Few things sound less appealing to marketing, data, and IT teams than switching from their current SaaS platform. Even if you acknowledge seemingly insurmountable problems with your current ESP, CEP, or packaged CDP, switching providers can be so difficult and time-consuming – even if you’re told it’ll be easy. Sometimes, the devil you know feels like a safer bet than the one you don’t.
Let’s explore some of the most common objections for making a martech switch. Some of these objections may even be swimming through your head right now… Feel free to skip ahead to find out exactly how a composable model using MessageGears cures each of these headaches:
1. “I don’t believe you. Everyone says they connect to my data, but no one actually does.”
2. “If MessageGears connects directly to my data, is it going to drive up my data costs?”
3. “Does connecting directly to the data cause issues between IT and marketing teams?”
7. “MessageGears won’t be able to scale to our needs, which are massive and frequently changing.”
8. “Why wouldn’t I just trust an all-in-one marketing cloud?”
Your concerns are understandable, but we hope you’ll come away from this breakdown with a better understanding of how a direct connection to your data can make a huge impact for your brand.
1. “I don’t believe you. Everyone says they connect to my data, but no one actually does.”
MessageGears is truly and fundamentally different. We don’t copy your data to our “multi-tenant cloud.” We sit on top of your existing data cloud. The lightweight MessageGears marketing console is installed behind your firewall and connects directly to your data warehouse or homegrown database.
We get it if you need to see it to believe it. With a free proof of concept (POC) you can get a smaller line of business or campaign live on MessageGears to see how it works with your actual live data.
2. “If MessageGears connects directly to my data, is it going to drive up my data costs?”
Most remote messaging providers require time and money to get your data into their platform. These hidden costs are inherent to legacy SaaS solutions and drive a lot of spend for enterprises due to the manpower it takes to create and maintain complex data pipelines – not to mention the pricey duplication fees for storing that data in multiple places.
MessageGears drastically reduces data costs for our users by:
- The sheer volume of data no longer being shipped back and forth between solutions
- The dedicated IT resources inherent to supporting this volume
- The reduction in issues that arise when constantly shipping data back and forth
- Your data is never stored within the MessageGears platform – it stays right in your data warehouse where it belongs
By focusing your resources on your own data environment, MessageGears helps you save money and IT costs.
In fact, when the team at OpenTable decided to replace its legacy cloud-based ESP with MessageGears and directly connect to its Snowflake data warehouse, the company recognized a 50% reduction in martech spend.
A streamlined data strategy helped the team identify new areas of opportunity, and thanks to the cost savings, OpenTable was able to bring on two new team members focused on those areas.
3. “Does connecting directly to the data cause issues between IT and marketing teams?”
It’s actually the opposite! Typical customer engagement tools are remote from the source of the customer data, and that causes headaches and data friction between IT, marketing, and marketing operations that we’re all familiar with.
Marketing requests take time and resources and can add to the long backlog typically present for technology organizations.
However, IT teams love MessageGears because we reduce these requests and headaches, while keeping them in control of what happens in their data environment. After all, don’t you want your marketing team doing marketing, your IT team IT-ing, and your data team data-ing? Of course you do.
When security and speed issues are eliminated, all of your internal teams can work in sync and focus on what they each do best.
4. “Does my team assume more responsibility with a solution that relies solely on our data/infrastructure? I don’t have time to manage a bunch of permissions and logins.”
Similar to concerns with data access and usage, MessageGears actually reduces the amount of involvement needed from IT teams by skipping the need to transport large amounts of data.
In addition, IT teams love that they have control over the key pieces of hardware and infrastructure you need to get critical messages out. With no more reliance on third parties to ensure that services don’t fail at peak volumes, IT is now in the driver’s seat to be the “good guy” for marketing in a more collaborative environment.
For instance, Expedia reported a whopping 50% reduction in IT involvement in marketing campaigns after partnering with MessageGears. The shift allowed the marketing team to handle tasks independently, freeing up IT resources for more critical priorities.
5. “Our data isn’t in a good spot right now. We’re going to have to change way too much about our data schemas to work with MessageGears.”
Investing in a modern data platform is one of the best ROI and cost-positive investments you can make – for marketing and across your entire organization. MessageGears was designed to help you make your data usable throughout your enterprise.
When your customer data is shared between different vendors and copied multiple times, it can become so complex and unmanageable that it creates a barrier to executing an effective marketing strategy.
Using MessageGears in conjunction with your data warehouse will save you money and allow you to communicate with your users by analyzing and understanding who they are and what they want.
If you’re working toward specific data goals as an organization, you can also start with just a part of the MessageGears platform – you don’t need a full rip and replace. Our team will work with you to develop a crawl/walk/run approach that you’re comfortable with.
We’ll help you achieve higher data maturity and reach data transformation goals by eliminating the legacy workflow of copying data.
6. “We have too much custom reporting and configuration with our current vendor to be able to move to anyone else. Migration of custom reports and integrations will affect ongoing programs or projects.”
Switching messaging systems is daunting. The thought of unwinding years of implementation effort – file uploads, data extracts, custom queries, proprietary scripting logic, IP reputations, SMS code migrations, switching out SDKs, perfectly QA’d templates, and all the tightly choreographed automations running on a daily, hourly, or even minute basis feels, frankly, impossible.
Because MessageGears doesn’t have a predefined schema, transitioning campaigns is as simple as using your data in its existing format.
Our team will walk you through a comprehensive transition plan, with timelines and measures of success. Migration is so simple that we’ll prove it: we’ll migrate several of your most complex campaigns to MessageGears free of charge.
With real-time access to all of your customer insights, you can start pointing advanced segmentation and dynamic content decisions from our platform to your existing vendors.
7. “MessageGears won’t be able to scale to our needs, which are massive and frequently changing.”
A direct connection to your on-premises or cloud data enables your marketing team to personalize content based on your internal structure. Our schema-less solution allows large, heavy sends to be broken into smaller batches of data and elastically distributed across our infrastructure.
Efficient bulk message processing optimizes data payloads for delivery, and our ability to scale mail transfer agents (MTAs) ensures that your messages land in the inbox when they should.
💡Find out more about how MessageGears scales to meet demand
8. “Why wouldn’t I just trust an all-in-one marketing cloud?”
Although they are big names that you are likely familiar with, many of the large campaign management systems aren’t as all-together as they appear.
To understand how these “Everychannel Service Providers” evolved consider that, for many, message sending wasn’t an original core competency. Instead, these software giants acquired different messaging providers throughout the years to cobble together a disconnected solution that attempts to do everything. Time to integrate these systems within large enterprises can take up to five years to fully implement!
Meanwhile, using a composable CDP approach, your marketing team can be up and running in days – not months or years.
This is not to say these legacy, big named solutions don’t do some things well. Indeed, they can be great messaging tools. But even at their best, they aren’t designed to be the only system of record for messaging, and they often need many multi-skilled users to accomplish seemingly simple marketing tasks.
Find a cross-channel solution built specifically for your needs
Large enterprise brands have massive data needs and the ability to massively scale across every channel, breaking the all-in-one model. These brands need a customer engagement platform built for their needs.
At MessageGears, we’ve helped countless enterprise brands navigate this journey, whether it’s a CDP switch or a fully composable approach to cross-channel customer engagement. Our experienced team works with brands to identify the best approach for every tech stack and unique data requirements.
A free POC lets you test drive our solutions, and we can help with your major CEP or CDP use cases, such as event collection, audience segmentation, and cross-channel data activation and deployment. Let’s work together to explore a better way to manage customer data and maximize your marketing impact.
Elizabeth Weddle
Elizabeth Weddle has a proven track record of driving brand awareness and increasing customer engagement for both B2B and B2C organizations. With over 10 years of experience as a proven product marketing professional, Elizabeth excels in both strategy and execution.
As Director of Product Marketing at MessageGears, she obsesses over customer problems and helps the team find creative ways to solve them. She is highly adept at building and managing cross-functional teams, fostering collaboration, and delivering exceptional results.
