Salesforce Marketing Cloud to Redshift: Enhance Your Marketing Strategies

Today, customers’ choices have become fickle due to many factors, such as rapidly changing trends, increased competition, and higher living standards. Salesforce Marketing Cloud helps businesses anticipate these shifts. It provides a comprehensive platform for analyzing customer data and automating marketing across various channels.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud enhances customer satisfaction through its built-in tools and functionalities. However, implementing and configuring the marketing cloud may be challenging, specifically if your workforce needs more technical expertise. This is where Redshift comes in. 

Amazon Redshift has a user-friendly interface that is easy to set up. It helps you analyze vast amounts of data smoothly. Redshift enables you to Integrate data with other sources and provides a unified platform for data analysis. Opting for Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Redshift integrations enhance data warehousing capabilities and drives data-driven marketing.

In this article, you will explore how to connect and load data from Salesforce Marketing Cloud to Redshift using different methods.

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 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.

Overview of Salesforce Marketing Cloud 

Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) is a CRM platform that allows you to create, manage, and implement marketing campaigns and strategies to provide a personalized experience to your customers. It combines all the marketing channels, such as social media, email, SMS, and more, in one place and helps you communicate tailored advertisements to potential customers.

SFMC consists of various tools and functionalities, including an email studio, a journey builder, an audience studio, an advertising studio, an interaction studio, and more. These tools enable you to automate your marketing by sending emails, mapping out customer journeys, building segments, creating targeted campaigns, and more. Overall, the Salesforce Marketing Cloud lets you connect with your customers effectively, driving customer loyalty and engagement.

Overview of Amazon Redshift

Amazon Redshift is a fully managed relational database querying and management system developed by Amazon. It supports client relations and applications such as BI, reporting, and analytical tools, enabling you to run queries on your data and retrieve actionable insights. Amazon Redshift offers columnar data storage capability, which offers efficient storage and resource optimization.

AWS provides an ecosystem for Amazon Redshift to be compatible with RDBMS applications like Postgres, MySQL, Oracle, and more, facilitating smooth data migration and transformation. It also supports various data types and formats, making it suitable for modern warehousing. Overall, Amazon Redshift is a robust and scalable data storage and analysis solution.

Learn more about Salesforce Connect.

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. 

Benefits of Using Hevo 

• Automated Schema Mapping: This feature of Hevo automatically reads and maps the schema of your source data into the targeted system. 
• Data Transformation: Hevo offers two types of data transformations: drag-drop and Python transformation. They help you clean your data before ingesting it into your destination. 
• Incremental Data Loading: This feature of Hevo reads and loads the updates and modifications in your source data to the targeted system. 

Let’s see how Hevo helps you sync Salesforce Marketing Cloud to Redshift.

Step 1: Configure Salesforce Marketing Cloud as Your Source

Before configuring your source to integrate the Salesforce Marketing Cloud with Redshift, you must meet the following prerequisites. 

• You need an active Salesforce Marketing Cloud instance from which the data will be integrated into BigQuery.
• Create 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.

Follow the steps given below to configure the Salesforce Marketing Cloud as a source:

• In the Navigation Bar, click PIPELINES.
• Click + CREATE in the Pipelines List View.
• Select Salesforce Marketing Cloud from the Select Source Type page.
• Enter the mandatory on Configure your Salesforce Marketing Cloud Source Settings page. 
• Click the Test & Continue button to complete the source setup.

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. 

Follow the steps to configure your destination:

• Select DESTINATIONS from the Navigation Bar. 
• Click on +CREATE in the Destination View Lists. 
• Select Amazon Redshift as your destination on the Add Destination Page. 
• On the Configure Amazon Redshift as your Destination page, specify the following details:

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 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 file 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. 

Use Cases of Salesforce Marketing Cloud to Redshift

• Get a 360-degree view of Customer Data: Integrating marketing data from the Salesforce Marketing Cloud into your Redshift DB gives you a unified view of your customer data. You can study your customer’s interactions with your product on different channels and create a personalized campaign for a targeted segment.
• Build Predictive Models: With Redshift’s machine learning capabilities, you can build predictive analytics models to analyze historical customer data and predict trends and behaviors. Using these models, you can grasp growth opportunities before your competitors do. 

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. 

FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions)

Q. Is there an Amazon or Salesforce connector to sync data from the Salesforce Marketing Cloud to Redshift? You can use the Amazon Redshift connector to sync data between the Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Redshift. Although syncing to the Redshift object can take much longer than expected, the job quits after 60 minutes of reaching the threshold.