You don’t want your company to be treated like every other company. You have unique needs, depending on your industry, your target customers, and your size. It seems unthinkable that enterprise brands would just accept that the email service provider they’re working with was built to serve the mid-market, but that’s what so many of them do every day. They work with ESPs that were typically built decades ago with the broad mid-market customer in mind.
They do this even though they know their needs for data and scale are far different from smaller companies. But they accept it because they don’t know anyone is built for them. They deserve a messaging partner that understands what makes the Super Sender different, and why the marketing cloud ESPs aren’t set up to serve them in the manner they need.
One size doesn’t fit all
The largest enterprise marketers have unique needs that aren’t being served by the leading marketing cloud ESPs. When it comes to messaging solutions, what works for one company won’t work for another. Super Senders usually have several things in common:
- They keep a large amount of customer data behind their firewall
- That data is stored in one or multiple places, often including modern data warehouses
- They send millions of emails and other messages every month
- Data security is top of mind
Personalization is vital for success
Consumers expect global businesses to lead the pack when it comes to delivering a great experience. This means it’s essential for them to have the right technology in place to be able to execute effectively. But these companies haven’t been adequately served by commercial cross-channel marketing solutions, like the popular “marketing clouds,” which were built for a wide audience and don’t meet the specific needs of Super Senders.
Marketing clouds make a lot of appealing promises: easy installation, higher ROI, and freedom and independence from I.T. For many businesses, these SaaS solutions can deliver on many of these promises. But these promises fall short for the largest marketers as their data gets too plentiful and complex, while their message volume grows too high for the marketing clouds to be effective.
It’s all about data access and control
The main reason pure-SaaS solutions aren’t ideal for big enterprises is marketers can’t access all their data in real time. With system-of-record customer data housed internally, a company must copy a subset of data, map it to their cloud provider, and sync it there for storage. After sending messages, you must send data back into the internal systems.
This process is time-consuming, costly, and less effective for larger businesses. When the data sync has issues or you need to add new fields, it frustrates both I.T. and Marketing groups. Most importantly, all this means that marketers aren’t able to deliver a great experience to their customers.
Robust customer engagement platforms for Super Senders
So where do major brands go when they’ve “outgrown” the marketing clouds? A robust customer engagement platform like MessageGears that lives wherever your data lives and provides all the tools you need to use the data can be a difference maker. It utilizes the cloud for the heavy lifting: getting emails out the door and into recipient’s inboxes. But importantly, connecting directly to your data — whether it’s in a modern data warehouse or an internally built system — allows you to access your customer data in real time and avoid the friction that can negatively impact the customer experience.
By allowing marketers to access all of their data in real time and letting the cloud deliver the messages, I.T. resources that used to be dedicated to managing email feeds and data syncs are freed up, enabling them to focus on projects that can grow the business. Marketers have live access to all of their internal data within a familiar, easy-to-use interface. And customers are happy because a brand they love is sending them timely and highly personalized communications.
Will Devlin
A 20-year email marketing veteran, Will has focused on marketing strategy and execution for MessageGears since 2014. He has extensive experience on both the retail customer and service side of email marketing, and he’s interested in helping businesses better understand how they can make the most of the work they put into their email campaigns.
