Campaign Monitor is a SaaS email marketing platform that enables businesses to create, send, and manage branded email. The product includes a drag-and-drop builder, visual journey designer, and real-time performance metrics. It offers list management tools to help organizations build segmented lists based on their own criteria, and optimization tools to help users track the effectiveness of their campaigns.

Tableau is one of the world's most popular analysis platforms. The software helps companies model, explore, and visualize their data. It also offers cloud capabilities that allow analyses to be shared via the web or company intranets, and its offerings are available as both installed software and as a SaaS platform. Tableau is widely known for its robust and flexible visualization capabilities, which include dozens of specialized chart types.

In addition to its business software, Tableau also offers a free product called Tableau Public for analyzing open data sets. If you're new to Tableau, this offering is a great way to experience Tableau's capabilities at no cost and share your work publicly.

You can use Campaign Monitor's RESTful API to get data about clients, campaigns, lists, and more into your data warehouse. For example, to get a campaign summary, you could GET GET /campaigns/{campaignid}/summary.{xml|json}. The final parameter specifies whether the data is to be returned in XML or JSON format.

Here's an example of the kind of response you might see when querying a campaign summary and specifying that the data returned should be in JSON format.

{
    "Recipients": 1000,
    "TotalOpened": 345,
    "Clicks": 132,
    "Unsubscribed": 43,
    "Bounced": 15,
    "UniqueOpened": 298,
    "SpamComplaints": 23,
    "WebVersionURL": "http://createsend.com/t/y-A1A1A1A1A1A1A1A1A1A1A1A1/",
    "WebVersionTextURL": "http://createsend.com/t/y-A1A1A1A1A1A1A1A1A1A1A1A1/t",
    "WorldviewURL": "http://myclient.createsend.com/reports/wv/y/8WY898U9U98U9U9",
    "Forwards": 18,
    "Likes": 25,
    "Mentions": 11
}

Analyzing data in Tableau requires putting it into a format that Tableau can read. Depending on the data source, you may have options for achieving this goal, but the best practice among most businesses is to build a data warehouse that contains the data, and then connect that data warehouse to Tableau.

Tableau provides an easy-to-use Connect menu that allows you to connect data from flat files, direct data sources, and data warehouses. In most cases, connecting these sources is simply a matter of creating and providing credentials to the relevant services.

Once the data is connected, Tableau offers an option for locally caching your data to speed up queries. This can make a big difference when working with slower database platforms or flat files, but is typically not necessary when using a scalable data warehouse platform. Tableau's flexibility and speed in these areas are among its major differentiators in the industry.

Tableau's report-building interface may seem intimidating at first, but it's one of the most powerful and intuitive analytics UIs on the market. Once you understand its workflow, it offers fast and nearly limitless options for building reports and dashboards.

If you're familiar with Pivot Tables in Excel, the Tableau report building experience may feel somewhat familiar. The process involves selecting the rows and columns desired in the resulting data set, along with the aggregate functions used to populate the data cells. Users can also specify filters to be applied to the data and choose a visualization type to use for the report.

You can learn how to build a report from scratch for free (although a sign-in is required) from the Tableau documentation.

Now what? You've built a script that pulls data from Campaign Monitor and loads it into your data warehouse, but what happens tomorrow when you have new campaigns?

The key is to build your script in such a way that it can identify incremental updates to your data. Thankfully, Campaign Monitor's API results include fields like Date that allow you to identify records that are new since your last update (or since the newest record you've copied). Once you've take new data into account, you can set your script up as a cron job or continuous loop to keep pulling down new data as it appears.