What do Black Friday and every other major shopping season have in common? Hundreds of brands are flooding their customer’s inboxes with emails – and we’re guessing your brand is too.
If you’ve ever hit “send” on an email campaign during one of these holidays and come back hours later to find your campaign did not send, there’s usually one reason – you’re sharing your data storage infrastructure through a multi-tenant platform.
A multi-tenant marketing platform is an app and infrastructure with more than one customer operating off of it.
If your company uses Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Adobe Campaign, Acoustic, Iterable, Braze, or just about any other traditional platform for cross-channel messaging, you’ve likely witnessed firsthand the difficulties a multi-tenant setup causes by forcing hundreds or thousands of companies to share the same data-storage infrastructure.
On the flip side, a single-tenant platform is an app and infrastructure dedicated to an individual customer rather than a group or cluster of customers.
Here are the three biggest reasons using tech like Salesforce – which has a multi-tenant platform – is preventing you from sending timely and secure campaigns:
1. You’re sharing your resources
If you’ve ever run into a situation where your Black Friday email campaign gets bogged down and doesn’t send until hours later than you needed it to — or doesn’t send at all — the multi-tenant platform explains why. Of course, it breaks down right at the moment you can least afford for it to do so.
Our parents may have taught us all to share, but that’s the last thing you want to be doing when you’re trying to get personalized messaging campaigns built and out the door. Because what’s going to happen is, at busy times, your message output is going to be slowed down. You didn’t do anything wrong. It’s just that you’re sharing the same infrastructure with hundreds or thousands of other customers.
With MessageGears’ single-tenant, though, you have dedicated infrastructure for your data and your sends. MessageGears’ customers get full control over how fast they want to send campaigns, allowing them the ability to scale infinitely. Many of the multi-tenant platforms will tell you they can also provide you with dedicated infrastructure. And they can. But it’ll cost you quite a bit extra on top of what you are paying for the platform and premium support. No one wants that.
However, at MessageGears, it’s built into our model. Everyone is single-tenant. It’s how we operate.
2. Prescribed schemas are killing your creativity
With your current platform, you probably have to map all your data into their fields. They have their system set up in a particular way, and now your data must conform just for the sake of functioning correctly. That’s because, with a multi-tenant platform, everyone has to map into this same schema. There’s no way for them to make it customizable for you. This made setup a huge pain for your data team. Want to use a new data field now? You’ve got to put in a ticket with them, and then push the data up to them at whatever point you can get it added.
MessageGears’ single-tenant platform, though, is entirely customizable to whatever you want to do. With no prescribed schema whatsoever, each customer is able to use any data they’ve collected, in exactly the way it’s already formatted in their database. Not only does this make onboarding far simpler, it also means that marketers can be as creative as they want to be with their campaigns since they can just do whatever they want without operational hassles and constraints.
3. Shipping data creates security risks
When you copy and ship data outside of your firewall so that you can use it to personalize messaging campaigns, you don’t control the security of that data anymore. And that can give your I.T. team some major heartburn. In fact, there’s a good chance they’ll lock down much of your data and refuse to let it leave the safety of your internal database. This is the reality with multi-tenant platforms. They need to hold your data in order for you to build campaigns off of it, since you’re sharing the same infrastructure with so many other companies.
We may be repeating ourselves here, but that isn’t the case with MessageGears’ single-tenant structure.
We connect directly to your data wherever it already lives, you have your own infrastructure to work in that you control. Your data is always as safe as you can make it because we never have to hold any of it. We believe your customer data is most efficiently and safely utilized within your database, behind your secure firewall. Our single-tenant platform is set up to ensure you’re able to do that.
Takeaways
There are many reasons the multi-tenant platform used by just about every marketing platform has major flaws that are likely causing you to have slow down campaign speed, diminished creativity, and holes in your data security. If you’d like to talk about how MessageGears can help you address these issues, we’d love to chat.
Jeff Haws
As MessageGears’ Senior Marketing Manager, Jeff is focused on producing engaging and thoughtful content that resonates with enterprise marketers, helping them to better understand how MessageGears makes their jobs easier. He’s passionate about understanding the way data impacts messaging, and he’s also hopelessly obsessed with baseball.
