These days, just about every software, service and platform collects data. Whether that’s consumer, user or product data, firms have access to more information than ever before. The more technologies you utilize the more data sources you add and the more data you collect (think CRM, marketing software, payment software, etc).
While more data is excellent, knowing how to access and categorize it is the real edge for marketers.
To make the most of the data deluge, enterprises are embracing the Modern Data Stack as a better method to gather their data in one, unified pipeline. The Modern Data Stack is made up of versatile and scalable data solutions, like data warehouses where user data is kept in databases like Redshift, Snowflake, Google BigQuery and many other SQL-style databases.
- What is a SQL Database?
- Why Query SQL Directly?
- How To Use SQL With Email Marketing
What is a SQL Database?
SQL stands for “Structured Query Language”: it’s a computer language used to access and manipulate data in a relational database. “Relational database” is just a fancy way of describing data stored in lots of tables with linkages between them. Think of a relational database as an immense spreadsheet.
To access and manipulate records from a SQL database, a user talks to the database by writing “SQL queries”. An SQL query is essentially an explicit instruction, or sequence of instructions, to retrieve the data you want, how you want it.
Writing SQL queries has historically been the domain of data engineers and analysts. Marketers looking to pull specific data or segments would normally ask the data team to conduct a query. Developers often have better things to do, so the queries wait, leaving marketing no alternative but to send ads to generic audiences.
Learning to write basic SQL queries is a technique that any marketer may acquire better actionable insights and segments from their data.
Why Query SQL Directly?
Most marketing technology and email products strive to be both your customer data platform and your marketing software. This is old-school thinking. Your customer data platform (CDP) and your marketing software don’t need to be the same. Because your data already sits in a database or central data warehouse, hiring a vendor to store your data means you’re paying numerous times to store the same data in various places.
Cost aside, one of the key difficulties with present systems is data accuracy. The more places you save your data, the more synchronization is needed to keep your data up-to-date. Syncing creates “room for error” that can lead to erroneous data.
Querying data directly at its source using languages like SQL means you’re reading from a single source of truth. This minimizes the danger of sending the wrong message to the wrong person, or, potentially missing marketing chances because your data hasn’t synchronized.
How To Use SQL With Email Marketing
Unlike traditional marketing platforms that require continual syncing, Vero Newsletters is the only email marketing platform created exclusively for the contemporary data stack. It enables you to utilize SQL to query your data straight from databases and data warehouses.
This email marketing technology stands as a clean layer directly on top of your data warehouse. This means you may load your customer and product data directly from your data warehouse into our SQL editor to narrow down an audience. No new JavaScript tracking or data synchronization required.
Vero’s integrated SQL editor makes it simple to conduct searches and narrow down an audience or segment to import into Newsletters for that particular message.
Once you’ve ran a valid query and are comfortable with the results, the results of that query are loaded as the list of recipients to send the email to. You can also use the data loaded from the query to customise the content of the email using dynamic fields.