The past 12 months have been crazy for the product team at MessageGears.

From venturing into the world of mobile messaging with Cross-Channel orchestration to enhancing our users’ ability to send content with our Drag and Drop HTML Editor and Deep Application Links, it’s been a whirlwind of product design, development, and release. And while we’re insanely proud of the work we’re doing, we’ve learned a few lessons about how to create and develop software in 2019. I recently had the chance to present some of these learnings to the audience at Technology Association of Georgia’s GeekOut Marketing conference, where dozens of marketing and technology professionals gathered to share how we’re building martech stacks and using today’s tools to drive marketing forward.

I’d like to take a second to share those lessons here as well, but first I want to touch on something that is very important to understand: Marketing is moving backwards.

When the “Data Nation” – made up of the brightest minds in the modern data world – gather June 3-6 in San Francisco for Snowflake Summit, there’s going to be so much to hear and see. We can’t stop thinking about all the amazing speakers and partner ecosystem, and everything we can learn to help our customers maximize the potential of the data they’ve collected. Just looking at the speaker list has us counting the days until June 3.

It’s especially exciting for us because of our direct integration with Snowflake, and the opportunities for data-driven brands when their cross-channel ESP and their modern data warehouse are connected together. Already, we’re seeing so many ways this is enabling marketers at our customers to move more quickly (and securely) than ever before, connecting directly to Snowflake modern customer data platforms to pull live, real-time data into their personalized cross-channel campaigns for audience segmentation and conditional content.

Marketing today is all about personalization. In recent years, enterprise marketers have increasingly become more sophisticated as consumer expectations evolve. Today’s consumer expects relevant, personalized messages from brands instead of generic content that doesn’t interest them. This requires brands to tap into data from all customer touchpoints to use in email and other marketing channels.

Smart marketers create a dialog with their customers by tapping into demographic and geographic data, purchasing behavior, lifestyle and interests, and more.

We’re always looking for new ways to provide Super Senders with more options, more ways to deliver effective marketing campaigns. We want working with MessageGears to be empowering for marketers in every possible way, and that often means finding the right partner fit when we see a market niche being filled particularly well by a best-in-breed solution.

That’s certainly the case with Airship (formerly Urban Airship).  They’re an established leader in mobile messaging. With our new integration, customers can build, automate, and deliver notifications based on any data that they’ve collected into their database — across a full range of actions and attributes — and accessing it live, using MessageGears’ interface. Airship’s Predictive AI is then able to utilize what you know about each customer to pinpoint the delivery time that will generate the highest open, click, and conversion rate.

Everyone agrees that personalization is important for any messaging strategy — Consumers expect it, and marketers see consistent positive results. When 79% of consumers say they’re more loyal to brands that understand them, there’s no going back. So, personalization is here to stay. If there’s one marketing prediction we can be confident in right now, it’s that marketing messages are only going to get more highly tailored rather than less for the foreseeable future.