Why marketers should prioritize data portability

5 Minute Read

Imagine you need to pull in web data, commerce data, and point of sale data to build audience segments for your latest email campaign. Sounds easy, right?

Well, here’s the problem: Data is spread across your martech stack, and trying to combine it feels nearly impossible. It’s a roadblock marketers know all too well.

Figuring out how to store, manage, and ingest customer data can be challenging. On one hand, wrangling multiple third-party solutions can be costly and complex. But often, consolidating to one vendor’s tech stack traps your data in a walled garden. So, what should you do?

When considering data management solutions, focusing on data portability can help streamline your martech stack while providing the flexibility you need to drive greater personalization in your marketing.

What is data portability?

Data portability is the ability to stream data between systems with minimal friction. While most martech vendors claim their solutions enable it, this isn’t always the case. For instance, they might require a cumbersome extract, transform and load (ETL) process, an SQL query, or even an additional fee.

Essentially, your data becomes trapped in a single system because it’s so challenging to distribute. By contrast, a solution with true data portability enables you to easily unify and activate data into other third-party solutions in your tech stack. That means when it’s time to combine data from your CRM to your email automation platform, you won’t have to call IT for help.

Exploring the benefits of data portability

Seamless data movement is essential, especially for marketers looking to consolidate multiple functions — like customer data platform capabilities and cross-channel messaging — within a single solution. Along with giving you more control over your data, here are some other benefits:

• It supports data analysis and visualization. The flow of data between platforms can help you understand customer behavior through first-party data. Let’s say your site views and browsing history are captured natively on one platform, but you also want to pull in demographic and point of sale data for better identity resolution. Data portability makes it easy to import and integrate information into a central tool, helping you make data-driven decisions going forward.
• It helps you customize your martech stack. No two martech stacks look alike. Each team needs different tools, whether it’s for advanced analytics or targeted SMS campaigns. While legacy cloud models often restrict data movement, data-portable solutions encourage you to adapt based on your team’s unique priorities. So as your customer strategy evolves, your martech stack can follow.
• It empowers you to make the most of your data. For marketers, data isn’t just your main commodity — it’s the fuel for your strategy. Unrestricted data flow means you can spend less time dealing with technical roadblocks and more time leveraging the full potential of your data. And, with no constraints on where your data can go, the sky’s the limit for creative, intelligent customer journey orchestration.

4 tips to assess a platform’s data portability

How can you tell if a solution will allow you to unify data easily? Here are four strategies to help you make a determination:

• Find relevant brand case studies. The proof likely lies in brand outcomes. Look for case studies or testimonials showcasing how the platform has helped brands collaborate with external platforms. If you see how data portability features work through real-world use cases, it’s easier to envision how a solution can help you achieve your goals through data migration.
• Study the technical details. Don’t hesitate to delve into a platform’s data architecture and functionality. Specifically, a robust set of APIs and web hooks indicate it can easily communicate with third-party applications during the data migration process. With this baseline understanding, you’ll have greater confidence when it’s time to unify your customer data.
• Look for hidden rules and conditions. Every platform has an integration network, but some are designed to play nicer with third-party applications. Platforms may advertise compatibility with other solutions, but still charge fees to set up connections or transport data outside their ecosystem. Reading the rules carefully can help you find a solution that encourages you to leverage all of your data across your tech stack, instead of bogging you down with restrictions and additional fees.
• Consider access to cloud data warehouses. Cloud data warehouses increasingly act as centralized base camps for organization’s data. Some customer engagement platforms can tap directly into warehouses like Snowflake, creating a consistent bi-directional data flow. With real-time data access, you’ll have the updates you need to enrich data, improve segmentation, and create more personalized experiences across channels.

If you plan to streamline your customer data management, data portability is an essential capability to prioritize. When marketing team members can stream data in real-time across platforms, they’re empowered to find new opportunities for personalization, making your cross-channel marketing campaigns that much more effective.