When marketers hear that MessageGears’ customer engagement platform can help them send more personalized messaging campaigns by connecting directly to their data, many of them balk. They think about all the times they’ve been shot down by the I.T. team, and they dread the idea of even making that walk over to that side of the office. Getting a customer engagement platform just sounds like it’ll tie them closer to I.T., and neither side of the relationship wants that.
It’s easy to understand why they feel that way: Typical ESPs are remote from the data and cause headaches and data friction between marketing and marketing operations. The solution that MessageGears offers is unique, and it involves re-thinking how a marketing platform and the data and technology teams work together. Once you shift your thinking a bit, though, the fact is that MessageGears is well positioned to do a lot to actually eliminate that relationship friction between Marketing and I.T.
The fact is that technology teams love us. Here’s why:
No more data headaches
Typical ESPs 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. Because MessageGears allows you to utilize your data in-place, this means we reduce what we call “data friction” in the platform. What do we mean by data friction? Well, with MessageGears, a technology team has:
- No more ETL.
- Expensive and compute-intensive jobs to extract, transform, and load data into a remote ESP are a drain on data operation resources and a large effort for marketing operations to even have the system up and running on a regular basis
- No more troubleshooting failed file transfers.
- Nightly (or hourly, at best) batches of data sent to remote ESPs from various data sources invariably fail. This means monitoring, paging and alarming, and root cause analysis of why these transfers fail — a large source of contention for most I.T. teams
- No more requests to modify data transfer processes to add new data requested by Marketing.
- Remember those ETL jobs required with most remote ESPs? Well, it’s only a matter of time before marketing will need new and different data fields and sources for campaigns. Each seemingly small change to marketing can be a massive headache for marketing operations, as changing these ETL processes can be a much bigger effort than anticipated
They have far more control
With most remote ESPs, If Marketing wants to add another field for use in personalization, they have to go through their I.T. team to get that done. Between the I.T. team’s work and the ESP making it available, the process can take weeks to complete, and that’s assuming there are no data access and privilege issues.
With MessageGears, though, it’s basically just like flipping a switch for I.T. Instead of having to update the ETL process to change the data in both the target ESP database and in the team’s data warehouse where it sits, they can do half the work and eliminate ETL because MessageGears is connected directly to the data warehouse. I.T. can still be the gatekeeper of data security, but not have to spend so much time making it work for the marketer.
The security level is much higher
Remote ESPs require you to ship your data back and forth to their cloud in order to build campaigns. This means the data has to leave the safety of your firewall, 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 ESPs
Tech teams love this because the data is their responsibility, and friction is oftentimes caused by sending this sensitive data outside of their environment. But when the data stays secure at all times, that friction is quickly resolved.
I.T. can be the good guy
Despite what some marketers may think, your I.T. team doesn’t want to be the bad guy — they want to help you. But teams have to recognize that guarding data security is a serious job, and helping Marketing get access to more of it isn’t typically going to be their highest priority. So when you come to them with a request, it doesn’t always get fulfilled as fast as you’d like it to.
Once the security and speed issues are eliminated, though, what was a somewhat adversarial relationship can become far more symbiotic. Not only can your I.T. team move faster on your access requests, but they can even be proactive in bringing opportunities to you. 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.
Good marketers know that I.T. has an essential role to fill in their organization, and would love a way to make them a true partner in delivering highly personalized emails that bring results for Sales and Marketing. MessageGears has the tools and the data-connection capabilities to make that a reality for your enterprise.
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.
