At MessageGears, direct data access is a topic we talk about a lot. It’s more than just something we think can help enterprise brands connect better with their customers, it’s the foundational philosophy for our business. It’s your data; you should be able to use it without technology getting in the way.
We do get some questions, though. Typically, what we hear from people who don’t quite get why direct data access is so transformative is that it’s nice to have, but does it really move the ROI needle?
We hear from our customers every day that it does, and here are three examples of exactly how direct data access makes it happen.
Stop paying (at least) twice to store your data
Every enterprise has to invest in storing their data, whether that’s with a modern data warehouse, in-house database, or some other third-party solution. For many, they’ve recognized the value in consolidating that data with a modern data warehouse like Snowflake or Google BigQuery.
Because MessageGears doesn’t store your data and just plugs directly into your own database, you’re already ahead of the ROI game before you’ve even sent your first campaign.
But even those who are proactive about that suffer a gut punch when they realize they’re paying to store the same data twice — once in their system and then again in their email service provider’s (ESP’s) marketing cloud. And if you’re using a CDP (which many are), you’re probably paying to store it a third time there.
Because MessageGears doesn’t store your data and just plugs directly into your own database, you’re already ahead of the ROI game before you’ve even sent your first campaign. Since we don’t have any storage costs, our customers don’t have any either, beyond what they’re already spending to store it behind their firewall.
What could cutting your data storage costs in half or better do for your team’s budget?
Send more timely campaigns to get results
One of the best examples of seeing increased revenue from MessageGears’ direct data access is with abandoned cart campaigns. Without direct data access, syncing with the ESP’s marketing cloud necessarily takes time, and that’s time you can’t reach your customers with a timely abandoned cart reminder.
With direct data access, though, you’re working off the data live as it sits in your database; you can send abandoned cart campaigns at whatever interval works for your team.
With most ESPs, you’re going to be limited to sending abandoned cart campaigns at some point in the future when you can get your new data synced up with their system. And, all the while, even newer data continues to stream into your database. By the time you’re fully synced and ready to send, that data is already out of data, but it’s the best you have. This is why customers (you’ve probably had this happen to yourself too) get abandoned cart emails for items they already returned and purchased. Or that they’ve had plenty of time to purchase elsewhere.
With direct data access, though, you’re working off the data live as it sits in your database; you can send abandoned cart campaigns at whatever interval works for your team. Two hours? One? Thirty minutes? Reach your customers in the time frame that maximizes their likelihood of actually returning to complete the purchase. Easily include personalized offers to entice them to come back, and use multivariate testing to determine which ones work best.
What would it mean to your bottom line to capture 20% more abandoned cart occurrences because you had direct data access with MessageGears, like Blue Nile did?
Improve customer engagement and loyalty
Seeing what you can do with abandoned cart campaigns may start giving you ideas for what you might do with other campaigns, given direct data access.
Want to put together true cross-channel campaigns — built in a single, drag-and-drop UI — that send to the channel the customer prefers? Easy.
How about emails that render on open with your latest pricing and inventory? Yep.
Utilize PII for personalization without that sensitive data ever leaving from behind your firewall? Can do.
This is what we tell marketers all the time: show us your toughest campaign to run, the one that either took you forever to set up or maybe you can’t even figure out how to do it on your current setup, and we’ll get it running in a day with MessageGears.
Think about the increased customer engagement that comes with sending the dream campaigns you’ve always wanted to run? Get the technology out the way, and see what happens when you let your marketing team’s creativity take over.
How does 90%+ six-month net customer engagement sound? That’s what Stylist saw after partnering with us. Let’s start today with showing you how we can help you get the same sort of results.
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.
