It’s a common refrain among Salesforce Marketing Cloud users: I hate so much about Salesforce, but I hate the idea of switching platforms even more.
We get it. Change can be intimidating, especially when you’re talking about moving away from a behemoth like Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC). You know exactly how much work it took to move on to SFMC, and the last thing you want to do is go through that again just to end up with another platform whose Sales team will lie to you about how easy everything will be. Might as well stick with the devil you know, right?
We know the prospect of migrating off Salesforce is scary for a lot of marketers. Here are some of the biggest objections to switching that we hear, and how MessageGears can help to ease or even eliminate the pain of all of them.
I have too many campaigns set up in SFMC and can’t afford to lose any of them
What is making you nervous?
You and your team have put too much time and energy into getting everything set up correctly in SFMC, and now you can’t risk things not transitioning correctly. The very thought of trying probably brings back horrible memories of the 1- to 2-year transition to SFMC. Maybe you’ve heard horror stories from peers about trying to change: data feeds break, schemas don’t translate, and one little thing can throw off a big chunk of your marketing strategy. Those 150 campaigns are essential to your strategy, and you’re not confident they can be moved intact.
How does MessageGears solve for this?
(For a quick overview, watch this 20-second video from a MessageGears expert)
Because MessageGears doesn’t have any predefined schema and uses open-source programming language Freemarker, transitioning your campaigns over is as simple as moving the data fields over in whatever format you already have them — no tedious QA required. After identifying all of the campaigns you’re sending, our team will walk you through our comprehensive transition plan – complete with timelines and measures of success.
Our campaign migration process is so simple, we’re willing to prove it: we’ll migrate several of your most complex campaigns over to MessageGears free of charge.
In addition, you don’t have to move everything immediately to start taking advantage of MessageGears’ direct data connection. Those 150 campaigns will perform more effectively with MessageGears Segment to serve as the connective tissue between SFMC and your data warehouse, allowing you to transition gradually, one step at a time until you’re ready to go fully onto MessageGears Message for your cross-channel campaigns.
There’s no way we have the bandwidth to make a change right now
What is making you nervous?
You’re thinking changing from SFMC is going to be a massive, labor-intensive process. Part of this thinking may stem from prior experience with an ESP change, stories from peers, or the migration to Salesforce itself. You look around at how tangled up you are in SFMC and have a hard time imagining how much work it would be to undo it all while still trying to perform the basic daily work you have to do anyway. You might also think that all ESPs are basically the same, so all that work wouldn’t be worth it even if you had the time for it.
How does MessageGears solve for this?
(For a quick overview, watch this 20-second video from a MessageGears expert)
The transition from SFMC to MessageGears is far simpler than you’d expect. While MessageGears Segment enhances SFMC’s performance immediately, you’re able to begin gradually migrating campaigns at your preferred pace. Due to our lack of predefined schema and open-source programming language, there are no “square peg into round hole” issues involved in moving to MessageGears.
And — we know you hear this all the time, but — we really are fundamentally different from SFMC because our products all live right alongside your data wherever it is, allowing you to use it live and in real time to build audiences for cross-channel campaigns. That means there are no data feeds to break or nightly syncs to set up and wait for. Plug it and play. If your data is set up in a modern data warehouse like Snowflake or Google BigQuery, we can have you sending emails in 3 weeks and fully migrated in 3 more.
But don’t just believe us. Unlike Salesforce, we can do a live, free Proof of Concept wherein we connect to your database and show you how MessageGears works using your actual data, not just showing you a video we made six months ago. So let us show you.
My team members are only trained and certified to use SFMC
What is making you nervous?
Let’s be clear: You have a team of people trained to use Salesforce because it takes an entire team of people to run your marketing ops using Salesforce
Nobody likes going through training. We all recognize the importance of it, but people want to be turned loose to do what they’re good at, and training takes away from that. And after all the Salesforce training your teams have been through, you don’t want to tell them they have to do it all over again with a new platform. There’s a bit of Sunk-Cost Fallacy to this too. You’ve put so much time and effort into getting up to speed on SFMC; even if it’s clunky and not doing the job the way you want it to, it can feel like you’re too far down the road to turn back now. So much of that work would seem wasted.
How does MessageGears solve for this?
First things first: SFMC is a complex tool to use, and that’s why it takes so much training. Almost everything requires an add-on, and all of those require training to use. You have to be able to write AMPscript to do personalization and dynamic content, and that’s a whole skill set people on your team had to learn.
But with MessageGears, each product — MessageGears Segment, Message, and Engage — is all-inclusive for its features, and they work within the same overall UI. No complex add-ons. For your I.T. team, MessageGears will make a lot of intuitive sense; with Freemarker and good customization options via SQL, they’ll get up to speed rather quickly. They’ll be able to set things up to give Marketing the guardrails and assistance they need to be able to build campaigns right away. And if there are learning challenges, MessageGears has 24/7 Customer Success support, offering hands-on assistance to ease the transition and make sure everyone knows what they’re doing. That’s as opposed to Salesforce, where you have to pay for premium support to get a dedicated person to call, but you still end up in a support queue.
Read the full list by downloading the free eBook:
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.
