Reverse ETL

Reverse ETL is the process of taking the transformed taking stored in your data warehouse and syncing it back into business teams' tools and applications. This allows teams to access and utilize valuable insights within their preferred platforms, such as CRM systems, marketing automation tools, or customer support platforms.

ETL vs. Reverse ETL

To grasp the power of reverse ETL, let’s break down the classic ETL process. Traditionally, the ETL process is as follows: gathering data from various sources (Extract), cleaning and transforming it (Transform), and then loading it into a data warehouse (Load). While this works well for analysis and building a big-picture understanding of your business. the final step’s data warehouse is often disconnected from your everyday tools. 

Reverse ETL is like the cool, rebellious cousin of the traditional ETL process. It extracts the cleaned data from the warehouse, transforms it into actionable formats, and then loads it back into your operational systems—like CRMs, marketing automation platforms, and other SaaS tools (ensuring your team can act on data-driven insights right within the platforms they already use).

How does Reverse ETL work?

In short, the process is as follows: 

1. Extract Data: Pull the relevant data from your data warehouse. It is important to note that the benefits of reverse ETL are only as good as the quality of your data warehouse contents. 

2. Transform Data: Convert the extracted data into a format that is compatible with your operational tools.

3. Load Data: Sync the transformed data back into the operational systems where it can be used by your teams.

Why is Reverse ETL important for B2B marketing?

While we’ve already touched on this a little, both data and GTM teams benefit from reverse ETL. Your sales team can get real-time lead scores, your marketing team can create hyper-personalized campaigns, and your support team can access detailed customer histories—all powered by insights previously locked away in your data warehouse.

Moreover, reverse ETL empowers your marketing team to be more agile. No more waiting on data engineers to extract insights for you. With real-time data flowing into your operational tools, you can react quickly to market changes, refine your strategies on the fly, and stay ahead of the competition.

Finally, reverse ETL allows data teams to maintain a single, streamlined data pipeline instead of juggling multiple ones. This means sales, marketing, growth, and analytics teams are all analyzing and acting on the same, consistent, and reliable data. 

For B2B marketers, this means smarter campaigns, better customer relationships, and a significant boost to your bottom line.

Reverse ETL with Dreamdata

To access the full benefits of reverse ETL it is crucial to make sure that the data coming from your data warehouse is quality, to ensure the insights you access are correct. 

This is where Dreamdata comes in. 

Since Dreamdata collects, transforms, cleans, and models all your go-to-market data, you can ensure you have a data warehouse with clean, ready-to-use data – bridging the gap between data and business teams to enable everyone to use modeled data however they need.

Dreamdata’s native integrations already sync data with LinkedIn Matched Audiences, LinkedIn Conversions, Google Ads Customer Match, and Google Ads Offline Conversions. But reverse ETL can extend this functionality to new use cases that aren’t natively supported yet