Why CTOs love MessageGears

Throughout history, great dynamic duos have made significant impacts in their field. Sherlock Holmes and Watson, Chewbacca and Han Solo, Thelma and Louise, Frodo and Sam, marketing and IT. 

Marketing and IT?! Probably not a pair you’d think of as a duo, and certainly not a dynamic one… We’d argue, though, that this perception can – and should – change!

When CTOs hear that MessageGears’ cross-channel engagement platform can help their brand send more personalized messaging to customers by connecting directly to their data, many roll their eyes. 

CTOs know their team instantly envisions all the work it will take to get the marketing folks up and running, not to mention the security nightmare involved in opening up their customer data access. Meanwhile, marketing teams are thinking about all the times they’ve been shot down by the IT team and had to limit personalization within a campaign because of which fields they have access to. When every vendor essentially promises the same “real-time personalization” capabilities, integrating yet another martech tool just sounds like another giant pain.

It’s easy to understand why: Typical customer engagement tools are remote from the source of the customer data, which causes headaches and data friction between IT, marketing, and marketing operations. 

Once you wrap your head around a truly direct data connection, the fact is that MessageGears is uniquely positioned to eliminate that relationship friction between teams and make CTOs lives easier. MessageGears was purpose-built for enterprises with millions of customers, and it changes how marketing and data/technology teams can work together. 

The bottom line is that CTOs love MessageGears. Here’s why:

No more data headaches

Typical cross-channel martech platforms require you to send a copy of as much of your data as you can to them, and then require that the data be kept in sync over time. 

MessageGears allows you to utilize your data in place, reducing data friction across platforms, which means:

• No more ETL.
  • The work needed to extract, transform, and load data into a remote platform is a drain on data operation resources and a large effort for marketing operations to even have the system up and running regularly.
• No more troubleshooting failed file transfers.
  • Whether you have syncs set up nightly, hourly, or maybe every 15 minutes (at best), batches of data sent to a remote platform from various data sources invariably fail. This means monitoring, paging, alarming, and root cause analysis of why these transfers fail – a large source of frustration for most IT teams.
• No more requests to modify data transfer processes to add new data requested by marketing.
  • Remember those ETL jobs required with most martech platforms? Well, it’s only a matter of time before your marketing team will need new and different data fields and sources for campaigns. Each seemingly small change can be a massive headache for your IT experts and for marketing operations, as changing these ETL processes can be a much bigger effort than anticipated.

CTOs have far more control

For most brands, if the marketing team wants to add another field for personalization, they have to go through the right IT/product team to get that done. The process can take weeks to complete, and that’s assuming there are no data access and privilege issues.

With MessageGears, though, it’s just like flipping a switch for IT. Instead of having to update the ETL process to change the data in both the target martech database and the data warehouse where it sits, they can do half the work and eliminate ETL.

MessageGears is connected directly to the data warehouse, so the CTO’s team can still be the gatekeeper of data security but doesn’t have to spend so much time making it work for the marketer.

The security level is much higher

Remote platforms require you to ship your data back and forth to their cloud to build campaigns. By default, this means the data has to leave the safety of your firewall, potentially exposing it to bad actors on the other side. Because MessageGears’ platform sits directly on top of your data – wherever it may live – that data is far more secure than it is with traditional marketing cloud solutions. MessageGears never needs to copy or store your data in our platform. Period.

CTOs love this because the data is their responsibility, and friction is frequently caused by sending this sensitive data outside of their environment. 

For instance, with MessageGears, Chick-fil-A anonymizes customer data before using it in marketing campaigns, allowing their team to collect and leverage customer intel confidently – while knowing PII is protected.

They save money

While security is often the first thought when teams learn that their data stays in their data warehouse with MessageGears, there’s another huge benefit to this structure. 

Because MessageGears doesn’t hold your data, you’re able to avoid all of the extra expenses of data transfer, mapping, and storage charged by other platforms. And CTOs know these data fees can add up FAST. 

MessageGears comes to you rather than you having to come to us, significantly lowering your martech costs – not to mention empowering marketers to get campaigns built faster, which means your brand is closer to recognizing the revenue associated with those campaigns.

IT and marketing can be a dynamic duo

Despite what some marketers may think, IT teams don’t want to be the bad guys – they want to help. But guarding data security is a serious job, and helping marketers get access to more of it isn’t typically going to be the highest priority. 

But your priorities don’t need to be at odds. With MessageGears, security and speed issues are eliminated, allowing marketing and IT teams to work in sync. 

Not only can your IT team move faster on marketing’s data access requests, but they can even be proactive in bringing opportunities to marketing. They’ll be the first ones to know if a new data field becomes available – perhaps they’ve gained access to local-area weather data for the U.S. – and can ask marketing if they could make use of it. As CTOs know, this type of collaboration and innovation is critical to compete at the enterprise level. 

For the best teams, IT is a true partner in delivering highly personalized cross-channel communication that brings results for sales and marketing. MessageGears has the tools and the data-connection capabilities to make that a reality for your enterprise… without all the common workarounds and headaches!