What is data onboarding?

If data onboarding were as simple as uploading the same type of customer file over and over again, it might be a more manageable process. But raw customer data comes in all types of formats and standardizations. Every scenario is different. 

What makes onboarding data even more complicated is that it can involve data from a variety of external sources. It’s up to marketers to comb through this data and correct errors, perhaps enrich the data with additional information, and standardize it as necessary until the data is in an uploadable format for CRMs or marketing analytic platforms. 

Once uploaded, marketers must leverage online identifiers and device IDs to match the new customer data with existing, pre-stored data or to group together the new customer data into unknown customer IDs. There are two main types of IDs that marketers to use to track the activity of any given customer: 

• Cookie IDs, which track how often a given customer (known or unknown has visited any particular website).
• Ad IDs, which are generated when a user visits any particular application and used specifically for improving advertisements based upon app usage.
  Though the data onboarding process can be tedious given the amount of corrections that need to be made to any given offline data and combined with the huge quantities of online data that any one customer/prospective customer can generate, it is essential to the foundation of marketing. Good data onboarding must be:
  • Accurate. Without accurately-stored customer data, marketers cannot perform any of their lead nurturing activities nor provide an accurate report on their marketing performance. What good is a flurry of marketing activity if you don’t know which customers are generating it? Each customer profile should include all marketing activity and as much contact information as possible.
  • Fast. Accuracy is certainly a critical tenet of data onboarding, but so is speed. Just think about how fast marketing data changes—social media data, online ads or website interaction data needs to be processed in hours, not days in order to provide useful insights. Even in our earlier example of uploading new contacts to a CRM, time is of the essence. Salespeople won’t be content waiting around for days just to get the list of contacts that they can call for potential new business. Marketers must act fast—and with precision—in performing data onboarding.

Through data onboarding, marketers can fill the gap between online and offline customer engagement. And better understanding the relationship between the two offers a wealth of opportunities for modern marketers, such as: 

• Retargeting customers that engage in offline activities in an online environment
• Building a 360º customer profile that offers a complete view of all historic customer activities 
• Offering a more personalized experience targeted to demographics, needs, etc. of each customer 
• Identifying high-profile customers that require special attention
• Understanding how to improve the disconnect between an offline and online experience

Here at Trifacta, the rate at which we’re seeing marketers use the Trifacta data preparation platform for data onboarding is huge. 

The primary advantage we hear from marketers for using Trifacta is the ability to cleanse and prepare data with an intuitive interface—no more piecing together Excel spreadsheets or recruiting data science teams for help. But the automation that Trifacta provides is key, too. With the ability to schedule repeated transformations for each new dataset, marketers are often left to review transformed data, instead of preparing it from scratch. 

Take Malwarebytes, for example, a malware company whose marketing team is using Trifacta to onboard data into their marketing automation platform, Marketo. Before Trifacta, the team relied on Excel, but they also needed a lot of additional help from their data science team that cost untold hours in delays. It wasn’t until they adopted Trifacta that the team was able to accelerate their process, onboarding 40,000 leads into Marketo—the equivalent of six months work—in just three months. 

To learn more about how Malwarebytes is transforming their data onboarding operations with Trifacta, watch the video on the left.