11 Data Mashups for Growth, Profitability & Retention
If you are a fast-scaling business, these are the data mashups you need to discover growth levers, optimize spends, and make your processes efficient.
Uber integrates GPS data, traffic patterns, and user preferences to optimize its driver routes. Amazon combines data from customer transactions, website interactions, and inventory management systems to optimize their supply chain. These are all data mashups, a powerful way to combine data from various sources to create a single dataset that reveals fresh, powerful insights.
Making data mashups is the easy part—the tricky part is figuring out which mashups will make sense for your business at its current stage. It reminds me of this exchange from Alice in Wonderland between Alice and the Cheshire Cat.
So, what data mashups matter to startups and fast-scaling businesses? Let’s dive in.
Choosing the Approach
There are two approaches to set up a data environment for your business, from which you can create mashups.
- Approach 1: Start with an initial set of questions and then figure out which data sources can help answer those. Design data pipelines and sync frequency based on how regularly these questions come up from various stakeholders. This is a demand-driven or pull-based approach that’s specific when you are trying to solve certain business problems.
- Approach 2: Start by setting up a data platform with the data sources you have available; for instance, CRM data. Using this, build a data lake, explore the data, and let your business users know the kind of questions that can be answered using the existing system. This is a supply-driven or push-based approach that makes the most of the data you have at hand.
Both have their own merits. But today, let’s go with the first one. We start with themes and questions, and then figure out the data mashup required to answer these.
Goal #1: Growth
Business growth is everyone’s goal but rather than fire blindly in all directions, ask pointed questions and use data mashups to find answers.
Mashup #1: CRM Data & Billing System Data
Which are your growth areas by country, product, channel, or segment? To uncover your growth bright spots, mash up data from your CRM and billing systems. This will reveal patterns. For example, a product might be resonating strongly with businesses in a specific industry or region. Or a particular channel might be more effective for one product or in one region. The mashup will guide you on where to double down your investments for maximum impact.
Mashup #2: CRM Data & Sales Team Data
Mashups can also expose growth gaps or underperforming areas that require intervention. For instance, which are the areas not growing as fast as you’d like? Or which teams are growing faster than others? By combining CRM data with sales team structures and territories, you can benchmark team performance and replicate the strategies of your high-growth teams across the organization. If you are undecided about whether to go for a user-based or usage-based pricing strategy, this mashup can be useful.
Mashup #3: Product Database & Billing Data
Mashups can also be used to plan business development efforts. For instance, mashing up your product database with billing data will help you spot the agent brackets/tiers that are growing fast. This will help you plan sales incentives to motivate (and retain) your most effective sales agents.
Mashup #4: CRM, Billing & Reseller Portal Data
Teasing out customer and revenue distribution by geography and language can help plan marketing and product efforts better. If you work with reseller channels, a mashup of your CRM, billing system, and reseller portal data can be invaluable to see which partner markets are growing, identify your most successful resellers, and plan joint marketing strategies.
Mashup #5: Competitor Analysis & Market Share Data
For ambitious startups eyeing expansion, keeping a pulse on market trends and competitors is essential. By aggregating data from competitor websites, social media platforms, and industry reports, you can create a comprehensive map of the market and your competition. This should help you benchmark your performance and identify new market opportunities.
You get the drift? The approach is straightforward: set your problem statement, look for the data that will help answer it, and use the right set of tools to mash them up. At DataviCloud, we’re building a no-code platform where every business user can do this without relying on analysts. Just connect all your sources for a one-time setup and after that, it’s plug-and-play! Request an invite if you’d like to play around with the platform.
Okay, onto the next goal.
Goal #2: Profitability
As your business scales, you need to keep an eye on profitability. That means building a granular understanding of revenue drivers, customer economics, and product dynamics.
Mashup #1: Ad Campaign & CRM Data
What is the true ROI on your marketing and sales spends? You can’t rely only on the ROAS reported by different ad platforms. Mash up your ad campaign data from Meta, Google, or LinkedIn, with your CRM data and spot patterns. Do the best quality leads come from certain industries or regions? Which channels are delivering the lowest CAC? These insights will help you optimize your marketing budget.
Mashup #2: Historical customer data & Billing
Net Revenue Expansion, a measure of how your business has grown through upselling, cross-selling, or addons, is a key profitability driver. To understand this, mash up historical customer data from your CRM and billing systems. This will reveal your most profitable, expansion-prone customer cohorts. You can then double down on the segments with highest expansion potential through targeted efforts.
A challenge you will run into when doing this is that systems of record like CRMs and billing systems often overwrite metrics and don’t memorialize this data. This limitation makes it difficult to create cohort analysis and calculate NRR. DataviCloud is purpose-built for effortlessly handling such use cases—get an invite to try out our product.
Mashup #3: Email Marketing Campaigns & Purchase History
There are few sights as welcome to a startup as returning customers. By integrating email campaign data with customer purchase history, you can personalize marketing communications, recommend relevant products, and improve conversion and win-back rates.
We’ve covered growth and profitability so far. The third pillar in this holy trio is optimization across functions. a.k.a. how to do everything better.
Goal #3: Optimization
Mashup 1: Social Media Engagement & Customer Support Tickets
Customer sentiment matters at all times. But it is all-important when you’re trying to win early customers. Mash up data from social media (don’t forget the annals of Discord and Reddit) with customer service requests to identify pain points early and address issues before they escalate.
Mashup #2: Product Database & CRM
How well is the product doing? What about it is driving stickiness? Look at your product database and CRM data to understand which onboarding steps or product features have a high correlation to product stickiness. This will help you plan the product roadmap and optimize the onboarding journey. In turn, this will reduce churn.
Mashup #3: App Performance Tracking & User Engagement Metrics
App/mobile web performance can make or break your business in today’s mobile-first world—hence this mashup of app performance and user engagement. By combining on-mobile performance with user engagement metrics, you can get visibility into usage patterns and feature adoption rates on mobile. There’s also merit in comparing this user behavior with web activity, so you can tailor your solution by device.
The Tools of the Trade
One of the earliest rules of computing is Garbage In, Garbage Out. That’s true for data mashups too. If your data is scattered across systems in different formats, with varying levels of quality and consistency, you have your work cut out for you. You’ll need to start with data cleaning, then transformation, and integration to create an accurate, reliable dataset.
This is a frustrating process and takes up time that as a fast-growing startup, you may not be able to wait for. That’s why DataviCloud’s simple, intuitive data platform. We can import data from any source (spreadsheets to API) in a matter of minutes, help you map, merge or update your data, and quickly build models and dashboards relevant to your vertical. To get a peek and play around with the DataviCloud platform, get an invite to our Design Partner program.
