Your ESP and your CDP lied to you.
It’s not like they meant to, but unfortunately they lied when they said they were data-first. What followed was a six-month migration to ship them the data that could fit into their system and allow you to activate your customer. By the time you found out that nothing was anywhere near as easy — or data focused — as they promised it would be, you were Customer Success’s problem, and the sales guy was on to the next prospect.
What’s fundamental to all these platforms is that they’re operating on a copy of your data outside of your environment while your data sitting in your database is effectively going unused by these platforms. They brag about easy and simple API integrations or native connections to your other tools, but what they’re really doing is making it as easy as they can for you to hold another copy of your data in their tool.
There are two huge downsides to this approach:
- A funny quirk to these platforms is that whatever data you have or want to use has to neatly fit their definition of what data looks like. That makes it difficult to actually “use” the data in a message, especially at scale. New data points can take weeks to be used, and marketers are often living with a subset of what they could do.
- The second issue is how much money it’s going to cost you to operate these tools at scale. The data you’re operating on might be “real time” if you can pay to have your developers build out APIs to get it there fast enough, but you’re paying extra money for them to hold it. All these companies have proud stats about the hundreds of billions of data points they’ve activated upon or “used” for their customers, but it’s creating a ton of overhead and adds unnecessary marketing spend.
Maybe you’re starting to realize the downsides by now, but you think there’s nothing you can do about it. This is just the way the industry is, you think. After all, your marketing friends at other enterprise companies share the same fundamental issues. You commiserate. You complain. And, at the end of the day, you lament that no one has solved these problems yet.
At MessageGears, we believe there’s a better way to utilize your data to build marketing campaigns, and we’ve made that the guiding principle of everything we do. We allow your data to live at the center of your marketing universe. We don’t make you copy your data into our system. We use it where it sits in your data warehouse that you’ve probably upgraded in the past few years, and we allow you to use it in whatever format it’s in, as much as you’d like. We call this our Accelerator data technology, and it’s why many of the world’s biggest brands have gone all in on MessageGears without turning back.
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.
