Why marketers should care about GraphQL

GraphQL has tremendous benefits in the software development space, and it’s clear why developers love it, but what’s in it for marketers?

GraphQL makes omnichannel experiences easier to build

An omnichannel experience needs seamless collaboration from multiple devices including desktops, mobile phones, tablets and more.

Each of these channels requires different types of content, customized to fit a different layout and style. When marketers change banners, images and other content assets to fit each device on the frontend, data has to be fetched from the backend using APIs to render the content on those pages.

So why are these experiences easier in GraphQL?

Well, REST requires that individual endpoints be defined before data for entities can be queried. This forces developers to coordinate each use case ahead of time. In other words, they need to know exactly how each request will work before they begin each stage of their project.

Unfortunately, this means that frontend teams have to ask their backend counterparts for new endpoints for each new application or channel. This can slow down development tremendously. On the other hand, GraphQL decouples apps from services.

By decoupling frontend apps from web services, GraphQL makes it possible for app developers to describe the data they need. GraphQL then fetches the data requested by the query from the data sources defined in the service.

(Looks can be deceiving. This website is fully API-driven)

GraphQL also lets you decide what exact data you need, and only that, it doesn’t include any excess. With REST, you get excess data with each query. This reduces network latency, since the partial fetching options of GraphQL provide only relevant data, making each channel slightly faster, and more cost-effective.

GraphQL makes personalization easier (especially when you’re working with a headless CMS)

Since data can be fetched in one trip, rather than several round trips, marketers can easily retrieve relevant customer data from a CRM or other tool within the MarTech stack and then use it to improve the customer experience.

In order to personalize the customer experience, you want to retrieve the user’s preferences, past purchases and recently viewed products. With REST, this would require at least three requests to the corresponding endpoints (for e.g. USER, PURCHASE, VIEWED_PRODUCT) whereas GraphQL would allow you to query past purchases and viewed products through the user entity. This helps to speed up personalized experiences across channels and at scale.