Table of Contents

Introduction

Nurturing your customer prospects is a crucial task to increase your conversion rates—so how can you make sure that valuable leads don’t fall through the cracks? That’s exactly where software like Marketo comes in. Marketo is a marketing automation tool to help standardize and automate your marketing funnel, helping push your prospects along the buyer’s journey from awareness to acquisition.

As you can imagine, Marketo can be a tremendous benefit for your sales and marketing teams—especially when they have access to as much data and analytics as possible. That’s the goal of the reverse ETL process. Standard ETL (extract, transform, load) seeks to ingest data from platforms like Marketo and transfer it to a centralized data repository. Reverse ETL, on the other hand, moves information out of this repository and into third-party platforms like Marketo for easier access, helping to operationalize your enterprise data.

But how can you perform Marketo reverse ETL? In this article, we’ll offer five tips, tricks, and best practices to help you get off the ground with reverse ETL for Marketo.

1. Select Your Data

The Marketo platform is optimized to store any and every kind of data about your company’s marketing automation workflow. The end goal is to obtain a customer 360 view of your prospects, including their behavior across channels such as web, email, mobile apps, and social media.

As such, it can be helpful to consider integrating your Marketo data with information from other platforms, such as your CRM (customer relationship management) software, your customer support platform, and your e-commerce or finance data. All of this information will need to be extracted from your centralized data warehouse (or wherever it happens to be stored) during the reverse ETL process.

Related Reading: The Power of Customer Support Data for Marketing

2. Select Your Marketo Reverse ETL Target

Next, consider the desired destination of your Marketo reverse ETL process. Where will this data end up after being sent out from your warehouse, and how will you use it for business intelligence and analytics?

The Marketo platform comes with no shortage of analytical capabilities, offering everything from pre-built dashboards to customized reports and business intelligence. In particular, Marketo’s Advanced BI Analytics feature enables users to make queries, get answers to complex questions, and reveal hidden trends and insights with custom visualizations.

3. Select Your Reverse ETL Transformations

As your data travels from your warehouse to third-party systems like Marketo during reverse ETL, it’s important not to neglect the intermediary “transformation” stage. At the very least, this phase should include checks to verify that the data matches the target database schema (and transform it as necessary if it does not).

More advanced transformations might also be advisable, depending on the exact contents of the data that you’re sending into Marketo. Data cleansing, for example, maybe a smart idea given that customers’ and prospects’ contact information tends to quickly degrade and become more inaccurate over time.

Related Reading: Data Transformation: Explained

4. Select Your Queries

Steps 1 through 3 have discussed the various stages of the reverse ETL process: extracting the data, loading it into Marketo, and performing any transformations in between. So what should you do with this information now that reverse ETL is complete?

The objective of reverse ETL is to operationalize your valuable enterprise data by getting it out of the warehouse and into the hands of people who need it—so think about how these people can use this data most effectively.

For example, the Marketo Advanced Journey Analytics feature enables you to examine, fine-tune, and optimize the entire customer journey lifecycle. You can supplement the existing information inside Marketo with data from your sales team to determine how much progress you’ve made at breaking down bottlenecks and speeding up the transition between stages of the journey.

5. Select Your Marketo Reverse ETL Tool

There’s one final issue to consider: choosing the best Marketo reverse ETL tool for your needs. Unless you have deep pockets and an in-house team of ETL experts to spare, opting for a pre-built ETL tool will be a much smarter return on your investment.

So what kind of reverse ETL tool should you choose? First, make sure that your choice of tool can easily integrate with Marketo and other platforms in your tech stack. Second, look for a tool that prioritizes ease of use: it will help boost user adoption and make it easier for employees to get the self-service they need to excel at their jobs.

How Integrate.io Can Help with Marketo Reverse ETL

If you’re looking for a Marketo reverse ETL tool, you’ve come to the right place. Integrate.io is a powerful and feature-rich ETL and reverse ETL data integration platform for building automated data pipelines. With more than 100 pre-built integrations and connectors—including Marketo—and a no-code drag-and-drop user interface, Integrate.io makes it a snap to get started with reverse ETL for Marketo.

Ready to learn more about how Integrate.io can help with Marketo reverse ETL? Get in touch with our team of data experts today for a chat about your business needs and objectives, or to start your 14-day pilot of the Integrate.io platform.