Three ways to streamline your martech stack, with and without Adobe

The marketing team at data-intensive organizations often finds itself in an unenviable position. To create a secure single source of truth for your customer 360 data, your company invested heavily in a cloud data warehouse like BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift, or Databricks. But your martech stack remains anchored by the Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) — and the two platforms communicate with difficulty, at best.

This schism creates friction: To activate customer data for marketing campaigns, you must copy it out of your secure cloud environment into Adobe. This increases security risks and governance issues, introduces data errors and duplication, and creates data silos. 

It also results in redundant costs for data storage and processing.

But breaking this cycle doesn't have to be an expensive, all-or-nothing proposition. Whether you’re ready to transition from Adobe entirely or prefer to leverage your existing technologies more cost-effectively, you can do so by adding the GrowthLoop composable customer data platform (CDP) to your martech stack.

At GrowthLoop, we’ve developed three ways to streamline your marketing operations while capitalizing on your investment in your cloud-based database, so you can do it on your own terms.   

Option 1: Bridging the gap by augmenting Adobe

Integrating AEP with any data warehouse is fraught with problems. Data must be exported via daily batch file transfers — a slow, duplicative process that struggles to keep data flowing smoothly to and from your warehouse. Any updates or variations in data require a data team to build new pipelines, making it difficult to get the hands-on access to customer data you need for fast-moving campaigns. And because Adobe copies data from your cloud, it's never working from a single, real-time source of truth.

But marketing teams fully committed to AEP can still end the cycle of continuous, inefficient data transfers by making GrowthLoop the conduit between your data cloud and Adobe. 

By using GrowthLoop as a reverse ETL engine to sync the customer data in AEP with your data warehouse, you eliminate this rigidity. You maintain the existing links between AEP and your downstream channels, but the data itself remains securely within your data warehouse. 

Rather than flooding AEP with static files daily, GrowthLoop pushes only the data needed to run a specific campaign. GrowthLoop also syncs new campaign data back to your data cloud, ensuring that your definitive source of truth is always accessible.

Some of our clients stop there. Others, looking for further efficiencies, move on to a second option….

Option 2: Simplify and optimize with a data activation platform swap

Many organizations find the Adobe Experience Platform overly complex to manage and its pricing structure both opaque and costly. But their marketing teams are comfortable with the way Adobe components handle downstream channels such as journey orchestration, targeted campaign delivery, and email automation.

By replacing AEP with GrowthLoop, you can shift where your data activation happens without losing any of the channel functionality you need. AI-enabled audience segmentation and activation now occur within GrowthLoop.

This allows your team to retain the activation channels they prefer while eliminating the licensing costs, usage fees, and technical overhead of the AEP platform. Because GrowthLoop operates directly on top of your existing data warehouse, you can connect audiences and send campaign data and metrics back to the warehouse. 

Compared to AEP, GrowthLoop also has more straightforward and predictable pricing and is simpler to maintain. And you can be up and running in a matter of weeks.

Option 3: A unified, modern martech stack

For organizations ready to unlock the full potential of a cloud-native martech stack, the final step is transitioning to a single composable data platform by removing Adobe components entirely.

With GrowthLoop, you get a Compound Marketing Engine that not only activates your customer data but accelerates your entire marketing cycle. Using GrowthLoop, you can generate custom audiences, orchestrate multi-step, omnichannel customer journeys and campaigns, and send data directly from your data warehouse to your preferred marketing channels — no Adobe “middleman” needed. 

The result? A streamlined, cloud-first architecture. The security of a single data platform. And the power to build thousands of audiences in near real time. 

More than just streamlined: Real-world results

The advantages of GrowthLoop’s cloud-first architecture extend far beyond technical efficiency:

• Scalable: Adobe’s proprietary schema often hits performance ceilings as data volume increases. GrowthLoop allows you to handle any data type in your data warehouse — from standard customer records to unstructured image data — at any volume.

• Secure: A “zero-copy” architecture no longer relies on data transfers in and out of your cloud warehouse, mitigating security risks with personally identifiable information (PII) and virtually eliminating data duplication, data transfer errors, and version control issues.

• Cost-effective: You no longer pay for data storage and processing in two places, freeing up budget for innovation and growth rather than maintaining redundant systems. And with GrowthLoop’s transparent pricing structure, you avoid hidden fees and unpredictable, activation-based costs. 

• Platform-agnostic: GrowthLoop integrates easily with any major enterprise data warehouse, including BigQuery, Redshift, Databricks, and Snowflake. By linking your data cloud to GrowthLoop and unifying on a single composable customer data platform, you get a cleaner, fully integrated data environment.

• Fast time-to-value: Sprawling platforms like Adobe's can take months to integrate. But you can add GrowthLoop to your martech stack and be up and running in just a few weeks. 

Whether you want to harmonize your existing martech stack or you’re ready to fully transition from Adobe components to a modern, composable architecture, GrowthLoop can get you there — without disrupting your business.

Interested in exploring which option will work best for your organization? Schedule a time to discuss your infrastructure and how we can help you get more out of your investment in your cloud data warehouse.