Salesforce Marketing Cloud to Redshift: Enhance Your Marketing Strategies

As you already know, moving data from Salesforce Marketing Cloud to Amazon Redshift is not as simple as it sounds. Between navigating complex APIs, dealing with nested JSONs, and handling frequent schema changes, the entire process can feel overwhelming. Along with the API rate limits and data freshness challenges, you’ve got a real headache on your hands.

But you don’t have to wrestle with manual scripts and fragile pipelines. With the right tools and approach, you can streamline your data flow, eliminate schema errors, and actually spend your time analyzing data instead of fixing it. 

In this article, you’ll learn two ways to connect and load data from Salesforce Marketing Cloud to Amazon Redshift. The first method uses Hevo Data, a no-code data pipeline platform, while the second involves exporting and importing data manually through CSV files.

Why Integrate Salesforce Marketing Cloud to Redshift?

Data migration from Salesforce Marketing Cloud to Redshift offers you several advantages. Let’s look at some of them.

• Redshift’s massively parallel processing (MPP) architecture allows you to handle large volumes of data in a concurrent environment. Integrating Salesforce Marketing Cloud data with Redshift will enable you to use MPP to optimize marketing campaigns during heavy workloads. 
• Sometimes, historical customer data can be analyzed to predict future trends. Redshift enables you to take snapshots of the data warehouse at a specific time, allowing you to roll back in case of data loss or experimental analysis.
• Redshift supports SQL querying for data transformation, providing a suitable data analysis and reporting format.
• It also has an automotive node failover capability, which ensures your application has minimal downtime.

Methods to Integrate Salesforce Marketing Cloud to Redshift

The following methods will teach you how to integrate Salesforce Marketing Cloud to Redshift: 

Method 1: Integrate Salesforce Marketing Cloud Data to Redshift Using Hevo

Hevo is a real-time ELT platform that streamlines your data integration processing through its no-code, flexible, and automated data pipelines. It offers 150+ data sources from which you can transfer data into the targeted system. 

Step 1: Configure Salesforce Marketing Cloud as Your Source

Prerequisites:

• You need an active Salesforce Marketing Cloud instance from which the data will be integrated into BigQuery.
• Create a Client ID and Secret inside the Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
• Locate the subdomain.
• You must be a Pipeline Administrator, Team Administrator, or Team Collaborator to create the Hevo pipeline.

Connect your Salesforce Marketing Cloud account as the source by providing the required credentials and configurations.

Refer to the Hevo documentation for configuring Salesforce Marketing Cloud as a source. 

Step 2: Configure Redshift as Your Destination 

Prerequisites:

• You must have an active AWS account.
• Set up and check if your Amazon Redshift instance is running. 
• Check if your Amazon Database instance for Redshift is available.
• You must Whitelist Hevo’s IP Addresses.
• Check if your database hostname and port number for the Redshift instance are available.
• Create a database user and grant SELECT privileges.
• You should be assigned any administrative role except for the Billing Administrator to create the destination in Hevo. 

Connect your Redshift account as the destination by providing the required credentials and configurations.

For more information, refer to the Hevo documentation on configuring Redshift as your destination.

Method 2:  Integrate Salesforce Marketing Cloud Data to Redshift Using CSV Files

In this method, you first need to export the data from the Salesforce Marketing Cloud to a CSV file format. The CSV files will be loaded into the Amazon S3 bucket, where the data will be imported into your Redshift DB instance. 

Step 1: Export Data from Salesforce Marketing Cloud to CSV File Format

Prerequisites:

• You should have an active Salesforce Marketing Cloud account. 
• You need to see which fields are exportable while exporting a list from the marketing list. 
• When exporting the file from the marketing cloud, you must choose whether to receive it via an FTP account or email.

Follow the steps to export a list from the marketing cloud in CSV file format: 

• Go to the Subscribers option on your marketing cloud dashboard and click on Lists. 
• Click on Export under Actions next to the list you want to export. 
• Click on Next in the wizard dialog box and specify the mandatory details in the File and Delivery dialog box. 
• Click on Next and select the data you want to export by moving the attributes from the box on the left to the box on the right. 
• Click on Export and begin the exporting process; once finished, click on Finish. 

NOTE: A dialog box will appear after the exporting process is completed. If you choose an email option, you will receive an email with a file in CSV format. If you select the HTTPS browser option, click Download File, open your file in a browser, and click Finish after downloading the file.

Step 2: Import Data from a CSV File to AWS S3 Bucket

Prerequisites:

• You need to create a user and permit it to create an S3 bucket and access data from it.
• Grant COPY command permissions to the user you created to read the file object in the S3 bucket.
• Download the CSV files from your local system.
• Create your Amazon S3 bucket in the same AWS region as your cluster.
• Create a folder where the S3 bucket will be stored. 

Follow the steps to upload the data from the CSV file to the S3 bucket: 

• Go to the Upload wizard in your AWS application and select the Add Files option. 
• Select the CSV file that you want to upload from your local system. 
• Select the Upload option to load the files in your S3 bucket.

Step 3: Export Data from an S3 Bucket to Amazon Redshift Instance

Prerequisites:

• Check if you have the IAM role permissions to upload data into your Redshift Instance. 
• Create and launch the Amazon Redshift cluster along with other database tables. 
• Check if you have the SQL client, such as the Redshift console query editor. 

You can create tables in your database and copy data using the COPY command on the Amazon Redshift query editor.

Load Data to Your Redshift Database Instance from an S3 Bucket

• Load the data from your S3 bucket to the Redshift table and execute the command below.

COPY table_name [ column_list ] FROM data_source CREDENTIALS access_credentials [options] 

       Here: 

• table_name refers to the targeted table in your Redshift DB instance. 
• column_list refers to the column in the targeted tables where you want to map the data. 
• data_source refers to the data path of the data file. 
• access_credentials refers to the AWS access credentials that are required for authorization.

Limitations to Integrate Salesforce Marketing Cloud Data to Redshift Using CSV Files

• You can’t directly transfer data from Salesforce Marketing Cloud to Redshift using CSV files, which makes the process lengthy. 
• As the S3 bucket you are using is not in the sandbox but an actual bucket, you will be charged more for the time your data objects are stored in it. This cost can be a hefty sum when transferring large amounts of data. 
• You can download up to 150 data fields per export file from your Salesforce instance. The limitation makes the process time-consuming. 

Conclusion

Integrating data from the Salesforce Marketing Cloud to Redshift lets you quickly retrieve data, perform complex analyses, and optimize your marketing strategies. You can integrate the two platforms using CSV files, which can be lengthy or Hevo. The platform is designed to be scalable and smoothly integrates your marketing data from the Salesforce Marketing Cloud into the Redshift DB instance with its automated data pipeline. 

With its minimal learning curve, Hevo can be set up in just a few minutes, allowing users to load data without compromising performance. Sign up for Hevo’s 14-day free trial and experience seamless data migration.

FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions)