Time zone-based sending is nothing new to anyone in the B2C email marketing world – It’s a solution to a problem so obvious, it’s almost surprising it even has a name. You can’t send emails about a sale starting (or ending) to every time zone at once and expect people to respond to your message. And on top of that, we already know the specific time you send out a message can have a real impact on the engagement rate. Enabling to set up campaigns to “Follow the sun” as they say, is one of the most basic table stakes features of modern ESPs.

But just because it can seem basic and almost obligatory doesn’t mean it can’t be improved upon. This is something we’ve thought a good deal about — how can we utilize our platform’s unique access to your data in order to take time zone-based sending to the next level? And when we looked at the current landscape of ESPs and their time zone-based sending features, we saw some holes that needed to be filled.

When we teamed up with Snowflake to help marketers and tech teams really turn their data loose for cross-channel campaigns, we had high expectations for how much it would help the Super Senders we work with. We knew this partnership had the potential to be a game changer, empowering them to build and deliver whatever campaigns they could dream up without data or ESP limitations getting in the way.

But moves like this never fully hit home until you hear from a data specialist who’s in those trenches every day with a major worldwide brand, and he articulates exactly what you hoped for with your vision. It’s never been more clear: This is why MessageGears exists.

What does it mean to be a “Best Place to Work”? Even while being named to the Atlanta Business Chronicle’s Best Places list the past couple of years, it’s not a puzzle we think you can really solve. It means different things to different people. And getting on these lists, while gratifying from a validation standpoint, can’t be the goal.

Hopefully, though, that’s the result of a steadfast commitment to building the type of company we want to work for, of creating an environment that’s conducive to a variety of jobs and personalities, and doing our best to ensure the people we surround ourselves with from day to day are professionally and personally fulfilled in what they do.

One challenge for even experienced Marketing Ops teams when they start to introduce their mobile push strategy is determining which push notification provider to partner with for delivery, and then how to thread that provider’s SDK into their app. It’s a tough question for a variety of reasons, one of them being that they often don’t even know they may not need to bother with the second part at all.

When we rolled out support for sending push notifications earlier this year, the big differentiator for us was that we are offering an alternative to the SDK for those who need it. But, even when we tell first-time users that, we often get the question: What is the MessageGears SDK-less solution, and how is it different from other vendors?

The mechanics of how push notifications get sent are a little confusing. However, when stripped down to its core, there are a few basic differences between how we send push notifications that make MessageGears stand out. First, let’s dig in a bit as to why the presence or absence of an SDK matters, and then we’ll look at why going SDK-less could be an attractive option for a lot of teams.

Since the advent of the smartphone, brands and marketers alike have been searching for a channel capable of delivering timely, relevant content directly to the world’s rapidly-expanding collection of mobile devices. As it turns out, such a marketing channel has been staring the marketing world straight in the face since way back in the heyday of the Blackberry.

That channel is push notifications.