Reverse ETL Has Crossed the Chasm

Edited 11/11/22 3:09pm to address potential accuracy concerns

Something interesting happens when a technology crosses the chasm. It goes from a “new kid on the block” to “an industry standard” seemingly overnight.

“An overnight success takes ten years.” - Jeff Bezos

In the last few months, it’s become evident that Reverse ETL has crossed the chasm. It’s hard to believe that just a few years ago, data leaders regularly asked us, “why would you want to use the data warehouse as a source?” Fast-forward to now, and every day new enterprises come to us saying, “well, the data warehouse is already our source of truth. We’re interested in learning how Hightouch can help us put that data to work.”

Reverse ETL architecture

The movement is real and is only gaining momentum. Let’s take a look at the last 90 days of Reverse ETL.

#1: Mainstay Industry Analysts like Gartner are Recognizing the Potential of Reverse ETL and Data Activation

Last week, we announced that we were recognized as a Cool Vendor by Gartner in their 2022 Cool Vendors in Marketing Data & Analytics report as a modern alternative to traditional CDPs. Being only in our second year of go-to-market, this is a massive validation for the momentum of Reverse ETL and Data Activation… not just by startups and early adopters but also in the enterprise sphere.

Gartner Cool Vendor 2022

#2: Traditional CDPs are Building Connectors from the Warehouse

CDPs are recognizing the importance of the data warehouse. We’ve been pretty vocal about our predictions, so this shouldn’t come as a surprise, but just in the last month, CDPs like Salesforce, Segment, and mParticle all announced pipelines from the data warehouse into their CDPs. Our perspective is that fully embracing the warehouse as your CDP and rethinking the CDP architecture from the ground up brings a number of benefits (flexibility, time-to-value, cost-effectiveness, etc.), but we are excited to see how these new solutions play out in practice. Nevertheless, the fact that vendors who’ve historically had a vested best interest in remaining the “source of truth” are now organizing around the warehouse confirms our warehouse-centric mission from the start.

The CDP is and will always be stuck in “user-events land,” with no flexibility to capture other objects. Reverse ETL platforms and Composable CDPs can handle any data type. This, to me, represents the real reason why tools like Hightouch are the future.

Austin Hay

Head of Marketing Technology

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Ramp

#3: Hightouch and Reverse ETL are Being Recognized by Modern Data Stack Leaders like Snowflake and Fivetran

Reverse ETL is the last mile of the modern data stack…and our partners are here for it ✌️. Earlier this summer, we were named Snowflake Marketplace Partner of the Year for Media, Entertainment, and Advertising. We were recognized for making it seamless for marketers to create custom audiences with first-party data easily and then activate that data across marketing platforms and advertising networks. Just two months later, we were again recognized in Snowflake’s Modern Marketing Data Stack Report as a best-of-breed solution used by Snowflake customers to convert valuable prospects into loyal customers.

Snowflake Marketplace Award

Hightouch's Data Activation platform delivers deep value to the Snowflake ecosystem, and we look forward to continuing to build upon our partnership.

Kieran Kennedy

Head of Marketplace

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Snowflake

Last month Fivetran, the leading ELT platform, named their five Global Tech Alliance Partners of the Year: Snowflake, Databricks, Google Cloud Platform, Hightouch, and Sigma. This recognition put us in very elite company, validating the integral role of Data Activation alongside pipelines, warehouses, and BI in the modern data stack.

Fivetran Global Tech Alliance award winners

#4: Our Customers are Fanatical about the Leverage We’re Creating for Their Teams

Receiving validation from vendors, industry analysts, and partners is great and all…but to us, none of it matters if our customers don’t feel the same. Everything we do—from our engineering roadmap, to our approach to customer success, to go-to-market strategy, to our brand values—is designed with obsessive customer-centricity in mind. None of the above validation would exist if it weren’t for our customers who push the limits of what’s possible with data each and every day. Here are a few recent examples that come to mind:

• IntelyCare was able to simultaneously grow 360% year-over-year and save $1 million in marketing spend…all by activating their data to drive more tailored experiences to their prospects. Check out the case study to learn how they brought together Hightouch, Snowflake, and Fivetran to make it happen.

• PrestaShop overhauled their data stack to center on BigQuery as the source of truth. They’re seeing early and outsized results with more and more teams moving beyond BI and driving business results with actionable data at their fingertips.

Since building out a modern data stack—that includes Fivetran, BigQuery, Looker, and Hightouch—we’ve enjoyed a 7-point improvement to our net promoter score. We use Hightouch to sync modeled data directly from Looker into Zendesk, and as a result of having actionable data in their preferred tool, our success team has achieved a 33% improvement in median time to resolution.

Remi Paulin

Data Architect

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PrestaShop

• We were recently ranked #1 in Reverse ETL in G2, a peer-to-peer review site for enterprise software. Our customers cited us as #1 Easiest to Use, Fastest Implementation, and Best ROI. With an average 4.5 star rating (out of 5) from 134 happy customers (and counting!), we remain laser-focused on continuing to earn this esteemed recognition each and every day.

G2 ratings and reviews

In the last 60 days, over 50 enterprises have followed suit and chosen Hightouch to activate their data. Below are some of the new logos we’ve added to our homepage. You can also catch this 10-minute clip about how Warner Music Group is using Hightouch and Snowflake to maximize the value they get from their data.

Recent Hightouch enterprise customers

Looking Ahead

​​While the market is moving incredibly fast, it's still early days. What's exciting to us is that whether you're a digitally native brand already using a CDP, a century-old retailer on the journey of digital transformation, or a fast-growing startup, all roads point to the data warehouse as the source of truth for customer data.

We’ll continue to focus on explaining how Reverse ETL and Data Activation can help not just with automating data integration pipelines, but also to deliver tangible business results and ultimately, better customer experiences. Thanks for being part of the journey with us. We’re excited about what’s ahead.