Email Insider Summit recap: Doing more with less

Doing more with less is a refrain we’re hearing often these days, and it’s one that MessageGears CEO Roger Barnette covered in his message to attendees of MediaPost’s Email Insider Summit (EIS) in Hilton Head last week.

Read on for a quick recap of Roger’s session on how brands can deliver a better experience for customers and build brand loyalty – even if they’re overwhelmed with what’s on their plate already.

The challenge: marketing chaos

It’s a chaotic world right now in general, and email marketers everywhere are being asked to do more with less – less budget, less people, less time, less… sanity.

But one thing marketers aren’t short on? Chaos. And the state of marketing operations at most companies isn’t helping.

Marketing tech stacks have devolved into complex sets of tools that serve different purposes – and some overlapping purposes – and they all require data to be sent and synced  in order to operate.

Most enterprise businesses have a central data warehouse, either an in-house database or a modern cloud one like Snowflake or BigQuery, that processes millions of customer data points behind the scenes. SaaS marketing clouds and ESPs handle email sends, but then your brand may also need to use a separate segmentation or campaign management tool to handle sophisticated marketing personalization needs. E.g. If a customer makes a purchase, how long of a delay is there before the marketing team has that info in their system?

That tool also lives separately and has to be hooked up between your database, your ESP, your website, and other vendors you use those segments for. 

Plus, maybe your ESP doesn’t do mobile messaging very well, so you go with a mobile provider – which is yet another silo that both the ESP and the segmentation platform need to talk to, along with the central database.

And then what about all of the various activations we want to be able to provide for advertising initiatives? 

How can we tie all of this together somehow? A “Customer Data Platform” sounds good, but that ultimately creates yet another data silo that has to interact with all of the other platforms.

Simplify your tech stack to make it work for you

The bottom line? Today’s martech stack is inefficient and costly – even when it’s all working as it’s supposed to (which it rarely does). 

A simplified tech stack treats your customer data (zero and first party) as the center of the universe, allowing you to access and activate data in real time for more humanized marketing.

Using MessageGears, teams can get more out of existing tech, and reduce some bloat along the way. Marketers can:

• Access all of their customer data – securely and in real-time – without copying, synching, or mapping.
• Use live data for segmentation and activation on any channel.
• Deploy email and mobile marketing campaigns at massive scale.

Tech should liberate, not limit

As he wrapped up his message at MediaPost’s Email Insider Summit, Roger shared some customer success stories, including one about OpenTable. 

OpenTable’s data situation was a struggle, with an ESP and a separate CDP that both forced the team to work with aging copies of their data. The process to get data over to their ESP was very clunky and slow.

Bringing in MessageGears’ customer engagement platform and connecting directly to Snowflake gave them full access to their customer data, live and in real time, so they could finally maximize its potential.

The team at OpenTable was able to realize a 20% reduction in marketing technology spend and a 15% lift in customer lifetime value by dropping their CDP and utilizing their Snowflake data warehouse and the full MessageGears platform.

Want to hear more from Roger about the ways enterprise businesses are revolutionizing their tech stacks using MessageGears? Check out the full recording!