For enterprise B2C brands, connecting with customers is the only way to succeed – yet it continues to challenge even the most sophisticated marketing teams.
Roger Barnette, CEO of MessageGears, recently called attendees at MediaPost’s Email Insider Summit to question the conventional and chart a new path forward.
As Roger explained, change doesn’t just mean running to something new and magically finding success. Read on to hear how he says brands elevate mundane marketing campaigns into a powerhouse of customer engagement and experience.
The Foundational Problem for Enterprise B2C Brands
Marketing professionals attend events like EIS year after year looking to learn from other leaders in the space. Everyone is constantly looking for ways to deliver more relevant, personalized experiences to customers.
Every couple of years, there’s a new “thing” that’s gonna be “the thing” that finally gets us all there, Roger said.
The reason none of these solutions have gotten us to that true customer 360? Our tools aren’t built to get us there.
“Centralized marketing clouds were supposed to make life easier. Then CDPs. Now maybe AI?” Roger said. “AI is really, really powerful. It actually could be the next big thing. But the thing to remember is that there is no one ‘silver bullet.’ There’s an underpinning – a foundation – that you have to have as a marketer to do your jobs and to do them well.”
Roger explained that most martech tools are built on outdated foundations. For brands with millions of customers sending billions of emails, this causes issues around syncing and copying data, heavy dependence on engineering teams, limited channel activations, and security and compliance concerns.
“Most of us here in the room have a degree in workarounds to get over these issues,” Roger said, pointing out that it can often take months for brands to get a new campaign out the door.
Change the Status Quo
So how can today’s B2C enterprise brands activate their live data across channels? There are a few essential things that Roger said need to change.
Instant, direct access to real-time customer data in campaigns – Marketers shouldn’t need to submit a ticket to IT or wait for data syncs to finish to get a campaign out the door. Real-time needs to mean actual real-time.
Autonomy from IT in general – Marketers often want to be best buddies with their more technical-minded counterparts, but there should still be a fast and easy way to build sophisticated customer segments and workflows without needing SQL knowledge.
It shouldn’t be so hard to make the customer journey dynamic – Why is it so hard to construct truly customer-driven journeys that allow individuals to take a unique path based on their actions? Marketers have been saying this for years, yet we still build customer journeys in a linear format within our martech… why?!
Prioritizing different segments and campaigns within an overall strategy – While this sounds like a normal thing to do, it quickly becomes a confusing process of stack-ranking different linear campaigns, leaving you with a mess of overlapping exclusion and suppression logic. Meanwhile, accurate visibility into the live counts of individual campaign audiences might as well be a pipe dream.
Better alignment for audiences and messaging across channels – How often do you pull together a campaign in your ESP, only to wind up with what seems to be a very different audience in your SMS campaign? Or in your display ad campaigns? How can you provide a cohesive, cross-channel experience when you can’t easily figure out how to speak to the same individuals across mediums?
Brands with millions of customers are used to these things being hard, and this has become the normal way of operating… Roger says it doesn’t have to be that way.
Delivering More Relevant, Personalized Customer Experiences
As Roger explained, the excitement and hope around AI is all centered around one question: How can we utilize AI and other tactics to deliver more relevant, personalized experiences to our customers?
MessageGears allows brands to use ALL of their customer data, but we don’t want their customer data. Brands can keep that data where it is, and Roger explained that this is a mind-shift that’s often hard for people to wrap their heads around.
It’s also a paradigm shift that becomes the NEW status quo, taking you to a place where you can’t believe how you used to operate.
“We’ve created the premier customer engagement platform, and we’ve done it in a way that lets you leverage everything you need to be successful,” Roger said.
To learn more about how MessageGears can change the status quo for your brand, book a demo with our team of experts.
Elsbeth Russell
Elsbeth has nearly two decades of experience helping brands attract and engage audiences through content. For the past six years, she’s been dedicated to helping B2B companies in the email marketing space connect with audiences through community building and social media marketing.
