Connecting in the Modern World: The Accelerate 2022 Recap

Movers and shakers from some of the most successful brands in the world gathered in Atlanta on September 18-20, 2022 for MessageGears’ annual Accelerate summit. The first two iterations of this event were exclusively virtual, making this our first in-person customer event. 

Guests enjoyed a luxurious stay at the historic Waldorf Astoria, and the three-day event included industry insights, collaborative discussion groups, and Atlanta’s best sites and food. 

Here are some highlights and memorable quotes from the main stage.

The Future of Customer Engagement is Connectivity 

MessageGears CEO, Roger Barnette, led with the mainstage keynote on the future of customer engagement. The future of customer engagement lies in the ability of enterprise brands to connect with their customers based on live (and accurate) customer data. Generic personalization won’t cut it anymore. Personalized content based on direct data access is both the present and future of customer engagement. 

“That’s what we’re all trying to accomplish with our customers – customer engagement and connectivity. That’s what great brands do,” Roger Barnette.

Achieving Your Goals During Economic Uncertainty

The last five years have undoubtedly been filled with economic uncertainty. Our partner spotlight by Movable Ink’s SVP of Partnerships, Kyle Schroeder, uncovered how marketers can navigate the realities of economic uncertainty and the ever-changing needs of our consumers. He unpacked how to take a customer-centric approach to your marketing program with the efficiencies of automation and the ability to maximize your data.

“When you think of the core of personalization, it’s really the ability to understand nuances [of your customer’s unique situation] and tailor communications to reflect that individual circumstance. You do that with the relevant data you have available. The more you understand who that customer is, the more you can message to them to reflect the realities of their environment,” Kyle Schroeder.

Transformative Connections

MessageGears CEO Roger Barnette sat down with a longtime friend and Atlantian Rohit Agarwal, the Chief Product Officer of SoundCloud. In this conversation, they discussed the unique opportunities SoundCloud faces and how they’re innovatively tackling them, how big organizations can identify if they’re early adopters or digital laggards, and how to lead change in large organizations.

“My approach to affecting change in an organization is to develop an operating plan that leverages a strong partnership framework. You can’t deliver a holistic customer experience on your own. You need incredible talent in the organization and a partner network outside of it. In any digitally native organization, you must build up many capabilities using partners,” Rohit Agarwal.

Reaching the Inbox: The State of Deliverability

Deliverability changes fast – even faster than other aspects of marketing technology. Brad Gurley, MessageGears’ Director of Deliverability, discussed the trends and changes in deliverability, including new privacy and tracking laws, how major providers respond to the increased privacy laws, and how MessageGears keeps our customers in their consumer inboxes.

“Email reputation, or send reputation, is the core of deliverability. It determines where your mail gets placed, if it gets delivered, if it bounces, etc. Whatever happens from a deliverability perspective, it all depends on and affects your reputation as a brand,” Brad Gurley.

Getting the Most Out of Peak Season

We were honored to welcome three guests to the main stage for a panel discussion: 

Corey Kahl (Manager of Campaign Operations at Best Buy), Brian Olson (Director of Lifecycle Marketing at Blue Nile), and Alisa Stewart (Sr. Director of Acquisition, CRM & Loyalty at Party City). Dave Ragals (Sr. Director of Accounts at MessageGears) moderated the panel and covered a host of topics like each brand’s unique peak seasons, how they strategize, plan, and execute in those seasons, and leading and scaling during macro events in the world.

“We plan a year in advance of our peak season. We study trend data – what will be popular in the upcoming season. We also look at and take into account the micro and macro things happening in the world,” Alisa Stewart.

Using Blueprints for Better Personalization at Scale

“We’re sending too many messages.” It was a common statement we heard from enterprise brand marketers during the event. Taylor Jones, the VP of Client Success at MessageGears, shared how our customers can target and deliver one cohesive experience to the right customer at the right time and how our newest features enable our customers to do that even better. 

“Say you want two different marketing communications for a user. You’re likely asking yourself: How do we prioritize those? How do we put them into different buckets so we know exactly what they’re going to receive in advance, but still do real-time personalization? Those are the use cases we’ll go through,” Taylor Jones.

Forging Deeper Connections: The MessageGears Product Roadmap 

The final main stage session featured MessageGears’ CEO, Roger Barnette, Craig Pohan (CTO), and Taylor Jones (VP Solutions). One of our values at MessageGears is that we innovate, and we take that to heart. We’re at the forefront of the next wave in customer engagement and are committed to helping enterprise brands cultivate relationships with their consumers far beyond the transaction. We are continuing to build the leading customer engagement platform for enterprise marketers that:

• Creates cross-channel excellence with mobile push and in-app delivery alongside social media conversations
• Has integrated, triggered partner orchestration that uses all customer and partner data signals to orchestrate messaging with all your partners
• Combines marketing program coordination and optimization like tools, workflows, and analytics that allow you to manage all your marketing execution with continued content testing
• Incorporates conversational messaging that allows you to attach marketing business rules to native customer data streams for conversational flow messaging