Prima and Emarsys
Integration Agency & Consultants
Marketing performance flatlines when the data in Emarsys no longer matches the reality in Prima. At scale, the gap between ERP transactional records and marketing engagement layers leads to inaccurate segmentation and wasted spend. This usually becomes painful when the marketing team can no longer trust revenue attribution or when customer journeys are triggered by outdated order statuses. We connect Prima's customer and financial data to Emarsys, ensuring every campaign is built on validated transactional history rather than stagnant profiles.
Auditing ERP and ESP workflow gaps
Cogent2 connects your Prima and Emarsys integration swiftly, supporting both ERP and ESP requirements. Our consulting services are invaluable, with system audit services that empower our consultants and your team to identify and resolve inefficiencies. This ensures your Prima and Emarsys integrations, including ERP and ESP platforms, operate efficiently. By addressing integration gaps and workflow issues, we help your tech ecosystem run smoothly, so you can deliver an excellent customer experience and maintain reliable performance across your business systems.
Solution Design
Design decisions for Prima and Emarsys focus on protecting the fidelity of customer and transactional data. We typically establish Prima as the definitive source of truth for customer records and purchase history, while Emarsys consumes this data to drive automated journeys. One key trade-off involves sync frequency. Higher frequency updates provide high personalised relevance but can increase the risk of transient sync errors. Conversely, batching data simplifies reconciliation against records but introduces a lag in marketing responsiveness. Our approach sequences core customer and order flows first, often keeping specific manual adjustments for complex logic at launch. This ensures finance can close periods using Prima data while marketing executes campaigns based on validated segments.
Synchronising transactional records and customer profiles
The integration establishes a controlled flow where Prima provides the definitive customer and transactional records. Customer profiles and order data are synchronised to ensure Emarsys segments reflect accurate purchase behaviour.
To maintain profile integrity, we use unique record IDs rather than generic company names, preventing data fragmentation across office locations. The integration logic is designed to filter out internal accounts during the initial contact sync, avoiding the duplicate profiles that often occur with B2B trade records. We prioritise data integrity by mapping Prima financial lines to Emarsys attributes for precise revenue attribution. The system monitors for common sync friction points, such as formatting errors in address fields, ensuring marketing automation is built on validated ERP data.
Securing data flows with accredited IPaaS
Leveraging IPaaS with ISO 27001 and SOC 2 and above security accreditations, Prima and Emarsys integrations are delivered efficiently and securely. IPaaS connects ERP and ESP platforms, automating data flow between Prima, Emarsys, ERP, and ESP systems. This approach reduces manual effort, increases reliability, and ensures compliance. Using IPaaS guarantees robust security, scalability, and simplified management, making Prima and Emarsys integration straightforward and secure.
Monitoring sync latency and record discrepancies
Standard dashboards often hide the quiet failures that degrade marketing performance over time. Our approach surfaces data discrepancies where Prima records do not match Emarsys profiles, such as missing order values or broken attribution links. We monitor for sync latency and record-level errors, ensuring that when a transaction fails to post, your team is notified. This visibility moves beyond basic monitoring to focus on data fidelity, identifying when segments are shrinking due to technical gaps rather than customer behaviour. By surfacing these failures early, we prevent incorrect automated emails and ensure marketing performance is based on accurate figures.
Handover for marketing and finance operations
Handover ensures your ecommerce, marketing, and finance teams own the new operating model. We focus on daily routines, teaching marketing teams how to verify that customer data is correctly fueling Emarsys segments and identifying where record mismatches occur. Finance teams are shown how to validate data against the ERP source of truth. We provide operational documentation that prioritises exception handling, explaining who owns specific data gaps or sync failures. This documentation is written for the operators running the business rather than as a technical archive. Training is anchored in your specific design, ensuring your team knows exactly what to check to maintain data fidelity.
Managing exceptions and post-launch data accuracy
Cogent2 delivers production ERP and ESP support, ensuring business continuity and peace of mind. With on-hand technical knowledge, they support Prima ERP and Emarsys ESP, resolving issues swiftly and maintaining system reliability. Their expertise covers both Prima and Emarsys, providing ongoing ERP and ESP assistance, so your business remains resilient and supported at all times.
Common failures
Inaccurate customer segmentation
Operational impact: Marketing campaigns target incorrect customer groups because Emarsys contact data does not reflect recent changes in Prima customer records. This leads to wasted campaign spend and inaccurate revenue attribution. The customer service team also faces challenges when customers report receiving communications that do not match their account status or purchase history.
Prevention / Action: Establish Prima as the definitive source of truth for customer records. The integration must use a unique, persistent identifier (such as email address) to map Prima customers to Emarsys contacts, preventing duplicates. Implement a scheduled synchronisation for customer data changes and design a clear exception handling process for records that fail to update.
Delayed or missing order data sync
Operational impact: Post-purchase customer journeys in Emarsys, such as review requests, are triggered unreliably. Segments based on Recency, Frequency, and Monetary (RFM) value become inaccurate, undermining personalised campaigns. This directly impacts marketing ROI and the ability of the finance and marketing teams to agree on campaign revenue attribution.
Prevention / Action: Configure the integration to push Prima sales order data to Emarsys immediately upon a defined business event, such as order confirmation. Ensure the data payload includes key details like order value and SKUs for accurate segmentation. Use a managed queue for data transfer to handle API rate limits and provide retry logic for failed updates, ensuring transactional data integrity.
Refunds and returns not reflected
Operational impact: Customers who have returned an item are still targeted with campaigns related to that purchase, creating a poor experience. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) and purchase history reports in Emarsys become inflated and untrustworthy. This misinforms retention strategy and leads marketing to invest based on incorrect sales data.
Prevention / Action: The integration process must synchronise return or credit note data from Prima back to the Emarsys contact record. This should be triggered when a return is processed or a credit note journal entry is finalised in Prima. This action ensures segmentation data and CLV calculations remain clean and accurately reflect net customer spend.
Frequently asked questions
If Prima is our ERP, which system should own the master customer record?
Prima holds the definitive customer record, including complete order history and financial data like lifetime value. The integration syncs these core details to Emarsys, which then builds on it with marketing engagement data. This ensures your Emarsys campaigns are segmented using accurate purchase history from Prima, not just web-tracking data.
How does integrating Prima help fix poor marketing ROI and revenue attribution in Emarsys?
The integration connects the Sales Order created in Prima back to the specific marketing activity in Emarsys that initiated it. This provides clear revenue attribution, solving the common problem where campaign success is measured on clicks, not actual sales recorded in the ERP. It turns Emarsys reporting into a reliable indicator of marketing's contribution to revenue.
What happens in Emarsys if we merge duplicate customer records in Prima?
Without a correctly configured integration, merging a customer record in Prima can leave an outdated or orphaned contact in Emarsys, skewing segmentation. This often results in sending emails based on an incomplete customer history. The integration should be designed to manage these events, ensuring that when a merge happens in Prima, the corresponding contact and its associated data are consolidated in Emarsys.
How can we run 'back in stock' campaigns if Prima's stock levels include stock allocated to other orders?
This is a frequent failure point where campaigns are triggered based on stock that isn't actually available to sell. A properly designed integration filters Prima's data, syncing only the 'free' or 'available-to-sell' quantity from the Item record to the Emarsys product catalogue. This prevents sending misleading 'back in stock' notifications and protects customer trust.
Our marketing team is hesitant to use ERP data. Is this integration just creating more complex reporting?
This integration is designed to reduce complexity by giving marketers direct access to valuable customer data previously locked in Prima. For example, it allows segmentation in Emarsys based on actual refund history or lifetime value without needing manual reports from the finance team. This enables more sophisticated personalisation and moves the focus from complex reporting to predictable revenue.