Westwing boosts marketing ROI with Fivetran

“By helping us develop new solutions and at the same time maintain current connectors, Fivetran saves us 40 hours of engineering time a week. It means we can focus more on the strategic vision and spend less time building and maintaining pipelines.”
— Christian Manrich, Business Intelligence Engineering Manager at Westwing

Westwing is the European leader in inspiration-based Home and Living eCommerce with EUR 433m of revenue in 2020. Through its 'shoppable magazine', Westwing inspires its loyal Home Enthusiast customers with a curated product selection and combines that with gorgeous content. With unparalleled loyalty, Westwing is generating more than 79% of orders from repeat customers. Westwing's mission is: To inspire and make every home a beautiful home. The company was founded in 2011 and is headquartered in Munich. Westwing went public on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange in October 2018 and is active in eleven European countries.

The Problem

Manual processes hinders growth  

Westwing understood the value of integrating data in a centralised location – but manual work on their on-premise architecture was becoming time-consuming. To integrate with each different data source, every line of code had to be programmed with Python.

With an aging technology stack and a lack of proper data architecture, Westwing knew they needed to begin a re-platforming project: moving the architecture to the cloud – with Snowflake as the data warehouse – to achieve a more holistic view of the business. At the same time, a decision was made to outsource commodity services so the business could concentrate on its strategic goal of scaling an eCommerce platform.

With an ambitious cloud migration deadline looming, Westwing needed to find an ELT solution that could quickly and efficiently automate access to data. It was important for Westwing not just to tap into multiple sources quickly, but to maintain and adapt the pipelines going forward, allowing the company’s twenty data analysts and six data engineers to focus on tasks that delivered more business value.

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The Solution

Connecting more quickly to data sources

Fivetran was chosen for two key reasons: firstly, because it offered more pre-configured connectors than its competitors. Secondly, Fivetran offered an alternative to complex manual builds that were slowing down a business that wanted to scale quickly.

“Fivetran was providing most of the connectors we were looking for. Fivetran is doing a good job in areas that I had been looking to fill for a number of years.”
— Christian Manrich, Business Intelligence Engineering Manager at Westwing

Westwing now uses Fivetran’s Facebook Ads and Pinterest Ads connectors to measure the effectiveness of social media and advertising campaigns. Beyond marketing, Fivetran’s Google Analytics 360 connector empowers Westwing to understand how customers are interacting with the website and product catalogue.

Data from CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software like Salesforce and Braze is analysed to help nurture key supplier and manufacturer relationships. Across each data source, it’s Fivetran’s ease of use and reliability that has accelerated the use of analytics.

“It’s very easy to configure the connectors and get to the point where you are just watching the data flow."
— Christian Manrich, Business Intelligence Engineering Manager at Westwing

The Results

Benefitting the business

With greater visibility into organic social media activity as well as paid marketing campaign performance, Westwing is now in a great position to optimise its online channels and drive business growth. The company is focused on customer experience; an experience that can now be expanded and measured using Fivetran connectors, including Pinterest and Instagram.

“Our business is focused on loyalty and retaining customers,” explained Christian Manrich. 85% of Westwing’s sales are generated with customers who visit the site 100 times per year on average. “The investment in marketing is paid back several times because once we acquire the customer we take very good care of them and analyse everything they do to help them make better decisions.”

As well as helping with market intelligence and better visibility, Fivetran has freed up the data team from time-consuming manual work.

“By helping us develop new solutions and at the same time maintain current connectors, Fivetran saves us 40 hours of engineering time a week,” said Manrich. “It means we can focus more on the strategic vision and spend less time building and maintaining pipelines.”

Old, unsustainable architecture has been replaced by more agile solutions that make data integration simple and seamless.

“The main driver has been the technical aspects of what Fivetran can do – in the longer term there will be benefits to the business,” said Manrich. “And I'm really looking forward to experimenting with new Fivetran connectors to see what else we can achieve.”

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