If you’ve been involved in marketing for more than five minutes, you’re at least tangentially familiar with the behemoth that is Salesforce. And in the world of enterprise messaging, Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) is the most common ESP that brands have partnered with. There’s a variety of reasons for that, but it’s certainly not because everyone loves it.
Ultimately, the chief reason enterprise marketers struggle with SFMC is the lack of a direct data connection. The inability to access your data is essentially a dealbreaker for data-centric enterprise marketers, while the need to create clunky data extensions to perform any real marketing and their practically non-existent services help you need to actually get off the ground are the icing on the cake. But data is what this all really comes back to.
How are they missing a “direct data connection”?
It’s not about being able to pull data from your database to their platform; everybody can do that. What we’re talking about is the ability to live wherever your data lives so that you’re working with the data live and in real time. With SFMC, marketers have to make copies of the data they’re wanting to use, then ship that up to the marketing cloud before building out audiences and, subsequently, messaging campaigns.
They can’t give you live access to your data because they’re simply not set up to do so in any way. Essentially, their position is that stale data is good enough, and all these overnight data syncs and such are just part of what it means to do enterprise marketing. And that’s not about to change.
Why is this a problem?
When you’re not working with your live, real-time data, enterprise marketers are going to deliver a worse customer experience, without exception. There’s no way around it. If you send millions of marketing messages each month, you’re wasting massive amounts of money and other resources every month you let SFMC ride it out without any help. Here’s a few reasons why:
- The Messages are never quite right. Going through nightly syncs, strict data definitions, and putting up with the world of data extensions makes it hard to create the right messages. It demos really well, but in practice is hard to use
- It’s costing you tons of money. You have to pay to store all that data — at least twice. Once for anywhere you store it, and then once for SFMC to store it. They’re storing truly massive amounts of data from all their customers, and those expenses are passed on to you. That means you pay to store the same data over and over and over again.
- It doesn’t scale. Because they’re holding all of this data for all their customers, messaging throughput suffers when everyone wants to send — leading to Black Friday headaches and the inability to guarantee high throughput requirements
- You’re waiting on your data. Your data has to sync with their system, and you’re always stuck waiting for that often-nightly sync to take place before you can complete QA or make any changes to audiences and campaigns. Yes, more waiting.
MessageGears Segment opens up LIVE Audience Data
Now time for some good news: there is a way you can clear these hurdles, even in the short term — and even if you’re stuck in a long SFMC contract.
MessageGears Segment has the ability to become the connective tissue between SFMC and your customer data. With MessageGears Segment, you can finally work with your customer data as it flows into your environment, building audiences that reflect the latest data you have, and export to SFMC when you want to send your message.
By sending real-time audience data to their platform when the messages go out, you start to experience the kind of live data access that SFMC simply can’t provide you with. That lets you continue to use SFMC’s template creation, data extension, mobile solution, sending infrastructure, and more for as long as you need or want to, without having to sacrifice the live data access you need to deliver great, personalized cross-channel customer experiences.
And MessageGears Segment does this without storing any of your data at all. You keep it where it’s both fresh and safe, behind your firewall. So the marketing team gets the campaigns it wants while I.T. gets greatly improved data security.
Interested in seeing how MessageGears Segment can be the missing piece you need to make SFMC less frustrating? We’d love to hear from you.
Jeff Haws
As MessageGears’ Senior Marketing Manager, Jeff is focused on producing engaging and thoughtful content that resonates with enterprise marketers, helping them to better understand how MessageGears makes their jobs easier. He’s passionate about understanding the way data impacts messaging, and he’s also hopelessly obsessed with baseball.
