B2B SaaS customers don't just expect your product to work; they expect it to work with everything else. This is especially true for data that powers their growth – customer data flowing into their marketing automation platform (MAP).
As your customer base scales, so does the complexity of this expectation. You start by building a simple integration for a popular tool like Mailchimp to sync contact lists. But soon, prospects start asking for event tracking in Klaviyo, and your new enterprise client depends on a two-way sync with custom objects in Adobe Marketo Engage.
The list of necessary MAP integrations expands constantly, each with its authentication method, data model, and API requirements. Building and maintaining these mission-critical connections in-house can take a lot of engineering time. Skipping them, however, means your product becomes a data silo, making it harder to win deals and increasing the risk of churn.
This challenge is significant, but a scalable solution is within reach. Let's explore why MAP integrations are essential and how B2B SaaS companies can deliver them efficiently for every customer.
What is marketing automation platform integration?
A MAP integration connects your B2B SaaS product with platforms like Mailchimp, Klaviyo, or Adobe Marketo Engage to automatically sync key customer data (profile attributes, behavioral events, and engagement metrics) between systems in real-time.
These connections are generally facilitated through marketing automation API integrations, utilizing features like REST APIs, webhooks, and authentication to ensure a smooth, secure flow of information.
The MAP market is notoriously fragmented, which presents the central development challenge:
- Diverse scope – Simple, list-based tools like Mailchimp are designed primarily for email marketing.
- E-commerce specificity – Platforms like Klaviyo are heavily focused on events and flows tailored for transactional and e-commerce-style messaging.
- Enterprise depth – And powerful, complex platforms like Adobe Marketo Engage support deep lead lifecycle management, custom activity objects, and complex auth.
This fragmentation means your team often needs to build numerous integrations customized to the specific requirements and data structure of the destination MAP to serve all your customers effectively.
How do you integrate with marketing automation platforms?
B2B SaaS companies have four main ways to approach customer-facing MAP integrations, each with trade-offs in scalability and maintenance.
Code a MAP integration from scratch
This involves your engineering team writing custom code for each MAP API. This approach provides maximum control over the integration logic (for example, exactly how a new user in your app is created as a lead in Adobe Marketo Engage). However, it is an unsustainable long-term strategy. Custom code becomes a massive maintenance liability as APIs change and customers add different MAPs.
Build a MAP integration with an enterprise iPaaS
Internal IT teams frequently use enterprise iPaaS platforms to connect systems within their own organization. While powerful, these platforms lack the essential features for a customer-facing integration product. They don't offer embedded marketplaces, customer-specific configuration dashboards, or the tenant isolation required to securely manage hundreds of distinct customer integration instances.
Build a MAP integration with a unified API
A unified API aggregates common API functions (like create_contact or get_list) across a software category, such as MAPs. This can be appealing for basic connections to simple platforms like Mailchimp. However, unified APIs are constrained by the lowest common denominator. They often fail to support the advanced features critical for enterprise customers, such as syncing complex, nested product events to Klaviyo or handling the custom objects within Adobe Marketo Engage.
Build a MAP Integration with an embedded iPaaS
An embedded iPaaS is built specifically for B2B SaaS companies to productize and scale customer integrations. These platforms provide pre-built connectors to various MAPs, streamlining development. Crucially, unlike the other options, an embedded iPaaS includes the necessary infrastructure for deployment, versioning, monitoring, and customer-facing management – ensuring that your integrations are scalable and manageable for all your customers.
Benefits of MAP integration with an embedded iPaaS
When building customer-facing MAP integrations, an embedded iPaaS delivers significant competitive advantages.
Save engineering time
An embedded iPaaS lets your team focus on your core product roadmap rather than API maintenance. Instead of spending weeks building a custom connector to handle the Adobe Marketo Engage REST API, your team can use low-code tooling and pre-built components to assemble the first version of an integration in days.
Increase win rate and sales velocity
Integrations are often the deciding factor in a competitive deal. An embedded iPaaS enables you to confidently say "Yes" when a prospect asks if you integrate with their existing tech stack, such as Klaviyo or Mailchimp. By having a library of production-ready integrations, you can close deals faster and remove technical barriers during the procurement process.
Provide a great UX for integrations
A poor integration experience is a poor product experience. An embedded iPaaS gives you the tools to provide a first-class user experience, allowing customers to:
- Self-configure – Customers can manage their connections (such as entering their Klaviyo API key) directly within your app's UI.
- Monitor status – They can view the run status, logs, and alerting for their specific sync without contacting support.
Improve your customer service
Integrations deployed via an embedded platform run on secure, scalable infrastructure with built-in logging, monitoring, and alerting. When a lead sync to a MAP fails, your non-dev support team can immediately diagnose the issue using support dashboards, dramatically reducing the need for engineering involvement with most support tickets.
Reduce customer churn
When your product is closely integrated with your customers' core marketing apps, it becomes deeply embedded in their business workflows. If your app is the hub that reliably feeds high-value data to their Klaviyo automation, for example, the cost of switching to a competitor increases, reducing the probability of churn.
Marketing automation platform FAQs
Question: Why might my SaaS product need to integrate with MAPs?
Answer: Depending on the nature of your product, MAP integrations may be necessary for your customers to transfer data for leads, campaigns, and customer engagement between your product and their marketing automation platforms.
Question: What happens if there's a sync conflict or other error while running the MAP integration?
Answer: Data synchronization issues can cripple essential workflows. But an embedded iPaaS ensures these are handled correctly:
- Error handling and retries – For example, if the Mailchimp API returns a rate-limit error, you can set the integration to wait for a defined interval before retrying the execution.
- Alerting and monitoring – Failure in critical data flows triggers immediate alerts to your support team and the customer via in-app alerts or external tools like Slack.
Question: What types of data are typically exchanged in MAP integrations?
Answer: Typical data includes:
- Contacts, leads, and accounts
- Campaign data and engagement metrics
- Custom event tracking
- Form submissions and lead scoring data
Question: What authentication methods do MAPs genearlly use?
Answer: OAuth 2.0 is standard for most modern MAPs, though some systems may still use API keys. For example, Klaviyo supports both OAuth 2.0 and API keys.
Meet your customers where they are
Whether your customers rely on the simplicity of Mailchimp, the event-driven power of Klaviyo, the enterprise depth of Adobe Marketo Engage, or another marketing automation platform altogether, integrations are a requirement for B2B SaaS success.
By leveraging a scalable, purpose-built embedded iPaaS, you can turn customer integrations into a powerful product differentiator that drives sales and retention.
Give your team the tools to build and manage whatever integrations your customers need, for marketing automation platforms and everything else they use.
Schedule a demo. Let us show you how Prismatic supports powerful, reusable, configurable integrations with your SaaS product.
