You may be familiar with launch variables today in MessageGears! We’ve given them a facelift, and a streamlined workflow to elevate the experience of our enterprise marketers and IT teams alike. Most notably, we are now calling them data variables to highlight their versatile nature across the MessageGears platform.
These data variables allow users more control over their queried data, and we’ve updated them to enhance the user experience and value add to your marketing campaigns.
With the added guardrails in the platform, the data administrator is able to control what the marketing campaign administrator can enter. For instance, say there is a certain number range that is applicable for this campaign — they can use the range to set the data variable.
Let’s take a moment to dig into some of the users we have on the platform today.
Non-Technical Users
Today’s enterprise marketers are still tech-savvy, but we’d like to take the opportunity to call out how they will use MessageGears’ data variables to send powerful and personalized marketing campaigns.
These users are generally focused on launching campaigns, audience targeting, creating templates, scheduling campaigns, and monitoring results across the platform. They may even dive into a bit of SQL, in addition to work with orchestrations and filtering various audiences.
While setting up recurring, automated campaigns in MessageGears Segment, data variables let the marketing team leverage the same messaging across different dynamic audiences.
What’s great about the new and improved data variables is that, while in the past there was a requirement from a system administrator to perform tasks, now we’ve split up functions for technical users like data administrators and campaign administrators, so each role has a streamlined process.
Technical Users
In contrast, data administrators are familiar with what goes on behind the scenes and are involved in writing queries, building out campaign logic, and creating and maintaining campaign and event triggers.
In MessageGears, data administrators are able to parameterize the queries so that campaign administrators have certain data variables to choose from while scheduling the campaign launch.
For our more technical users, here is the full list of options a data administrator can define to make the life of the marketing campaign administrator easier:
- Strings – Max Characters
- Number – Min/Max Value
- Boolean – True/false
- Fixed List
Real-Life Use Case
Let’s talk about a real-life example. Say you are a marketing campaign administrator for the National Football League, and you are sending out messages to various fans across the country. Your goal is to create one email to send out while supporting your audience that all happen to support different NFL teams.
In this case, the data administrator would set up the query for you while being mindful of your goal. By using a data variable, the marketing campaign administrator would be able to select the team, say Atlanta Falcons, before the campaign launch, and all of the audience members who prefer the Atlanta Falcons would get an email, push, or SMS that’s unique to their favorite team.
Let’s double down on this. Say the next campaign to launch is for the Carolina Panthers. The marketing campaign administrator would go back into the campaign and select the “Carolina Panthers” data variable, and once that campaign is launched, all of the Carolina Panthers fans would receive their personalized message.
In these examples, we can see that by using a data variable, the back and forth is drastically reduced between administrators because of the pre-defined options upon set-up.
What’s even better is that data variables can be set at a global level. So if you need to add an NFL team to the list, for example, all of your campaigns using that data variable will be dynamically updated across the MessageGears platform — no additional work.
Takeaways
These enhancements to MessageGears Segment will undoubtedly elevate the setup and execution of sending out marketing campaigns.
Adding both structure and flexibility to data variable definition + assignment will allow our users to further customize launch variables and leverage them for more uses throughout the application.
This deeper understanding of how the data variables can be used across the MessageGears platform will lead to better communication between both technical and non-technical marketing teams and, ultimately, total adoption of one of our most used features!
Interested in learning more about how you can leverage data variables in your current workflow? Let’s get started!
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.
