Creating a Marketing Cloud Data Model: Where to Start

If you’ve dug around the system, you’ve no doubt come up against a number of strange terms and if you’ve charged forward and attempted to create your data model already, perhaps you’re seeing duplicate contacts as a result.

This isn’t uncommon! We speak with many users who are lumbered with Marketing Cloud Engagement when joining a new company or following a basic implementation. Often, they’ve been plowing their way through, trying to successfully pull in data sources and set up journeys single-handedly. The result is confusion, many hours of troubleshooting, and an unreliable database.

Creating a data model can be complicated, especially if you’re not familiar with best practices.

Allow us to remove some of the headaches for you with this basic introduction to the key terms and steps.

Firstly, it’s important to learn the basic words and phrases you’ll encounter when managing data in Marketing Cloud.

Once you have your head around the jargon, you can begin planning your own data model. Note I said planning, not building… yet! 

Start with these steps:

• List all of the data sources you have.

• List all of the field values (attributes) you collect using these sources.

• Consider which you want to store and use, and which you can ignore/

• Use a visual diagram to map out how you want to group your data i.e. one table for shipping information, one table for customer purchase history, one table for basic customer details, etc.

• Decide which attribute will be your primary / contact key - what’s the single unique value that identifies a contact?

By the end of this process, you should be able to visualise how many Data Extensions you’ll need, which columns and attributes they’ll contain, and how each is related to the others, along with the primary key that identifies the same customer across all of the Data Extensions.

In essence, you’ve designed your data model!

Once you have a clearly defined plan, you can jump into Contact Builder and start creating your Marketing Cloud data model.

At this stage, you should:

1. Integrate your various data sources but don’t import data just yet.

2. Setup your Data Extensions and their attributes.

3. Create an Attribute Group in Data Designer and link the Data Extensions and attributes to be included, along with the primary / contact key. If you miss this step, you won’t be able to use the attributes in Journey Builder decisions.

4. Import your contact data to the relevant Data Extensions.

1. Clearly define your marketing objectives and goals. Recognise the critical metrics and data points for your marketing strategy.

2. To create a single customer profile, combine data from various sources (website, CRM, social media, etc.). This enables personalised marketing efforts and a more in-depth understanding of customer behaviour.

3. Establish stringent data quality and governance standards. Ensure that the data is accurate, consistent, and complete. Implement processes to clean and validate data regularly to maintain a high level of quality.

4. Prioritise data security and regulatory compliance (e.g., GDPR, CCPA). To protect sensitive customer information, use encryption, access controls, and other security measures.

5. Create a customer journey that takes them from awareness to conversion and beyond. Determine touchpoints and interactions across multiple channels. This knowledge will assist you in defining the data entities and relationships required to track and analyse customer behaviour.

6. Create a data model that will grow with your company. Think about future data volume increases and make sure your infrastructure and architecture can handle the growing dataset without sacrificing performance.

7. Integrate powerful analytics and reporting capabilities into your data model. This enables marketing teams to gain actionable insights and assess the efficacy of their campaign.

Hopefully, this blog post has put you on the right track to creating a Marketing Cloud data model but if you’re feeling overwhelmed, or you’re already stuck with database issues and need a helping hand, we have the perfect solution. 

Take a look at our Marketing Cloud database management service and get in touch today.