Enterprise organizations and their marketing teams understandably put a lot of time and thought toward the choices they make for their martech stack. For vendors, the RFP process can be long and grueling, but it exists so that companies can make the most informed choice possible when it comes to major decisions that will impact their business for years to come.
We think we’re in a good position to offer some advice here, given our frequent conversations with marketers to understand their needs and our constant discussions with other vendors in and around the messaging space. For modern data-led organizations, there’s a set of tools that makes sense to invest in so that you can maximize the impact of the data you’ve collected.
For those enterprise marketers asking “Which tools should I have in my martech stack?” here’s our take on the ones that will make the biggest difference when building your Super Sender Stack.
Data Warehouse/Storage
Fortunately, you have some very good options here, given that it’s undoubtedly among the most consequential decisions you’ll make. Most everything you’ll do from a cross-channel messaging perspective starts here, and everything else should revolve around your data. We think these are your best bets to evaluate when looking for data storage at scale:
Content Creation
Getting your content right before you send and then getting valuable insights afterward is essential for any marketing team, so having a tool to help that process can certainly give you a lift. From templating to workflows and slick UIs, Litmus is a terrific option for marketing teams that want to streamline the process of creating content and feel more confident about every send they make.
Identity Resolution
It seems like some companies view identity resolution as a sort of “Last mile” problem rather than a crucial part of their data operation. But when it comes to connecting, controlling, and activating the data you’ve invested in, identity resolution is huge for data-forward Super Senders. LiveRamp is a true leader in this space, helping companies better understand and leverage their data with a focus on privacy that’s unrivaled in the industry.
Analytics
Whatever you do with your data, without a way to reliably measure the performance of your campaigns, you’ll never know how well your tools are working. Looker is a great tool for helping you get better insight into how consumers are responding to the messages you send. They specialize in modern business intelligence and integrated insights, while also integrating workflows with your data.
Deliverability
Everest (formerly 250ok, Return Path)
No campaign is successful if it doesn’t land in your customers’ inboxes (or phones), and few Super Senders have deliverability expertise in house. This is one of those areas that’s almost certainly going to be worthwhile to get help. Everest — the email success platform incorporating 250ok and Return Path under the umbrella of Validity — is the best option on the market to help ensure your messages reach their destination and that you have the visibility you need into your sender reputation.
Dynamic Content
One of the ways you can truly maximize the value of your data is through dynamic content that helps you send highly personalized and engaging messages that your customers will love. Movable Ink and Liveclicker are great tools for helping you to do this. Movable Ink allows you to create messaging content that renders on open based upon the most up-to-the-minute information you have on the recipient, or your own internal information. Similarly, Liveclicker helps you create unique and engaging email experiences with an objective-oriented strategy.
Real-Time Data Access
And to enhance the Movable Ink experience, MessageGears Engage is a great option for giving Movable Ink access to more of your data in real time so you can maximize your investment in their tool.
Event Tracking
An open-source Customer Data Infrastructure (CDI) tool like RudderStack is essential in the modern martech stack. RudderStack is a leader in capturing behavioral event data from first-party and external applications. They simplify data streams so that data engineering and operations teams can easily configure where to collect data from and where to send it to. Having this in your stack is a huge help because it supports modern data warehouses, and RudderStack has one of the more extensive catalogs of destinations in the industry.
Artificial Intelligence
Even the most skilled and experienced marketing teams recognize that nailing the best language to get conversions each time is essentially impossible without help. And the best option for providing that is Phrasee, a tool that utilizes innovative AI technology with deep learning and language generation to help you A/B test and identify the right language for each campaign, from the subject line into the body of the message itself. Affinio and Continual use machine learning to reveal naturally forming behavioral-based segments in any customer data set, helping marketers to better connect with people using rich interest and affinity data.
Segmentation, Data Activation, and Reverse ETL
In order to practice true personalization, you need to be able to divide your audience into smaller groups so you can target them with content that’s relevant to them. MessageGears Segment does the best job with this by not only giving you a simple drag-and-drop journey builder that can go as deep as your data allows it, but can adjust quickly to changing information because it connects directly to your database.
Cross-Channel
Email has been the most prominent marketing channel for more than two decades, but the most effective campaigns today are cross-channel ones, reaching the customer on the channel — email, mobile push, or SMS — they prefer. MessageGears Message connects directly to your data in order to let you build data-driven campaigns that carry across all three channels with a clean drag-and-drop UI that allows you to see exactly what you’re sending live in the platform.
Distributed Marketing
When it comes to letting marketing execution flow from a large corporate overseer to dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of locally based leaders with their own unique customer base, Sageflo is the industry leader. Sageflo helps large organizations empower their local market leaders to send personalized campaigns to their area customers within the corporate brand and language guidelines of the larger company.
Mobile
The cross-channel relationship can be great for your customers, but some Super Senders are mobile focused enough that they feel they need a specialist for that particular channel. Airship and Sinch are the industry leaders in helping you create a full mobile experience that delivers results. Your app is a huge part of the brand experience you want to share with your customers, so when that’s the top priority for your organization, that might be a time when it’s worth talking to a company that’s laser focused on that.
Takeaways
At MessageGears, we know these are challenging and important decisions for your organization. If you’re in the market for any of these services, we hope you’ll reach out to the great companies mentioned above to learn how they can help you enhance the work your marketing team is doing. And if you’d like to talk to us about the impact we can make for you, let’s set up time with one of our experts.
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.
