HubSpot is a customer relationship management (CRM) platform that helps you capture all of your interactions with customers and potential customers, from their first call or website visitors to their most recent purchase. With tens of thousands of users around the world, HubSpot currently owns an estimated 30 percent of the global CRM market share.
Usually, businesses capture and send data from HubSpot to a centralized data warehouse for storage and analytics — a process known as ETL (extract, transform, load). Recently, however, data practitioners have been seeing the benefits of reversing this workflow, sending data out of the warehouse and into third-party systems like HubSpot for specialized analysis and easier access for non-technical users.
This process is reverse ETL. So how do you perform HubSpot reverse ETL, exactly? In this article, we reveal 5 reverse ETL best practices for moving data from your warehouse to HubSpot.
1. Select Your Data
The HubSpot platform itself collects any and every kind of customer data that can help with your marketing efforts: demographic, psychographic, geographic, and behavioral. However, it’s also possible to enhance and supplement this data with other information from your data warehouse, leading to more informed decision-making.
Related Reading: What is Customer Data Ingestion?
The first step in HubSpot reverse ETL is to choose the data that you plan to extract from your data warehouse. For example, you can combine multiple forms of information — e.g., product, sales, and customer support data — to achieve a customer 360 view and create smarter, even personalized, marketing campaigns.
2. Select Your HubSpot Reverse ETL Target
So you’ve got the starting end of HubSpot reverse ETL figured out, but what about the destination? Next, you’ll need to decide where you want to send the data from your warehouse and how you’ll use it for your analytics and reporting needs.
Of course, HubSpot does come with top-notch analytical and dashboard capabilities, offering a 30,000-foot view while also enabling you to slice and dice your data (e.g., by marketing channel or asset). You can also take advantage of the integrations in the HubSpot App Marketplace, which offers a number of connectors to popular analytics tools such as Databox, Hotjar, and Klipfolio.
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3. Select Your Reverse ETL Transformations
In between extracting and loading your reverse ETL data, you also need to transform this information — at a minimum, making sure that the data from your warehouse matches the HubSpot target database schema.
The data transformation stage is also an excellent time to make sure that your HubSpot CRM data is fresh and accurate. Out-of-date customer contact information can lead to frustration and hours of wasted effort on the part of your employees. And, conversely, pruning and cleansing your CRM data can increase productivity and boost your profits.
4. Select Your Queries
Once you've loaded your extracted and transformed data into HubSpot (or another third-party system), the sky’s the limit in terms of what kinds of queries and analytics you want to run. The goal of reverse ETL is to operationalize your CRM and other data, so think about how employees can most benefit from this new workflow.
For example, one popular motivation for HubSpot analytics is to understand the performance of your marketing campaigns by measuring traffic from different sources. You can use supplemental data from your warehouse to “de-anonymize” anonymous visitors, which lets you better understand their behaviors and motivations. Then you can run fresh analyses based on these new insights.
5. Select Your HubSpot Reverse ETL Tool
The final — and perhaps most crucial — element of HubSpot ETL is to select the best ETL tool for the job. An ETL tool can be a lifesaver for organizations without the time or technical expertise to build their own data pipelines.
As a baseline, your choice of ETL/reverse ETL tool should come equipped with a pre-built HubSpot integration so that you can get up and running right away. Since HubSpot is one of the most popular CRM platforms, there’s no shortage of ETL tools that support it. Using one will save you the time, cost, and effort it takes to manually build your own HubSpot integration.
In addition, your HubSpot reverse ETL tool should emphasize user-friendliness, with a learning curve that’s gentle enough for even non-technical users. This will help employees outside the IT department access and analyze the data they need to do their jobs better.
How Integrate.io Can Help with HubSpot Reverse ETL
Looking for the right HubSpot reverse ETL tool for the task? Look no further than Integrate.io. Integrate.io is a powerful ETL, reverse ETL, and data integration platform for building automated pipelines between your data sources and a cloud data warehouse. Featuring more than 100 pre-built connectors and integrations, and a drag-and-drop interface, Integrate.io helps you simplify and streamline your ETL workflows.
If you’re in the market for a HubSpot reverse ETL tool, Integrate.io is here to help. Get in touch with our team of data experts today to have a chat about your business needs and objectives, or to start your 14-day pilot of the Integrate.io platform.