Today, a major portion of the economy is online, or lives in a digital space. Society has long been integrating technology further and further into everyday life, and the virtual marketplace is just one result. While online shopping isn’t necessarily news by any means, the past few years saw an unprecedented acceleration into the digital era, which was largely a result of the global COVID-19 pandemic. Even before the pandemic, though, digital natives were already living a lot of their lives online through social media and various other platforms, creating massive pools of data waiting to be accessed. Naturally, it wasn’t long before consumer data became extremely valuable.
Data by itself isn’t all that exciting. It’s how organizations are able to decipher, interpret, understand, and act on that data that is really game-changing. Data activation strategies are designed to help organizations make real use of their collected consumer data in real-time. From delivering higher quality consumer experiences to improving consumer-to-customer conversion rates, data activation helps organizations better serve a modern audience.
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Pick and Choose Your Data
There are a variety of data activation tactics and strategies, but one of the most important data activation tactics to begin with is data synchronization. This is the process through which organizations are able to connect the data collected by different softwares they utilize. For instance, an organization may use Salesforce as their main CRM. This helps the brand connect with potential partners, customers, and other consumers. However, while Salesforce hosts a lot of customer data, it’s really more one-dimensional.
Snowflake, on the other hand, is a cloud-based data warehouse that lives on top of other cloud infrastructures like Amazon Web Services and the Google Cloud Platform. Snowflake is a unique data warehouse, however, in the way that they have separated storage from computing, which allows for unique and extremely customizable set ups.
As a data warehouse, Snowflake is also where important consumer data metrics are stored like product usage and event data. Often, even custom audiences are built and stored in Snowflake. These are valuable pieces of information that the sales team utilizing Salesforce could use to more accurately define customers.
In order to synchronize data from Salesforce to Snowflake there are a few easy and pretty straight forward steps to take. The first of these steps is data-selection. In other words, it’s unlikely that an organization will want to synchronize the entire pool of data available in Snowflake with another system like Salesforce. This would be time consuming, and in some instances ineffective. Therefore, users responsible with the synchronization need to tell the system which pieces of data should be synchronized. Understanding the different ways data is used throughout an organization can be helpful in deciding which pieces of data need to be synchronized across which systems. Granting a marketing and sales professional too much access to irrelevant information can sometimes cause clogs in the workflow and actually make things worse.
Develop Maps
After deciding which pieces of data you want to sync between Salesforce and Snowflake, the data needs to be mapped from one system to the other. This process dictates how the data will appear in its new destination compared to its old. This is vital in making sure that data is understandable for the end-user.
Mis-labeling data can lead to a myriad of problems like ineffective consumer experiences, and poorly designed marketing campaigns that could have otherwise been avoided with a higher attention to detail.
Data mapping is a very important step in correctly synchronizing your data in order to improve operations.
Creating a Sync Schedule
Finally, once the data has been selected and mapped appropriately, it’s time to get the synchronization started, and to set an ongoing schedule for future synchronizations. Data transfer and synchronization services like those provided by High Touch offer the user a plethora of both simple and advanced scheduling options.
Once a synchronization schedule is set for the systems at hand, the initial sync can start and your teams can start really making the most of the available data.
Also read: Top tips for high converting websites
Why Sync Salesforce to Snowflake
There are many reasons that syncing your data between Salesforce and Snowflake is beneficial. While Salesforce acts as a central CRM utilized by sales and marketing professionals to build and understand customers, it is missing a lot of pertinent data. Snowflake has this data at the ready, and can share it with Salesforce, and all the Salesforce users, to help paint a more comprehensive consumer portrait.
By empowering sales and marketing professionals with higher-quality data that grants them deeper levels of insight into the consumer, they are better equipped to design campaigns and consumer experiences that are tailored to members of the organization’s target audience.
Developing a strong data activation strategy can help any organization remain competitive among consumers in the modern digital economy.