by Zeke Sexauer, on January 21, 2021
Universal Onboarding brings a simple, intuitive UI to data onboarding, enabling anyone to activate offline, first-party data in real time
Customers move fast, and marketers need an onboarding solution that allows them to keep up in real time. But the current process for onboarding data is arduous, opaque, and expensive. It’s highly manual and takes weeks to execute, often bottlenecked by the handful of large vendors that offer the service. What’s more, using these vendors traps you in their ecosystem: your data is tied to a proprietary identifier, requiring you to pay for each activation.
With Universal Onboarding, we’ve created a fully self-service solution for data onboarding, allowing users to match offline customer data to digital identifiers in minutes, without the need for technical expertise or upfront commitments. The app provides an alternative to traditional onboarding services characterized by a lack of visibility or control over data sources, slow turnaround times, and inflexible pricing models.
Narrative’s new Universal Onboarding product is great news for the market. The simple and easy to use capability to take offline data assets, such as CRM data and emails, and generate addressable identifiers in a matter of minutes without needing to talk to anyone, is exactly what we were looking for.”
Senthil Govindan
CEO, Datawrkz
Onboard data without engineers
We obsess over removing the bottlenecks and roadblocks that slow down data transactions. And the traditional onboarding process is chock full of them: You’ve got to download your CRM data, run it through a hashing algorithm to anonymize the information, set up an FTP between you and your onboarding provider, and then wait up to 2 weeks to receive the matches and activate your data.
We built Universal Onboarding as a simple self-service workflow so that anyone in the company can onboard data in five simple steps, without needing to get an engineering team involved. Once you upload a list of email addresses, the app will automatically and securely anonymize your private customer data via a hashing process before the data leaves your computer, match the hashed data to online identifiers, and deliver your matches without the need for FTP or any coding at all.
Get matches in minutes
You can get physical products delivered to your door in days. Why should it take even longer than that to deliver data?
Traditional data onboarding typically takes weeks to deliver results. We think that’s unacceptable. With Universal Onboarding, your data is matched to digital identifiers from our graph – a pool of 1.6 billion IDs – in a minute or less, with results delivered in one hour.
Set a budget that works for you
At Narrative, we’re committed to removing the barriers to entry that prevent people from getting started with data. And when it comes to data onboarding, cost has often been a huge barrier preventing smaller brands and companies from getting the most out of their first-party data.
With Universal Onboarding, you can start onboarding with a budget that works for you. There are no long-term commitments or hefty minimum spend requirements.
Other onboarding services charge you for the volume of data you upload, whether you get matches or not. We only charge you for the matched identifiers, and only as much as you want to pay.
For as little as $100, you can get access to a list of matched identifiers to use as you see fit for the next 30 days. That means you can activate the matches in as many places as you’d like for no extra cost. Again: You pay only for the matches, not the activations.
Build a custom onboarding solution
Universal Onboarding is also available as an API, allowing you to build, customize, and brand a data onboarding product for your customers directly onto your platform, powered by Narrative's data collaboration platform and supplier network.
Using Narrative's Universal Onboarding APIs, a customer can implement an onboarding solution built on their hand-picked data providers, and with transparent pricing rates negotiated with each provider rather than imposed by a traditional onboarding service. As a truly automated solution, matched data is forecasted in minutes and delivered in as little as one hour, providing actionable insights to customers in hours instead of days.
Break out of the LiveRamp box
We won’t beat around the bush here: Data onboarding is a space that has long been dominated by LiveRamp, but we believe their long term position of strength has led to them squeezing their own customers while failing to innovate their product offering.
We listened to our customers and noted what their biggest pain points were regarding the current solutions available in the market. We then set out to develop a product that solved for these pain points, creating a data onboarding solution that is fast, easy to use, and puts the customer back in control.
"We rejected existing onboarding offerings as they stand," says Tina Zhuo, Product Manager at Narrative. "Instead we designed and built an entirely new way to onboard: a beautiful, intuitive app for anyone to do their own onboarding. And now that we've built it, we can't believe that anyone would go back to what the industry has had to put up with for so long."
Narrative's philosophy is that what is good for our customers is good for us. Universal Onboarding is the next step in us executing against that philosophy.
Universal Onboarding is free to use and available today on the Narrative data collaboration platform. If you’d like to learn more about how Universal Onboarding works, visit the knowledge base or schedule a call with a member of our sales team.
