The Ultimate Guide to Reverse ETL

Raw data doesn’t automatically translate into informed business decisions, successful marketing and sales campaigns, and 5-star customer service. Data needs to move effectively from one platform to another so that your teams can access it in real time. While ETL and ELT play a key role in aggregating your business’s data in a single place, reverse ETL is essential to ensure that the latest data is available to relevant teams. 

But before we jump into exploring what reverse ETL is, let’s review the basics of the modern data stack and the role reverse ETL plays in it. 

A Brief Overview of the Modern Data Stack

Data has always been important to businesses. Therefore, there have been continuous efforts to ensure that organizations can effectively aggregate their data in a single place and easily access it whenever it’s necessary. 

In the 1980s, tech companies started using data warehouses for the centralized storage of all their data. From there, they could pull relevant data when relevant professionals in a business required it. Back then, however, storing data required physical servers. This was expensive. Moreover, managing and accessing data was time-consuming and required professionals with specialized skills to operate on-premises.

As the technology evolved, so did the data stack, and data storage moved to the cloud. This was not only more cost-effective but also more secure and easier to manage and maintain. 

Nowadays, the modern data stack consists of a suite of tools that facilitate data integration, data transformation, data security, data governance, and more. These tools are usually simple and inexpensive, allowing even small companies to enjoy the benefits of the modern data stack. These are the primary modern data stack processes:

• Data loading – this involves either the ETL or the ELT process. During it, data is extracted from various data sources and loaded to the target platform – a data warehouse or data lake.
• Data transformation – making changes to the data format and cleansing it to ensure the quality of data as well as that it fits with the standard requirements of the database. 
• Data warehousing – data warehouses or data lakes serve as a centralized repository of all your company’s data.
• Business intelligence – since raw data doesn’t provide value, business intelligence and analytics translate it into visually attractive dashboards that provide meaningful information.

While dashboards are extremely valuable, they aren’t necessarily enough. So, reverse ETL closes the data loop.

What Is Reverse ETL?

Reverse ETL is the process of synching clean, processed data from a data warehouse to a third-party system such as an advertising platform, CRM, or SaaS app. 

The purpose of Reserve ETL is to operationalize data for further use by your business’s frontline teams. Since this data is more recent and complete, it allows business teams to perform more complex analytics than it would be possible with business intelligence tools alone. 

The Difference Between ETL, ELT, and Reverse ETL

ETL stands for Extract, Transform, and Load. During this process, data gets automatically extracted from SaaS tools, transformed, and loaded into your destination of choice, most commonly, a data warehouse or data lake. 

Fully managed SaaS platforms such as Hevo and Fivetran simplify the ETL process. They offer pre-built connectors that extract, transform, and load data. With new transformation tools like dbt it’s also possible to perform the ELT process, which stands for Extract, Load, and Transform. In it, data is transformed after being loaded into the data warehouse rather than before it. 

However, both ETL and ELT are one-way processes. Neither ETL nor ELT pipelines can read and write data to move it out of your warehouse. To perform reverse ETL, you need to write reverse SQL. 

However, ELT tools cannot execute the process. That is because they merge data and load it into tables based on data in the “updated_at” fields. If any errors occur throughout the process, you can delete tables and re-ingest the data. 

The process is different with reverse ETL. While you have rows of data that you need to sync, there are no “updated_at” fields. Therefore, you have to compare the values between your current data warehouse query and the one that you’ve previously synced. This step is important because it can prevent you from wasting lots of time and resources on synching all fields. 

Data rows that fail to sync can add an additional challenge. You need to ensure that you sync the right data, or else you risk resyncing stale data.

Reverse ETL Use Cases

Most likely, you are getting data from various data sources and injecting it into your data warehouse, where your data analysts and engineers can transform it. 

In the past, transferring data out of your warehouse back into a SaaS tool required you to manually download CSV files, build and maintain custom pipelines to each SaaS tool you are using, and then upload a CSV file into each of them. As you can imagine, the process was neither fast nor easily scalable. 

The purpose of reverse ETL is to democratize data so that not only data analysts and engineers but also customer-centric teams can access it. Thus, reverse ETL allows you to activate your data in order to create a better customer experience and improve a wide range of business processes. 

Let’s look into some reverse ELT use cases. 

Data Activation

Data activation involves unlocking valuable knowledge in your data warehouse and making it available to business users in their day-to-day life. Thus, data activation enables your teams to work toward their business objectives with the most recent data.  

For instance, your B2B company may need to discover what accounts they should focus on next. Instead of teaching your sales team data analytics, you can allow them to access the latest data directly in the SaaS solution they are using. 

Simplified Data Integration

With a vast number of SaaS platforms available, companies usually use several tools to run their operations. However, as they incorporate more tools into their workflow, it becomes important to share information between them. While many platforms support integration, others don’t, and many point-to-point integrations can also become challenging to manage and keep track of. 

Reverse ETL can minimize point-to-point integrations and simplify integrations. 

Data Automation

Large companies tend to require many manual data requests daily. For these queries to be successful and pull the latest data, data automation solutions are necessary. Here are a few requests that your teams can execute with reverse ETL:

• Syncing data of specific users to the Google Ads platform for retargeting purposes,
• Access specific users in Zendesk,
• Have support tickets sorted based on priority,
• Importing sales-ready leads from various marketing campaigns into Salesforce,
• Creating highly targeted marketing campaigns based on segmented lists.

Internal ETL

Reverse ETL can be beneficial if you require a data infrastructure solution for internal purposes such as software engineering or app development. It can help you personalize customer experience as well as access data from different sources. In this case, you can sync data from your data warehouse into production databases. 

This can be especially valuable for e-commerce companies that use their own apps and would like to personalize the in-app experience. Syncing data such as lead scores can help show personalized ads to a group of customers while offering special discount codes for others. 

Effective Customer Service

The experience your customers have when interacting with your business can determine whether or not they will return. This is especially important when handling issues and complaints. Ensuring that your frontline workers have all the tools necessary to offer a more effective, personalized experience. 

Reverse ETL can help you sync data from various support channels like HelpScout, Slack, and more with Zendesk. As a result, your support teams can easily access customer information, purchase history, prior support tickets, and more. 

Personalized Marketing and Sales Campaigns

Personalization in marketing and sales is becoming increasingly more important, especially in the aftermath of the pandemic when an increased number of businesses are operating online. Reverse ETL can help pull information on customers’ behavior throughout the entire marketing funnel. 

Such information can provide marketing and sales teams with the information needed to determine what marketing channel or piece of content has been effective in triggering the customer’s journey. As a result, they can create more personalized campaigns that have higher conversion rates and lower conversion costs. The information of the entire customer journey can also help effectively nurture leads who do not convert right away. 

How to Choose a Reverse ETL Tool

Not all reverse ETL tools perform equally well to support the rapidly growing needs of modern businesses. There are a few factors you need to take into consideration before you select a reverse ETL tool:

1. A Reverse ETL Tool Must Support the Latest in Security Technology 

Since reserve ETL tools manage data moving, the security and privacy of this data are paramount. This will help you keep your clients’ and customers’ data secure as well as will prevent you from additional fees, penalties, or similar. 

2. It Must Integrate with the Tools You Use

Your company uses a wide array of tools, apps, and services. For you to effectively perform reverse ETL, you need to ensure that the tool you select can integrate with each of the tools you use. 

The majority of reverse ETL tools will provide a list of integrations that they support. So, listing all the apps and services your business is using and cross-referencing them with the different revere ETL tools will help you determine which offers the most complete solutions for your needs. 

3. It Must Provide Reliable Syncing

Syncing is essential because it enables your data to be aligned in real time. Therefore, the reverse ETL solution you choose needs to prioritize. Else, you may end up providing your team switch faulty details. 

Leverage the Power of Reverse ETL with Datrick

Reverse ETL solutions help businesses bring real-time data into their day-to-day operations. If you’d like to make the right decision from the start and deploy a reverse ETL tool that best supports your business needs, Datrick can assist. 

Our experienced data engineers and analysts can assess your business’s goals and requirements, suggest the most suitable solution, and help you deploy and manage it. Schedule a free consultation with us to learn more.