A free, comprehensive and low-code toolset for data wrangling and AI to enable marketers to meet data demands
Marketers across industries and enterprises big and small are missing something. Key marketer-friendly segmentation and data wrangling capabilities are missing, despite recent major investments in cloud data platforms (Databricks, Snowflake etc.), and powerful customer engagement solutions (Braze, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Adobe Marketing Cloud, Iterable, Klaviyo etc.).
This gap is the “missing middle” of sometimes mundane, but strategically imperative marketer-friendly segmentation and data wrangling abilities. Often unglamorous, these features are easy to forget in the unrelenting windstorm of new AI offerings launching weekly. While these innovations can be overwhelming to keep pace with, a low-code and visual experience will be essential for marketing technologists to benefit fully from whatever new paradigm emerges.
This article will explore how KNIME can address the missing middle as an indispensable part of a modern composable marketing technology architecture, which is suitable for both small businesses and large enterprises (who are often looking to retire costly legacy solutions).
Read on if you:
- Rely on Braze, Salesforce Marketing Cloud or other customer engagement solutions
- You are waiting on IT for segmentation and light data wrangling
- You want to self-serve data prep without coding
What is KNIME?
Initially released in 2006, KNIME is a visual platform for analytics, reporting and integration. Since its academic and pharmaceutical focused origins in Germany, the firm now offers full-blown commercial offerings, while remaining faithful to its open-source tenets. KNIME is best known as an essential technology for enabling business users at complex European enterprises like Siemens and T-Mobile, but increasingly at North American corporations like Canadian Tire Financial. KNIME’s non-commercial offering is full featured and can be found as an essential “shadow IT” tool across countless non-profits, smaller organizations and for individual use.
KNIME is “installable” anywhere — from your laptop, to your organization’s private cloud. For the enterprise, KNIME offers the scaling, governance, versioning and collaboration features demanded by these environments and organizational standards.
The Middle Matters: KNIME’s Role in Modern Marketing
KNIME is an analytics solution first, but underlying is a powerful data wrangling foundation, which directly addresses the missing middle faced by today’s marketing teams. KNIME provides business users with a visual way of addressing two problems in an agile and autonomous (i.e. without IT) way:
- Understand and capture customer data from the data platform for their time-sensitive marketing strategies
- Prepare, cleanse, transform and transport curated customer data to their customer engagement solutions
KNIME + Data & Analytics Sources
KNIME enables these tasks by offering a full feature visual workflow capability, which is built around designing interactive workflows with nodes. While it is possible to configure nodes with Python or SQL, KNIME encourages a visual and self-documenting approach, which allows marketers to perform even the most complex data wrangling tasks without writing a single line of code.
While analytics platforms like Databricks and Snowflake have recently introduced visual workflows, these are built for roles like data engineers — not marketers. For example, Databrick’s Workflows, paired with Delta Live Tables is optimized for efficient building and monitoring data ingestion at scale. These are the essential pipelines, but they’re not intended to be configured for every new marketing initiative or to complete all tasks within a visual experience. Reached the limits of the visual interface? These solutions direct you to notebooks, where custom tasks require coding in Python or other languages.
The best approach is to have data & analytics platforms play to their strengths, while using KNIME to provide an additional layer of business expert agility with the data (watch the KNIME + Databricks demo).
KNIME + Systems of Engagement
KNIME is not a CRM, customer engagement, or marketing automation system, so it does not actually contact customers across channels. Instead, KNIME offers a flexible framework for integrating with systems of engagement, including their APIs and custom integration methods. Business users use this layer to provide customer data enrichment to get the most out of their customer engagement solutions.
Customer engagement solutions like Braze, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, and Adobe Journey Optimizer offer advanced journey building experiences, but they rely on curated input data. Often, the first roll-out of these tools are paired with big IT budgets that ensure useful data is readily available to meet the initial use cases. In subsequent months and years, it can be challenging to secure resources for the new data types that the latest marketing strategies demand. Meanwhile, IT has moved onto other priorities, but both campaign complexity and marketing demands have increased.
KNIME equips marketers with the data wrangling tools needed to meet the data demands of ongoing and future campaign needs. Some examples of tasks they might perform in advance of their customer engagement solutions include:
- Audience preparation
- Householding, deduplication & linking
- Rule based segmentation
- Scoring & ranking
- Custom split testing
- Regulatory filtering
- Quality control
- Campaign & data quality readiness checks
- Contact optimization strategies (e.g. antifatigue)
- Cleaning & minimizing customer data stored on customer engagement tool (for cost optimization)
Many of these tasks could be performed in other systems, but KNIME offers an open and flexible framework that can serve as the connective tissue during uncertain and rapidly changing times.
A Flexible Tool for Uncertain Times
KNIME is built on a foundation of openness, which is well suited for today’s uncertain times.
As a low-code and visual solution, KNIME (when using best practices) is automatically a self-documenting solution. Self-documentation has always been an important mitigating strategy for the “won the lottery” risk (only Bob knows how this code works), but it may become even more critical as marketers blend AI into their everyday tasks.
As marketers pioneer their own use of AI to build more automated content generation and personalization (aka “vibe coding” / “vibe marketing”), complexity will increase dramatically. KNIME offers a kind of Rosetta Stone or common language between these rapidly emerging technologies and the marketer. If you are looking to explain to leadership how something works, or train a new colleague, visual workflows offer the more human approach.
Bridging the Gap Starts Here
The missing middle isn’t going to fix itself, and the situation is only going to get more complex as additional AI tools and data sources are added to your stack. But, with the right approach, marketers can take control and react to these rapid changes and constantly changing business demands.
Here are two steps you can take today to bridge the gap:
- Download KNIME Analytics (free forever), which can run on your laptop, or on a virtual machine in your organization’s cloud (don’t worry, anything you build can be migrated to the commercial offering later)
- Reach out to discuss your environment. Get independent advice about your readiness for KNIME from experts that have decades of experience with the most popular customer engagement solutions & how they integrate with contemporary cloud data & analytics platforms.