How to Connect Snowflake and Marketo

A product-led growth business is more likely to have huge volumes of data tucked away in a data warehouse because of the low-bar entry into the product. Centralized storage with data integrated from dispersed sources helps the PLG businesses standardize, analyze, and report more efficiently.

In other words, a single source of truth so that growth teams can make data-driven decisions from accurate and consistent data.

Snowflake is one of the most popular data warehouses out there with the highest TAM share among data cloud platforms and continues to grow.

Apart from analytics, one of the most popular use cases of mobilizing data from Snowflake is powering customer communications. And, marketing automation platforms are usually the easy choice to reach out to customers at scale.

Marketo is a highly-rated enterprise marketing automation platform used by marketers globally. The goal behind connecting Snowflake and Marketo would be to use actionable raw data to fire up personalized campaigns to communicate with your customers at scale. The integration would also help in analyzing and taking data-driven decisions in marketing.

But, in reality that is not as easy as it sounds. Because

1. There is no direct integration between Snowflake and Marketo.
2. You can connect them using ETL or reverse ETL solutions like Stitch, Census, or Hightouch. These tools come with a fairly easy connection process to start syncing data from Snowflake to Marketo and their share of problems by no fault of their own.

Data Flow into Marketo Can Be Limited

A major disadvantage of using Marketo for syncing product event data is the API call limitation. Marketo’s pricing structure is not exactly made for PLG data volume. Let me explain.

For PLG businesses, daily product activity generates an immense volume of events. Marketo's pricing levels have limitations on API calls with their highest-priced plan allowing 50K API calls daily.

Either you compromise by choosing what data flows to Marketo, limiting your understanding of your users or you end up paying a lot more than originally planned.

The Custom Object Conundrum

Similar limitations are set for creating a custom object field in Marketo.

Creating custom objects in Marketo requires some technical expertise. It is also time-consuming depending on the number of product events you chose to track.

If you are a PLG business with a lean growth team, dedicating resources with coding expertise for the data sync facilitation in Marketo might even be unaffordable.

Data Delays and Poor Quality

Sending data into Marketo in batches owing to the API call limitations also means that there is a high possibility of working with duplicate data if you don’t have a deduplication tool in the mix.

Using a reverse ETL tool also has the disadvantage of batch-processing data. That means your campaigns are triggered off of old data and not in real time.

Inflection with Snowflake for PLG Use Cases

If you are a B2B PLG business using Snowflake, Inflection.io is a better alternative for mobilizing your data from the source to power your growth automation.

Inflection offers native integration with Snowflake. That means no complicated data pipeline setup, no coding…not even SQL, and no dependency on engineering and data teams.

Snowflake can be the single source of truth for all your customer communications. With Inflection synced to your data warehouse, you can run campaigns to speed up onboarding, drive product engagement and adoption, and generate more revenue and pipeline. These are some of the campaigns you can launch from Inflection today.

All the data stored in your data warehouse data can be actionable. Inflection combines product activity and firmographic data to give you a unified view of your customer. With a complete view of the person and account activity, you can automate personalized PLG campaigns at scale.

Our backend also supports millions of contacts and billions of product activities. That means you need not pick and choose who gets your PLG emails and who doesn’t.

To find out more about our personalization capabilities for PLG, get started with Inflection.