Blog

Data At Your Fingertips With MessageGears’ Contextual Data Suite  

Sep 20, 2021
Danielle Briner

Are you interested in making the most out of your data? How about connecting with your customers based on their preferences? 

Create Positive Brand Experiences 

What is Context Data? Easy. Context Data is information that you’re able to leverage while building your customer experience to connect better with your audience. In MessageGears, we talk all the time about how we connect to your live data, letting enterprise marketers and data teams alike reach their audience base with a true moment-based marketing experience. 

But what does this mean for your customers? 

We are all customers, after all! When you receive an email from a Big Box Retailer or a Top 10 Fast Food restaurant trying to lure you back in for another visit, you may see your last purchase featured in the email or the last item you viewed before you abandoned your cart or left the site. 

These two examples of content are pieces of specialized context data that are dynamically pulled upon email open with MessageGears. If this information changed overnight, you may receive a new email depending on the marketing efforts of the organization, or your previous email may render again, displaying your latest viewed items. 

What’s unique here about the MessageGears suite of Context Data is that we offer three ways for marketers to access all of their customer information. They are all accessible while building marketing messaging in MessageGears Message and Engage: Context Data, Real-Time Context Data, and Context APIs. 

MessageGears Suite of Context Information 

Let’s Build An Email: 

Context Data: Use Context Data to pull static information from your customer data. This can be anything from first name to last name, customer ID, or even favorite store. 

Real-Time Context Data: Use Real-Time Context Data to pull live customer data up to the minute of send, with the option for fresh data to render upon email open. This can be loyalty points, order status, last viewed item, or abandoned cart items. 

Context APIs:  Use Context APIs to create a unique experience for your customers upon email open. Say a national reservations app sends an email reminder of a reservation made in Atlanta, Ga.; Context APIs can be used to dynamically render the weather for Atlanta at the time of email open. Alternatively, if the customer edits their reservation to be in Charleston, S.C. instead, the weather suggestion would change as well. The opportunities to bring unique information into customer marketing experiences are truly limitless with Context APIs. If your marketing team plans to leverage information from an outside source in a dynamic message, Context APIs are the next best tool in your marketing toolkit. They also allow you to leverage any internal service that your I.T. team has built out or any vendors across our partner market. 

Contextual Data In Real-Life 

Specifically, we’ve watched our enterprise clients send out highly modular, fully customizable marketing messages to their customers in real-time, chock-full of their personal preferences. As you’ll see below, your enterprise marketing team can leverage the MessageGears Contextual Data Suite to pull in data from multiple sources. 

For instance, let’s say you have an email with six different sections that pull customer data and preferences depending on: 

  • First Name 
  • Customer Points or Loyalty Status 
  • Home Store Location 
  • Last Purchased Item or Last Viewed Item 
  • Custom Monthly Recommendation Based On Purchases 
  • Social Media Interaction Recommendation 

Each of these customer data points would be pulled in dynamically using a different type of contextual data and can be easily customized for each recipient. In this specific example, we’ve seen clients send out hundreds of versions of one email template at scale. 

We’re All Customers

To drive the point home, we can all agree that feeling unique as a customer makes for a more positive brand experience. Here are just a few examples of how subtle details can elevate an email: 

  • Color change based on loyalty status 
  • Photo of your favorite food or drink item from a restaurant 
  • Instagram post from your most booked bar or restaurant on a reservation app 
  • Grid of your last viewed items 
  • Sale offer for an item in your abandoned cart 
  • Personalized recommendation based on your customer profile 
    • Has kids vs. no kids 
    • Lives in a city vs country 
    • Prefers to buy in-store vs online 

Takeaways 

MessageGears enables Super Senders to access their customer data from wherever it lives, whenever they need it. This means, when your enterprise marketing team needs access to real-time customer data, they can work on their timeframe, not ours. Interested in getting the most out of your data and providing extremely personalized marketing messaging? Get started here

About the Author

Danielle Briner

As the Product Marketing Manager at MessageGears, Danielle Profita Briner oversees the creation and execution of our Go-To-Market Strategy for the entire MessageGears product suite. She applies her background in content strategy and software to organize, establish, and produce meaningful content for our current and future clients.