For any enterprise marketing team that prioritizes its data for building messaging campaigns, a modern data warehouse is a very smart investment. Getting that data organized with a tool like Snowflake or Google BigQuery is a huge step in the right direction toward taking full ownership of the data you’ve collected.
But any investment like that brings with it a responsibility to make it worthwhile; in fact, the C-Suite is going to demand it. So, the question is this: Are you maximizing your investment in a modern data warehouse? And what are the warning signs that the answer very well might be no? Here are the keys to recognizing that you’re only using a fraction of the potential of your modern data warehouse, and how MessageGears can help you start using it all.
Warning Sign 1
The magic of a modern data warehouse is that it organizes your data, making it both highly performant and accessible across your organization. In order to take full advantage of that, though, you really need to be able to use the data right where it is, live and in real time, rather than having to copy pieces of it and ship them somewhere else.
If the tools you’re using still require you to copy data and send it elsewhere in order to build audiences for targeting, you’re throwing away a lot of your modern data warehouse’s potential. You’ve spent all that money and devoted so much time to securing your data in a single, structured location, only to then duplicate it and let it go somewhere else. Not only does that not make much sense operationally, but it effectively doubles your costs since you’ll be paying for the same data to be stored in two different places.
Solution: MessageGears Segment allows you to use your data precisely where it lives so that you’re:
1) allowing your modern data warehouse to work as intended;
2) maintaining your data security by keeping it behind your firewall
3) saving money by only paying to store your data once.
Warning Sign 2
Almost any martech tool you look into buying will have their sales people telling you they connect directly to your data. They don’t make a lot of sales by telling potential customers no. But, in virtually all cases, it’s half the truth at best.
Some of them will connect to certain data warehouses, but not others — most don’t play well with Snowflake and BigQuery, for instance. Others will connect, but it’s incredibly painful and time consuming to make it work because of language rewrites and complex operations adjustments.
What does it mean for your team if you have your data in Snowflake and then sign a contract with a CDP that can’t connect to them, or it’s extremely difficult to do so? It means neither tool is going to work as intended, and you’re going to struggle to get much out of either one while your team has to spend countless hours trying to connect them.
Solution: MessageGears Segment integrates directly with any data warehouse, Snowflake and BigQuery included. And it does so without any language rewrites or operations issues. We’re agnostic as to how you store your data and will simply allow you to use it how it stands right now. MessageGears Segment is plug-and-play.
Warning Sign 3
Inside your data warehouse, your data is currently formatted in the way that works best for your team. Your columns are labeled with language structures that make sense for your business, and were likely that way even before you purchased your data warehouse. Capital letters, commas, pipes, and other symbols are where you expect them to be.
But many CDPs and other tools you may work with have prescribed schemas they’ll force your data to convert to in order to use it. This creates a significant (and completely unnecessary) amount of purely operational work and frustrating QA to get straight, especially when something breaks and you don’t quite know why.
Solution: MessageGears Segment has no prescribed data models because it’s not storing your data. You are. So however your data is structured now is how you’d continue to utilize it with MessageGears Segment, building dynamic audience segments without frustrating formatting work.
If you’re struggling to maximize your company’s investment in a modern data warehouse, you’re not alone. They’re terrific tools with incredible potential for ROI if used correctly, but we’ve talked to plenty of marketing teams whose other tools can’t seem to get out of its way enough to allow its potential to be reached.
If you’d like to learn more about how MessageGears Segment can help you better tap into that potential, reach out about talking with one of our experts and seeing a demo.
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.
