Jeff Haws, Author at MessageGears

Webinar Recap: How to Achieve Customer Data Maturity with Enrichment Tools

January 17, 2020
Jeff Haws
Expert Advice

When it comes to sending sophisticated, personalized messaging campaigns, the quality and depth of your customer data is going to drive everything. If your data is comprehensive and organized in a way that’s accessible to your marketing team when they need it, your cross-channel messaging results will likely reflect the work and resources you put into that. If not, though, the likelihood is high that you’re lagging behind your competition when it comes to delivering campaigns that your customers look forward to seeing in their inboxes and on their phones.

So what if you have a good deal of customer data, but there are gaps that are preventing you from executing the level of strategy that you want? Our recent webinar with AnalyticsIQ looked at how their data asset can help you fill in those critical gaps, allowing you to know your customers better than you ever have in the past. And the better you understand who your customers are, their desires and motivations, the more targeted you can be with the messages you send them.

Research: The benefits are clear with modern data warehouses

January 8, 2020
Jeff Haws
Research

Our exclusive new research into the enterprise marketing experience with modern data warehouses (MDWs) uncovered lots of interesting information about how those relationships are working from the marketing side. While the general tenor was quite positive, we received a wide variety of responses to our questions, as one would expect.

But the most consistent, resounding response came to our question about benefits to working with an MDW. No matter the size of the organization or their responses to other questions, enterprise marketers overwhelmingly said that they saw the benefits from having their data in an MDW.

MessageGears’ Top 5 Blog Posts of 2019

December 17, 2019
Jeff Haws
Company

Nearly every week this year, we’ve published another blog post, on a variety of topics revolving around the email marketing world. We strive to be authentically helpful, providing content that informs and advises, trying to draw on our collective experience in the industry to help you become a better, more data-driven marketer.

Over the course of the year, some blog posts stood clearly above the rest when it comes to web traffic and popularity. Sometimes, we can see clearly why one stood out to readers, but sometimes it’s harder to tell why one gained more attention than others. So, we thought it’d be interesting to dig into the data and pull out our five most read blog posts from the year that’s soon coming to an end.

MessageGears Research: The Modern Data Warehouse is a Catalyst for Marketing

December 5, 2019
Jeff Haws
Research

For enterprise marketers, the dream when it comes to cross-channel marketing is to be able to easily access and utilize the data they have to deliver campaigns that feel personalized to the individual customer. But what’s been clear for some time is that’s a dream that’s rarely realized, with data hard to get out of various sources and nearly impossible to reliably get up to the ESP’s marketing cloud in order to build out those targeted campaigns. Response time lags, data feeds break, security is questionable, and everything’s often just generally a mess.

If this sounds familiar to you, you’ll want to watch for our upcoming research report, examining our Q4 survey in which we examined marketers’ experience with modern data warehouses, looking at the challenges and benefits they’ve encountered from their investment in consolidation and access for their customer data with a modern data warehouse.

Channel Silos are Negatively Impacting Message Personalization

November 14, 2019
Jeff Haws
Research

As consumer expectations for personalization across marketing channels continue to increase, the importance for brands to smartly utilize the customer data they’ve collected grows alongside it. But, even for those marketing teams that are personalizing campaigns across multiple channels — from email to mobile push and SMS — channel silos threaten to damage the overall customer experience they’re trying to create.

While it’s easy to build campaigns in each channel separately — and most multi-channel ESP platforms require you to do so — it’s essential for marketers to think of these various channels as one interconnected way of communicating with customers. Why? Because that’s precisely the way customers think of them. And that’s especially true for Super Senders. All of the communications consumers receive are associated with the brand they receive them from, and they expect these channel to be seamless. If one channel doesn’t appear to know what the other is doing, that hurts trust and that overall experience with the brand.

Research: Data Friction Takes a Financial Toll on Enterprise Brands

November 7, 2019
Jeff Haws
Research

For years, it’s been clear that syncing data back and forth to their ESP’s cloud has been a drain on enterprise brands, given the massive size of their datasets and the sheer volume of personalized messages they send on a monthly basis. It’s a business relationship that’s only been sustainable because the ESP marketplace doesn’t offer many alternatives that are truly built for the Super Senders rather than the mid-market.

Webinar Recap: Exploring the Hidden Costs of Data Friction

October 31, 2019
Jeff Haws
Research

For many enterprise marketers, shipping and syncing customer data with their ESP’s cloud is just considered one of the inevitable — annoying but inevitable — parts of sending personalized campaigns. What else can they do? They have to use their ESP to build campaigns, and the data has to get out to them somehow. For large brands, that means copying the segment of data they need, shipping it out to their ESP’s marketing cloud, and using that copy to personalize their communications.

But all of that takes work. It requires someone’s time to replicate that data and sync it with the cloud. There’s the time spent waiting for the sync to complete, and the time spent dealing with triggered campaigns sending confusing messages based on outdated data. And there’s the fact that you’re paying to store the same data twice — once in your own database, and then again in your ESP’s cloud. Those are just a few of the costly problems with this process.

Email is your firewall against the end of social media

October 2, 2019
Jeff Haws
Expert Advice

Social media can seem like an ever-present part of our culture today, going far beyond our personal lives to become a vital part of the marketing strategy for most companies. Because of their large amounts of data on the individuals that use the platforms, social channels can provide an enticing way to reach the types of people who will buy your product, and enterprise companies devote significant resources to doing so. Some businesses even surrender their own websites in favor of using Facebook as their primary channel for providing information and interaction to their customers.

In today’s environment, there’s probably little risk or danger in doing this. LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook (and Instagram, by extension) are all publicly traded companies with massive users bases, and they’re entrenched as advertising platforms with access to troves of data voluntarily surrendered by the people you want to market to. It makes sense to be directing at least some percentage of your marketing efforts toward social media.

Twitter chat recap: Finding Email Testing Success

September 19, 2019
Jeff Haws
Best Practices

Every email marketer knows that establishing the right goals is essential to success, and testing effectively is the only way to know if you’re hitting the benchmarks you need to hit along the way. In a Twitter chat this week with our friends at Email on Acid (Check out their chats at #EOAChat), a bunch of email geeks joined us to share their own expertise and experience on email testing.

Webinar Recap: Building a Cross-Channel Marketing Data Strategy

September 13, 2019
Jeff Haws
Expert Advice

For marketers trying to execute a messaging strategy, customer data is going to be the lifeblood. And for that data to provide the impact they need, it needs to be thoughtfully organized and easily accessible when they need it in order to segment and target campaigns. For our latest webinar, Aptitive Marketing Analytics Practice Lead Cierra Valor joined our SVP, Growth, Walter Rowland to discuss steps teams can take today toward getting their data in order, and some of the benefits once you can get it done.

Jeff Haws

Webinar Recap: How to Achieve Customer Data Maturity with Enrichment Tools

Research: The benefits are clear with modern data warehouses

MessageGears’ Top 5 Blog Posts of 2019

MessageGears Research: The Modern Data Warehouse is a Catalyst for Marketing

Channel Silos are Negatively Impacting Message Personalization

Research: Data Friction Takes a Financial Toll on Enterprise Brands

Webinar Recap: Exploring the Hidden Costs of Data Friction

Twitter chat recap: Finding Email Testing Success

Webinar Recap: Building a Cross-Channel Marketing Data Strategy

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