When Super Senders explore switching to a new ESP, they inevitably hear pitches where an ESP’s sales rep makes numerous claims about how easy they’ll be to work with, and how everything they want to do is possible on this new platform. They’ll see slide decks and videos and maybe even some hands-on demonstrations of the product so they can get a feel for the user interface.
What they won’t get — in the vast majority of cases — is a true Proof of Concept where the ESP’s team shows first-hand how the brand will use it with their own data to build personalized cross-channel campaigns.
And that kind of feels unfair. Why do you need to pay for a trial to see if you want to buy the product? At MessageGears, we pride ourselves on offering POCs to brands that are serious about offering better messaging to their users. How is MessageGears able to offer this during the vetting process when other ESPs can’t? Here are the four main differentiators:
Direct data connection
Because MessageGears’ customer engagement platform connects directly to your datasource, there’s no need for data mapping as we’re accessing your live data wherever it lives. Many times, prospects use the queries they’ve built internally to create files that go to their current ESP and just copy/paste directly into our platform.
Other ESPs might be able to set up a sandbox for you (and we can too!) to be able to get an overall feel for what it would be like to use the platform and how the back end would work for your Marketing team, but you’ll have to spend days if not weeks just on data mapping to have a meaningful POC.
Ease of installation
MessageGears’ platform is easy to install and connect to your datasource because it uses common web application architecture in order to run. This greatly simplifies the installation process, making a POC logistically feasible in a short amount of time.
The average time for a guided install with MessageGears is about 45 minutes — from the start of the process to running and connecting to your datasource. Optionally, we can host our platform for you during the POC, simplifying the process even further if it helps your team.
Open-source templating language
MessageGears’ open-source templating language — Freemarker — creates a very smooth transition process for ensuring you aren’t having to do complicated rewrites in order for systems to understand each other.
Switching from your current, and likely proprietary, language is not only easy, but it’s also very well documented. Combined with direct data access, creating and migrating programs is a matter of hours, not months. At another ESP, they’re typically your only resource for learning their proprietary language, and they’re not always working with you to migrate programs during the POC. But we’re glad to help wherever we can.
Team expertise
This is something we have extensive experience with. MessageGears’ Solutions team has migrated clients from every major competitor and has many years of experience in marketing automation and cross-channel communications. This helps us to anticipate any hurdles ahead of time and develop a plan for clearing them before they occur rather than after.
We know your time is valuable, and a POC is a process you don’t enter into lightly. So it’s essential that our team is prepared for every eventuality, and knows how to execute the POC so that you learn everything you need to as efficiently as possible. Because we’ve been doing these for so many years, there’s virtually nothing we haven’t already encountered, and that helps us maximize what you can get out of the POC.
If you’ve considered an ESP switch and think a live POC could benefit you in your vetting process, we’d love to talk about setting one up for you.
Nick Ziech-Lopez
Nick is the Senior Director of Product Marketing at MessageGears. He applies his background in engineering and data analytics to organizing his product backlog, understanding user experience, and obsessing over the Chicago Cubs.
