Saving Inkit $100k+ in Data Import Costs with Flatfile

The challenge

Living in a digital world, it’s easy to forget about all the “offline” conversations that are critical to how companies run their businesses. Inkit is a SaaS product that directly addresses this gap with consumers. Inkit automates direct mail to connect hundreds of digital applications (like Salesforce, HubSpot, or Braze) with printers, brokers, and postal services. Their personalized and targeted direct mail approach results in a massive impact on their clients. Some of them, like Naturebox, have increased their revenue per customer by 60 percent using Inkit’s automated re-engagement system.

In this post, we uncover:

1. When buy vs. build is the best option

2. The data import ROI

Unlike other platforms in their space, Inkit strives to eliminate the manual work involved in managing online to offline programs; every action to be automated, tracked, and analyzed in one place. The process requires less time and people overhead, resulting in cost savings and a faster time-to-market for Inkit’s customers.

When buy vs. build is the best option

To use Inkit’s direct mail automation solution, customers need to import their client’s data from a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platform. To handle data import, Inkit went about developing their own tool internally but it quickly became apparent that the build your own solution route was not working well - for Inkit internally as well as their customer base.

Inkit would frequently need to work with customers directly to fix import issues, walking them through things like saving files with UTF-8 encoding in order to work properly for their platform. The Inkit team continued to run into a variety of problematic edge cases around data imports. With one client, they found files with a German location had EU encoded files that could not be imported at all.

From improper file types to bad data inputs, Inkit came to the point where the company was spending several hours a day addressing data import issues. Building their own import tool was not only bogging down development resources, but customer support at Inkit was being stretched thin handling data import requests left and right. As Inkit scaled, the customer support team became overwhelmed with import-related requests. By the time they came to Flatfile, the team was spending roughly 30 hours a week answering support tickets directly related to data import challenges.

Once Inkit realized the extent to which they were losing precious productivity hours on data imports for their customers, McCarthy sought a solution. Enter: Flatfile. It took Inkit one week to implement Flatfile’s data onboarding platform with their React front-end framework.

With Flatfile up and running, Inkit no longer needs to deal with data import support tickets from customers and focuses on their more important product-related success, which has greatly impacted their business.

The data import ROI

When it comes to the return on investment of Flatfile’s data onboarding platform, McCarthy went on to say:

“A viable data import solution easily represents a hundred thousand dollars a year in savings for Inkit. We had two clients that were paying upwards of $30,000 a year and were at risk to churn if we didn't figure this data import issue out. There's also a ton of engineering time that we saved by partnering with Flatfile. Without Flatfile, we would have had to dedicate one or two full time engineers to the development and maintenance of an internal data import solution and honestly, it would never have been as good as Flatfile’s product. I could see a bigger company looking at a million dollars a year in cost savings.”

“Thanks to Flatfile, we were able to deliver a 10X better product and save hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

About Inkit

Inkit helps companies connect to hundreds of printers with complete visibility. Instantly leverage global print infrastructure with Inkit’s developer friendly APIs, dashboards, and reporting. Connect, track, and manage critical business communications faster than ever before.

About Flatfile

Flatfile, the pioneer of AI-assisted data exchange, provides companies and their software development teams with the easiest, fastest and safest way to build the ideal data file import experience for their users. Hundreds of companies such as ADP, AstraZeneca, Square and Sage rely on Flatfile’s extensible, API-first platform to create enterprise-scale, intelligent, file-based data import solutions, increase developer productivity, reduce cost and improve data quality. Find out what Flatfile can do for your business.