Merret Retail Assist and Emarsys
Integration Agency & Consultants
Marketing campaigns lose their edge when they rely on stale operational data. This usually becomes painful when customer communications are triggered based on outdated purchase history or incorrect order statuses.
At scale, the gap between Merret Retail Assist and Emarsys creates operational drift. If purchase history and customer records are out of sync, your segmentation fails. This integration ensures that customer engagement is informed by relevant transactional data, ensuring that promotional messages and loyalty updates reflect actual customer behaviour in the ERP.
Audit ERP and ESP system gaps
Cogent connects Merret Retail Assist and Emarsys, ensuring your ERP and ESP systems work efficiently. Our consulting services, particularly our system audit, are invaluable. They identify inefficiencies and integration gaps, allowing our consultants and your team to take decisive action. This ensures your tech ecosystems, including Merret Retail Assist and Emarsys, operate smoothly, providing your customers with a great experience. By focusing on ERP and ESP systems, our audits help maintain operational efficiency and effectiveness, supporting your business goals.
Solution Design
The integration design establishes Merret Retail Assist as the source for order and product data, which Emarsys pulls to drive marketing automation. A key decision involves the handling of customer records to maintain compliance across both systems. We typically prioritise a structured approach for historical purchase data to ensure reconciliation accuracy, while using triggers for transactional events. This involves a trade-off: periodic syncs provide a stable foundation for deep segmentation but mean marketing segments may not reflect live store activity instantly. The resulting operating model ensures that marketing campaigns are informed by validated purchase history, reducing the risk of sending irrelevant messages based on out of sync information.
Mapping SKU and purchase history flows
Data flows from Merret Retail Assist to Emarsys to ground marketing campaigns in operational reality. Merret acts as the source of truth for SKUs, purchase history, and customer attributes. Purchase events sync through an integration layer that maps product identifiers to the Emarsys product catalogue, ensuring specific product data is available for personalisation. To maintain data integrity, the integration manages the global subscription status across both systems. Monitoring tracks sync success and flags cases where order data in Merret does not match events in Emarsys. This sequencing ensures that when a customer receives a post-purchase email, the supporting order data is already present and accurate within the engagement platform.
Orchestrating secure flows via IPaaS architecture
Cogent2 leverages IPaaS to integrate Merret Retail Assist and Emarsys with ERP and ESP systems securely. IPaaS platforms, compliant with ISO 27001 and SOC 2 and above, ensure secure data handling. This integration aids Merret Retail Assist and Emarsys in managing ERP and ESP data efficiently. Benefits include improved data flow, reduced manual errors, and enhanced security, ensuring compliance and operational efficiency.
Monitoring data integrity and sync exceptions
Standard dashboards often mask the failures that compromise marketing ROI. Our approach focuses on data quality monitoring between Merret and Emarsys, surfacing where customer records fail to sync. We track specific exception types, such as malformed product data or mismatched contact details, which prevent segments from populating correctly. Instead of just monitoring uptime, we monitor the integrity of the data being moved. When a sync fails, the system alerts the team before it affects a live campaign. This visibility allows operations and marketing to identify and resolve data gaps before they lead to incorrect customer communication.
Operational handover and alert management training
Handover ensures your ecommerce, marketing, and operations teams own the daily mechanics of the Merret and Emarsys connection. Training focuses on the operating model, defining who owns exception types like opt-in status mismatches or missing product attributes. We provide operational documentation that details where each data object lives and how to interpret integration alerts. Teams learn to perform regular checks on a defined schedule to verify that purchase histories and customer profile updates are syncing correctly from Merret. This documentation is written as a practical reference for running the business rather than a technical archive, ensuring staff can maintain data integrity and respond to alerts without IT intervention.
Post-launch governance and flow reliability support
Post-launch, we provide ongoing operational support to ensure your integration remains stable as your volume grows. Our support model includes monitoring of the Merret-to-Emarsys flow, surfacing errors before they impact your marketing. Issues are handled via an escalation process that prioritises data integrity and campaign continuity. We monitor for operational drift where data changes in one system may break logic in the other. This ensures your marketing team can focus on strategy while we manage the reliability of the underlying retail data.
Common failures
Customer record desynchronisation
Operational impact: Merret holds the master customer record, but changes like email updates or account merges are not consistently reflected in Emarsys. This leads to marketing campaigns being sent to defunct email addresses and CX teams viewing a different customer history to the one driving marketing automations. Inaccurate segmentation in Emarsys also means communications are poorly targeted.
Prevention / Action: Define Merret as the single source of truth for core customer data. The integration must use a shared, immutable identifier to link records between the two systems. Logic should be designed to handle specific events, such as customer record merges in Merret, to trigger an equivalent consolidation of contact data and order history within Emarsys.
Inaccurate post-dispatch communications
Operational impact: Delays or errors in communicating fulfilment status from Merret mean Emarsys triggers transactional emails at the wrong moment. For example, a 'Your order has dispatched' email is sent before the item has left the warehouse or relates to a partial shipment without specifying which items are included. This erodes customer trust and significantly increases 'where is my order?' queries for the customer service team.
Prevention / Action: Map all relevant order statuses in Merret, including partial dispatch and cancellation, to distinct events in Emarsys. The integration should send status updates as soon as they occur, rather than relying on a single daily summary. For partial shipments, the data payload must specify which SKUs have been dispatched, allowing Emarsys to send precise, line-item-level notifications.
Marketing to customers who returned products
Operational impact: A customer returns an item and the refund is processed in Merret, but this information fails to update the contact's record in Emarsys. The marketing team includes the customer in campaigns related to the returned product, such as 'review your purchase' automations. This creates a negative brand experience and wastes marketing spend, while skewing customer lifetime value data.
Prevention / Action: The integration must capture all return and refund events from Merret as they are processed. This data must be reliably passed to Emarsys to amend the customer's purchase history, typically by flagging the original order line as returned. This ensures the customer is automatically excluded from any post-purchase automation sequences related to that specific product SKU.
Stale inventory data for marketing automations
Operational impact: 'Back in Stock' campaigns in Emarsys are triggered based on outdated inventory data from Merret, which often relies on batch processing. This means customers are either notified of available stock that has already sold out again, or notifications are delayed, missing the critical buying window. This results in direct revenue loss and customer frustration.
Prevention / Action: Supplement large catalogue updates with event-driven synchronisation for inventory levels. When a stock level for a SKU in Merret changes, particularly when it crosses the 'zero' threshold, a specific, high-priority update should be sent to the Emarsys product catalogue. This ensures 'Back in Stock' automations are triggered with minimal delay.
Frequently asked questions
Merret uses batch updates for stock. How does this risk impacting our Emarsys campaigns?
Merret's reliance on batch processing for inventory updates can create a time lag between the actual stock level and the data shown in Emarsys. This could cause Emarsys to trigger a 'back in stock' campaign for a SKU that has already sold out, creating a poor customer experience. A well-designed integration mitigates this by architecting near real-time updates or re-validating stock levels before triggering communications.
Which system should own the customer record, Merret or Emarsys?
For this integration, Merret Retail Assist should act as the source of truth for the core customer record and their complete, cross-channel purchase history. Emarsys synchronises this data to build detailed segments for personalisation, but it does not 'own' the master record. This ensures marketing campaigns in Emarsys are always based on verified operational data, including returns and refunds processed in Merret.
How does this integration improve our customer segmentation in Emarsys?
This integration enables Emarsys to build segments using rich operational data from Merret that is otherwise unavailable to marketing teams. Instead of only using web behaviour, you can create segments based on a customer's complete lifetime value, cross-channel purchase frequency, or specific product affinities from their full order history. This allows for far more relevant campaigns than relying on ecommerce data alone.
What happens if an order is cancelled in Merret? Will Emarsys know not to send a 'review your purchase' email?
Without a robust integration, it's common for Emarsys to send marketing emails based on stale order data from Merret. For example, a customer could receive a review request for an order they just cancelled, which damages trust. We ensure the integration transmits order status changes, like cancellations or full refunds, promptly so that Emarsys can suppress these inappropriate communications.