Knowledge Base

BlueConic Connections let you integrate your customer profile data with your existing data sources such as point-of sale systems, CRM systems, email service providers, and more. Using BlueConic Connections for data integration helps you make the most of your customer profile data.

Watch the video: Introducing Connections

What are BlueConic connections?

Connections are data integrations between BlueConic and over 80 marketing systems, ESPs, CRMs, and big data systems. You can use BlueConic connections in a number of ways:

• Unify your customer profile data by importing or exporting data from your marketing stack
• Employ BlueConic profile data in your marketing stack or ESP for messaging, recommendations, promotions, personalized content, and more
• Use BlueConic segments to create audiences for ad tech, messaging, or promotions
• Synchronize customer data with your CRM, ESP, ecommerce, or marketing platforms
• Stream events and data via firehose connections to big data systems and data lakes
• With universal connections, exchange customer order data, events, and transactions with other data source

How to create and run connections

To create and run connections you follow these basic steps:

1. Choose Connections in the BlueConic navigation bar and click Add connection to see the gallery of connections. 
2. Search for an external marketing system or type of connection (e.g., Facebook Ads, Salesforce, SFTP, or S3 connection to exchange via CSV files, etc.) to create a new connection.
3. Enter a name for the connection, and optionally add metadata to make it easier to find and manage connections, including getting email notifications for batch connections. See Best practices for names and labels for tips on naming them.
4. Add your credentials to authorize the data exchange between BlueConic and the external marketing system.
5. Create at least one import or export goal that details how to match customers' unique identifiers (email, unique ID, etc.) between platforms and how to map profile and/or event data to or from the other system. For example, you can set up profile property mappings or Timeline event mappings between BlueConic data and the customer data exchanged with external systems.
6. Save your changes, turn the connection on, and run the connection immediately or schedule it to run later.

See each connection's help page for step-by-step instructions.

Learn more

• See the full list of BlueConic connections. 
• Get tips on scheduling and running connections.
• Find best practices for exchanging profile data via CSV files.
• Learn more about using unique identifiers in BlueConic.
• Filter or transform data during import or export with BlueConic data processors. 
• Spot and fix errors based on the status of your BlueConic connections.
• Use Firehose connections to stream events from BlueConic to Amazon, Microsoft, and Google event queuing systems.
• Use the BlueConic Connections Overview insight to see how many profiles have been enriched or exchanged with data from other systems.