Last week, I wrote about our new product, Segment, and how it enables marketers to effectively segment, enhance, and export their data. This week I’ll continue the discussion of Segment, but I’d like to give a more detailed look at our design and architecture of the product and why our solution is able to support the needs of the modern marketer.
Our goal in creating MessageGears Segment is to create a product whose design will grow as a marketer’s needs continue to modernize. In designing Segment, we recognized that many of the challenges that common segmentation products face today directly stem from legacy designs and architectures that either do not work or are not performant with modern data needs and do not support flexibility in their available third-party connections for data exports. These products are not I.T. or user friendly, and their architecture does not support advances in data technology such as cloud storage solutions like Snowflake or Google BigQuery. The recency of Segment’s design ensures that it will meet the current and future needs of marketing and data technology.
Segmenting your data at the source
Segment heavily leverages one of MessageGears’ core strengths of living with your data. Using this strength enables the Segment tech stack and load to be very lean, meaning that there’s no need for creating temporary data tables to house data during processing, as Segment is able to simply stream the data through the custom rules engine defined by the user. This significantly reduces the cost of technical overhead and monitoring to ensure that data is being cleaned up after use. Another benefit of Segment is its compatibility with modern cloud data warehouse solutions. By allowing users to use data solutions like Snowflake, Segment continues to help provide top performance at a lower infrastructure cost. Segment remains compatible with standard data solutions or any combination of the two. Combining these strengths means that Segment is able to work with large datasets in an efficient manner and at a fraction of the price.
Flexible Design leads to a better user experience
Segment also drastically reduces the time it takes to create a blueprint of your audience for you to generate labels for personalization and targeting. Through the use of reusable Angular components, Segment provides the flexibility and scalability to quickly and efficiently iterate and improve the product in the future. Many data tools are full of cells and data tables that a user can get lost in. The Blueprint feature of Segment is designed to minimize cognitive load on the user while also reducing the clicks per action to help streamline the segmentation workflow no matter the number of segments the user is working with.
The Blueprint labeling system is very flexible, giving users the ability to modify or append data after streaming users through the segmentation engine. The labels can be used to append data to a particular data set that can be leveraged for personalization or targeting. The labels are also able to overwrite data on run-time so that the system could leverage an existing column on a feedback loop for reporting or auditing purposes. This does not overwrite data in the actual database but simply provides the ability to modify it during the extraction process.
Don’t limit where data can go
Segment also provides the ability to export third-party data from the same tool. The MessageGears connections to third parties provide a secure way to integrate with multiple third-party destinations such as Airship, Google, or Facebook. These connections integrate seamlessly with the segments created by the user, allowing them to send certain segments to one party and other segments to another. The data is then either transmitted directly via SFTP or by using an API connection, allowing for multiple connection routes based on the customer’s needs.
Throughout the process of creating our Segmentation Product, we ensured that we continually were designing and building a tool that met the value proposition that other tools weren’t meeting. If you’d like to see Segment for yourself, check out our live demo we recorded to give you a full overview of how it can change the way you build audiences.
Ricky Timbers
Ricky Timbers is the Product Owner of the Campaign Management Platform Team at MessageGears. When he isn’t playing with his beagles, he spends time researching and refining the MessageGears user experience and working with the development team to deliver top notch features.
