Customers’ expectations around experience get higher every year, while increased regulation around tracking and customer data privacy makes it harder and harder to meet that demand. It can be hard to be a good steward of your user data while also ensuring you’re getting the most out of the data you’re collecting. That’s where reverse ETL can help.

Reverse ETL gives marketers access to the high-quality, governed data they need to achieve their goals — from delivering personalized messages to the right users, to understanding offline and online cross-channel conversions, to segmenting customers based on real product and engagement signals. Reverse ETL pipelines move and activate the relevant data directly in the tools where the marketers work. This unlocks new levels of precision and effectiveness, elevating campaigns, experiments, and customer experiences. 

Here’s how two companies — Notion and Canva — went from good to great with reverse ETL.

Notion: Realizing the romance of reverse ETL

When all-in-one digital workspace management tool Notion first heard of reverse ETL, they weren’t sure it was for them.

The company was early in its data journey and had focused on getting data into its warehouse. So they didn’t quite see why they should do more work to pull all that data out of the warehouse right after putting it there.

However, a few months later, Jamie Quint, Head of Growth at Notion, wanted to get data from Snowflake into Salesforce, Facebook Ads, and Customer.io so his team could put together a 360-degree customer view, granular segmentation, and ad retargeting more effectively.

But, at the time, Jamie was one of 13 people on the team, and they had to optimize for value and time wherever possible, which meant he knew he didn’t have time to build reverse ETL himself.

‍

That’s where Census, now a Fivetran company, came in. Thanks to reverse ETL, Notion can easily share segments across tools and integrate them into Salesforce workflows to power lead scoring and better understand their product-qualified leads (PQLs). Beyond Salesforce, they can sync data into Facebook custom audiences with ease.

“Now we don’t have to go through a whole time-consuming process of exporting email addresses and reuploading them on a regular basis in order to update them. That just wouldn’t have been very feasible for us. So having an automated tool to do that was pretty important.” — Jamie Quint, Head of Growth, Notion

As Quint says: “Do you have the problem of getting data into other tools? If so, you should definitely use [reverse ETL]. It's great.”

Canva: Another chapter in an epic story of user segmentation

Canva started using reverse ETL to get data from Snowflake into Braze, Salesforce, Facebook Ads, and Google Ads for segmentation, email personalization, and retargeting efforts.

But Canva struggled to get the data their marketing team needed into Braze, which made it hard for them to send relevant and targeted messaging to their 55+ million users.

They knew data maturity wasn’t where it needed to be, and the marketing team wasn’t seeing ROI on Braze. Thankfully, with reverse ETL, they could get the data into Braze to fuel more complex segments and reach users with targeted messaging.

From there, the marketing team created detailed campaigns for all their customers, including breakouts for hardcore Presentation users to get the information each person needed in front of them to drive conversion and build loyalty. With this new reverse ETL functionality and upgraded Braze usability, the marketing team was also able to run experiments around ad targeting with different propensity scores for each user, testing business impacts more quickly than ever.

Take control of your own data story with reverse ETL

Reverse ETL empowers marketing teams with the accurate, complete, and actionable data they need to personalize every touchpoint, understand cross-channel behavior, and deliver the right message to the right customer at the right moment. With product signals, lifecycle events, and enriched attributes flowing directly into the tools marketers use every day, campaigns become smarter, segmentation becomes sharper, and experimentation becomes faster and more reliable.

It doesn’t just help you “do more” with data — it transforms how marketing teams operate. Reverse ETL removes manual work, eliminates guesswork, and turns your warehouse into a growth engine. This can be done in an automated, self-service fashion, allowing you to maximize your time, scale your impact, and focus on the initiatives that truly move the needle.

[CTA_MODULE]