teams. It empowers teams with comprehensive, organization-wide data sets rather than restricting them to the limited data available within their day-to-day tools. For example, product teams can identify high-value customers and offer them beta access to new features in a SaaS app, using data that would otherwise be inaccessible.

By making enriched data sets readily available across the organization, reverse ETL breaks down data silos and democratizes access to valuable insights. This approach reduces the reliance on engineers and analysts to manually extract data, so all teams can leverage data-driven insights more effectively.

Improved decision-making

By transferring data from the warehouse to operational systems, teams always have access to the most up-to-date analytics for more informed and timely decision-making. Having this rich data at their fingertips means every team is working with the same single source of truth. This reduces discrepancies, minimizes misunderstandings, and leads to greater alignment across the organization.

Increased operational efficiency

Data that sits idle in a warehouse offers limited business value. The true potential of data is unlocked when it’s integrated into your business applications and tools, transforming it into a vital asset for marketing campaigns, product development, customer support, and strategic business planning.

For example, customer support can automatically prioritize incoming requests or tickets based on a customer’s loyalty tier or lifetime value. This practical application of data ensures it plays a central role in driving business outcomes across various departments.

Enhanced personalization and customer experience

Reverse ETL pushes real-time customer data from the warehouse into tools like CRMs and engagement platforms so marketing and customer-facing teams can leverage detailed insights for more impactful personalization.

With access to live data and insights, marketing teams can tailor interactions and content that resonates with individual customer preferences and behavior. For example, a campaign manager can segment audiences more precisely, sending personalized emails and messages that accurately reflect a customer’s most recent activity or purchase history. 

Seamless automation and integration

Reverse ETL tools offer connectors that automate the flow of data from the warehouse to operational systems. This automation ensures data is accurately loaded to its target destination, eliminates the need for manual data entry, and reduces the risk of errors.

Reverse ETL use cases

At its core, reverse ETL is designed to reliably and scalably move data from your warehouse into your marketing tools for seamless personalization and data continuity across your entire tech stack.

With that in mind, here are some of the key use cases driving brands to adopt and implement reverse ETL:

Personalized customer engagement

To resonate with your audience, you need to know everything about them. With reverse ETL, marketing teams can build highly sophisticated audiences based on all the data in your warehouse, including core attributes, customer profiles, and even custom data models your data science team has built.

They can then activate those segments across advertising platforms, CRMs, cross-channel messaging tools, etc, for personalized journeys and touchpoints unique to each customer.

Enriched customer support

Customer support teams can automatically prioritize support tickets based on real-time customer data, such as payment tier or lifetime value. By integrating more detailed data into support platforms, teams can ensure that high-value customers receive faster and more personalized assistance.

Sales automation

With reverse ETL, sales teams can have access to rich information that doesn’t natively exist in their tools. For example, modeled data from the warehouse that includes key attributes like product behavior to showcase how your customers are interacting with your app or what pages and products they’re viewing on your website.

They can bring data like lead scores, engagement history, and product usage metrics from the warehouse into their CRM to inform sales strategies and help reps focus on the right high-potential leads as well as tailor their outreach based on real-time insights.

Informed product development

Product teams can leverage reverse ETL to pull product usage data like user behavior and feedback data from the warehouse into their product management tools. This can help identify feature usage trends, understand customer needs, and inform product improvement, developments, and new feature rollouts.

Direct data access

For data teams, the main value reverse ETL provides is in the automation and reliability of moving data out of the warehouse. Reverse ETL platforms don’t store any data; they simply read from your warehouse and write to your destination. Rather than focusing on building and maintaining custom integrations or exporting manual CSV files every time your marketing team wants to run a campaign, with reverse ETL, all you need to do is ensure the appropriate data is available and servable in your warehouse.

Reverse ETL with MessageGears

With MessageGears, enterprise brands can harness reverse ETL alongside real-time identity resolution and automated data governance to enrich customer profiles in the data warehouse before syncing them with downstream tools for activation. 

For an even more streamlined approach, MessageGears serves as a fully integrated, warehouse-native data activation and engagement platform. This means you don’t need separate reverse ETL tools or a CDP (customer data platform) to build audiences or execute cross-channel marketing campaigns. 

By connecting directly to your central data repository, MessageGears empowers marketing teams to build audiences and launch email, push, SMS, and in-app messaging campaigns all within a single platform – without the need to copy, move, or export your data. This integrated approach means you no longer need multiple vendors to manage, analyze, and activate your data – MessageGears handles it all.

But if you do use other platforms for cross-channel marketing and for all the other tools within your broader tech stack, MessageGears’ flexibility and reverse ETL capabilities provide full data access and activation for every team across your organization.

MessageGears’ pre-built connectors make integration with your tech stack seamless. With direct data connection, marketers can use complete customer profiles to create sophisticated audience segments for activation across more than 250 third-party destinations. 

Examples include:

• Enhancing messaging campaigns by sending segments, audiences, and context files to Salesforce Marketing Cloud
• Targeting high-purchase likelihood individuals through Meta Ads/Facebook custom audiences
• Using the Google customer match (GCM) destination to reach users on Google-owned properties such as Gmail, Google Search, and YouTube

Test drive MessageGears today

Take advantage of MessageGears’ proof of concept (POC) to connect your data sources and destinations to our platform. Reach out to our data experts for an inside look and discover how you can unlock the full potential of your customer data.