Marketing on Real Revenue: Feeding SAP Emarsys With Sales Data From S/4HANA Public Cloud

Marketing segments on clicks. Newsletter opened, link clicked, form filled: that’s what feeds the target groups, the scoring models, entire campaign plans. Meanwhile the actual gold sits two systems away, in the ERP. Orders, invoices, product mix, ordering rhythm: the ERP knows to the cent who buys what, when, and how often. The marketing automation knows who opened an email on Tuesday. Which of the two would you plan your budget on?

The good news: with SAP Emarsys (officially the product is now called SAP Engagement Cloud, we’ll stick with the familiar name) and S/4HANA Public Cloud, you can close that gap with the tools already on board. The effort is modest. The effect on campaign quality isn’t.

Sales Data in Smart Insight: The Pattern

Emarsys ships with Smart Insight, an analytics layer built for exactly this: turning sales data into segments. It comes from the e-commerce world originally, but it doesn’t care where revenue comes from. A sales order from S/4HANA is simply a transaction as far as Smart Insight is concerned.

The path there is unspectacular. S/4HANA Public Cloud delivers sales orders or billing documents, either through SAP Integration Suite or, perfectly down to earth, through the file-based sales data API of Emarsys. One record per line item: customer, product, quantity, value, date. That’s all Smart Insight needs. A daily batch is enough, more on that below.

From then on, marketing segments on actual buying behaviour:

• RFM: recency, frequency, monetary. Who bought last, how often, for how much? Smart Insight calculates the scores automatically and keeps them current.
• First-time versus repeat buyers: two completely different audiences that usually get the same email in click-based setups.
• Category buyers: who buys which product group, who has never touched a category at all.
• Churn risk: no order in X months, measured against that customer’s own usual rhythm, not against one fixed threshold for everyone.

That last point is the important one. A customer who orders every two weeks and has gone quiet for six is an alarm. A customer on a yearly rhythm is, after six weeks, simply normal. Without ERP data, marketing can’t see the difference.

Four B2B Programmes That Work in Real Projects

From our projects, anonymised, and deliberately unspectacular. That’s exactly why they work:

1. Replenishment reminders based on real order cycles. Consumables, spare parts, wear items: Smart Insight knows each customer’s rhythm per product. Shortly before the next order would be due, a reminder goes out. No guessing, the cycle is de facto written in the order data.
2. Cross-sell on the first category purchase. When an account buys from a product category for the first time, a short programme kicks off with accessories, consumables and application know-how for exactly that category. Not the full catalogue, just what fits.
3. Win-back on dropping order frequency. When an account’s frequency falls well below its own historical average, marketing gets active before field sales discovers the revenue drop in the quarterly report. That’s the difference between a call at the right moment and a missed opportunity.
4. New-product announcements only to buyers of the predecessor. The successor generation of a product interests, above all, the people running the predecessor. One segment on the buyers of the old material numbers, done. Higher relevance, less waste, and nobody markets products to customers who never bought them.

None of this needs a data science team. All of it needs sales data in the marketing system.

One ID Strategy, One Consent System

For this to hold, two questions need clean answers before the first campaign runs.

Identity: in B2B, the account buys, but a human reads the email. The key is the contact’s email address, connected through the CRM sync: the contact in the CRM hangs on the account, the account hangs on the ERP customer. That way the account’s revenue reaches the right person in Emarsys. One ID strategy, applied consistently, saves months of data cleansing. Two half ID strategies produce duplicates that never go away.

Consent: consent lives in exactly one system, the one where it’s collected, and gets distributed from there. And under both the Swiss revDSG and the GDPR, data minimisation applies: Emarsys needs IDs, product categories and aggregates, not complete invoices. Conditions, payment terms and pricing details have no business being in the marketing system. As a side effect, that makes the conversation with your data protection officer considerably shorter.

Start Small, Measure Properly

Two pieces of advice from project experience, both uncomfortable.

First: three lifecycle programmes, not twenty. A welcome journey for first-time buyers, replenishment reminders, win-back. Build those three properly, let them run for a quarter, then extend. Whoever starts with twenty programmes maintains none of them well. Less is more.

Second: success is measured against a holdout group, not against open rates. Part of the audience deliberately doesn’t get the programme; the revenue difference between the two groups is the programme’s value. Open rates flatter, incremental revenue proves. And since the sales data flows in daily from S/4HANA anyway, the measurement basis is already sitting there.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do we need a customer data platform between the ERP and Emarsys?

Not necessarily. For segments on sales data, Smart Insight already covers the commerce-style analytics: RFM, categories, purchase cycles. A CDP becomes interesting when many additional sources need consolidating. As a prerequisite for this pattern, it isn’t one.

How fresh does the sales data need to be?

A daily batch is enough. Lifecycle programmes react to patterns over weeks and months, not minutes. Whether the replenishment reminder fires at 8 am or 2 pm changes nothing about the outcome. Real time here is effort without return.

Does this even work in B2B?

Yes, and rather well. Revenue hangs on the account, marketing runs at contact level: through the account-to-contact link from the CRM, every contact person gets campaigns based on what their company actually buys. Especially in B2B, where order cycles are stable and product ranges clearly structured, these segments bite better than in many a B2C shop.

What about orders that don’t come through the webshop?

Those are exactly the point. Phone, email, EDI, field sales: in B2B, most revenue happens away from the shop. Because the data comes from the ERP and not from web tracking, Emarsys sees the entire revenue, no matter how the order was placed.

Your sales figures live in the ERP and your marketing segments on clicks? We’ll gladly walk you through the pattern with your own order data. Talk to us.