How MessageGears Segment Accelerates Your ESP

From thousands of conversations with enterprise marketers, we know pretty well how many reasons they’re frustrated with their ESP. The technology just isn’t where it needs to be in order to solve so many of their problems, and the existing remote ESPs aren’t set up in a way that it’s at all likely they’ll ever be able to fully address them.

And all of their problems rhyme with each other — consider if any of these sounds familiar:

• It takes you days to get a personalized email out of your ESP
• It takes you more than a day to get a new data point to your ESP
• You’re stuck in the cycle of trying to get the “correct” data to your ESP

That’s because those problems, in many ways, are foundational. At the end of the day, enterprise marketers don’t have an email problem; they have a data problem. Storing it in a coherent way. Connecting to it where it lives. Accessing it reliably across your entire organization. And making it fully actionable in real time for personalizing your messaging campaigns.

But there’s a good reason why, despite all that, you’re still with your ESP — for a variety of reasons, it feels like it’s somewhere between incredibly daunting and virtually impossible to switch ESPs. You need a data tool to fix your email. And that’s where MessageGears Segment comes in.

Enterprise marketers don’t have an email problem; they have a data problem

With MessageGears Segment, none of those obstacles exist. With just a simple install, we can begin reshaping the way your data interacts with your ESP, making it faster and easier to work with for enterprise marketing teams. If you’ve experienced any — or, in many cases, all — of those, keep reading:

What does MessageGears Segment do?

When we set out to build MessageGears Segment, it was all about solving a problem we knew existed for marketers, and that we were positioned to solve in a unique way. During the process, we kept three key tenets in mind.

MessageGears Segment must:

• provide a best-in-class user experience to empower non-technical users to easily use their data to build audiences
• reduce technical overhead and maintain compatibility with modern data solutions
• be flexible enough to enrich and export data however and to wherever a marketer wants

What we created was a product that lives alongside your data wherever it resides, and allows you to take advantage of that direct, live access to build dynamic audiences that can then be exported wherever you need in order to target your customers.

And it does so without a complex setup that requires a lot of work or computing power from the brand. The light software install plugs directly into your data warehouse or internal system and runs from there. MessageGears Segment exists to stay out of the way, removing the obstacles that prevent marketers from sending the sorts of messaging campaigns they dream of.

How does this help with my ESP?

Because — unlike remote ESPs (i.e. Salesforce, Adobe, Oracle, Iterable, Braze, etc.), which require marketers to send a copy of their data up to the ESP’s cloud in order to do anything with it — MessageGears Segment connects directly to your database, it allows for audiences to be built using the most up-to-date data from your database rather than a quickly outdated copy of it.

That seemingly small change is a very powerful one, for a few reasons.

• Instead of waiting for your ESP to do a nightly sync in order to complete changes and allow you to move forward with your work, just hit Refresh to update campaigns and get them out the door as soon as you’re ready. Campaigns that today take close to a week to send can be started and finished in the same day.
• Reduce I.T.’s involvement in audience and campaign building, letting the marketing team work more independently (and quickly). That’s because there are no predefined schemas that you have to map to with MessageGears Segment. However your data is currently formatted and set up is fine. Any data points you have on your customers can immediately be used for personalization, with new columns added and subtracted with a few keyboard clicks.
• Once built, easily export audiences directly to your ESP (or wherever else) to quickly send highly personalized campaigns. Now, all that’s left is the creative that goes along with the campaign. But your data has already done its job, and the hardest part is done. This is where the possibilities open up.

How is this different from a CDP?

In many ways, this is similar to how a CDP functions, providing you with a nice UI and view of your data to help with audience segmentation. And, if you don’t already have a CDP, MessageGears Segment can essentially eliminate the need for one by giving you the same functionality — and it also syncs bi-directionally with a CDP you might already have.

But there are some key differences between MessageGears Segment and a CDP. If you’d like a deep examination of these differences, we went into great detail elsewhere. The important points to remember, though, are:

• Unlike MessageGears Segment, CDPs aren’t going to provide you with that direct data connection, and that’s the most important differentiator. The right CDP can be a great asset for your marketing team, but it’s still going to be storing a copy of your data for you to work with, and that reduces the potential for what you can do. It also makes virtually every CDP far more expensive than MessageGears Segment.
• Since you’re working directly with your data on MessageGears Segment, that allows you to use your data warehouse as the single view of the customer rather than having some data over here, some over there, and more wherever else it might be. Bring all your data together in MessageGears Segment and work with it there, live and in real time, saving your marketing team time, giving them more control, and empowering them to provide a better experience to your customers.
• MessageGears Segment is a light software install that doesn’t require complicated language rewrites and operations changes. This means that MessageGears Segment integrates easily with Snowflake, Google BigQuery, Amazon RedShift, or any other data storage you’re using, without any difficult changes to make.

So, if you feel like you’re stuck with a remote ESP that’s frustrating your marketing team, we’d love to talk with you about how MessageGears Segment can provide the boost you need to make your marketers more efficient — and happier — with a quick software install that’ll make a huge difference.