Webinar

The Complete Enterprise Data Stack: Take Back Control of Your Customer Data

One of the biggest steps any B2C Marketing team can take toward better personalization of their messaging campaigns is to get their data centralized in a way that’s easy to manage. That’s why we brought in our friends at RudderStack recently for a webinar to discuss how their own product helps Super Senders accomplish this, and all the ways getting your customer data in order can help you do more with it. MessageGears and RudderStack fit well together because we such similar viewpoints on the world of data and marketing — It’s your data, and you should control it. Other ESPs make you copy it, but MessageGears doesn’t. Most CDPs make you copy your data, but RudderStack doesn’t.

So how do you get to the point where you truly have your data centralized and fully under your control? In the webinar, data experts talked through the steps you can take to go from an organization whose data is scattered in a million different places to being one that can move with speed and efficiency to use that data in a way that helps you communicate better to your customers. In this recap, we’ll go into the tips they gave on how to get from here to there.

Unify your data

If you’re a Super Sender, you have data coming into your systems from various places, and there’s a good chance different teams “own” different slices of that data. That can create silos, and those can be really difficult to break down when team members get their arms around the data they own and either don’t want to or don’t know how to share it across teams, sometimes because the systems don’t talk to each other in a way that makes sense.

That’s why unifying your data from all those locations is the first big step you can take to get your data centralized, and all the teams on the same page. It’s not a simple step to take, but taking this one meaningful action will go a long way toward making your organization more data-forward.

“When we’re saying different locations, we’re talking about files of different formats that they live on, and different places away from your other employees,” RudderStack Head of Product Kostas Pardalis said. “Things like, our CRM ticketing systems on the cloud. And then, of course, we have  all the data that needs to be captured in places like our web application, our website, logs on our servers, and mobile applications. So by adopting a CDI like RudderStack, you can actually collect all these different data from all these different sources and consistently and reliably deliver them to something — in our case, the data warehouse — that can act as the single source of truth.”

Make sure you can trust your data

Once you’ve eliminated the silos and centralized your data, you’re in a much better place, but there are still crucial steps remaining to get to where you need to be. Next is ensuring you can trust the data you’re working with. It’s not enough just to have it at your disposal if you’re not confident in its accuracy and timeliness.

This is a two-part challenge. The first part is validation so that you know when something goes wrong, and are notified so that you can take whatever action is needed. That step gives you the opportunity to convey what you want to know so that you’re speaking the same language as your tool.

“Validation is more about allowing the user of RudderStack to define what is expected in a way from this data,” Pardalis said, “and allow the RudderStack engine to infer if the data that are flowing into the systems of our customers are the right data nodes.”

So, at that point, you know what the problems are. But the next essential step is to be able to fix those problems as they arise. And that’s how you get to the point where you can fully trust your data — when problems are identified and corrected in a timely manner.

“We also provide tools both on our side and also on the data side for you to fix any kind of problems and make sure that you always work with the right data and that they are correct,” Pardalis said. “And the quality’s like what you should expect.”

RudderStack + MessageGears is able to do that because, with a direct data connection, they can collect all these different behavioral breadcrumbs from everywhere they happen, on your digital assets. With the rights and mechanisms there, we can make sure that whenever something goes wrong, you’ll be notified and aware of what the problem is. And RudderStack provides tools both on their side and on the data side for you to fix any kind of problems and make sure you always work with the right data.

Leverage robust identity resolution

Now that you trust your data, the next step forward is to ensure you know who your users are. And that comes from having a golden customer record that contains the right information you need.

“The reality is that the golden customer record just becomes this itty-bitty pinpoint right in the middle that’s almost impossible to collect enough data around, to get a really good picture of what your golden record actually looks like,” RudderStack Director of Customer Success Eric Dodds said. “And this makes sense in the context of data silos, but the challenge is that for all the downstream teams, it really limits their ability to drive, truly effective programs.”

The good news is that, as you solve the data silo problem, you also solve the identity resolution problem. Instantly, if you have access to the richest source of your customer data, which is your modern data warehouse, and you can build all sorts of interesting cohorts and then syndicate those out to  the other tools.

Activate your data

After all that comes the fun part. You’ve centralized your data. Then you’ve ensured that you can identify and fix any problems that arise with it. You have a direct connection to your data, and you’re using the live, real-time data as you collect it. You have a robust CDI that turns your modern data warehouse into a manageable CDP, and you’ve found that golden customer record that allows you to understand who your customers are.

What now? Now it’s time to start using that data in a smart way. You’ve earned that, and your customers will notice the difference.

“Now you send better messages which, in the bottom line, increases revenue,” MessageGears Director of Product Strategy Nick Ziech-Lopez said. “That’s what we get excited about because, as consumers, that’s the world that we want to live in.”

If you’d like to learn much more about the complete enterprise data stack, including some steps you can take right now to improve where you are with your data even if you don’t have a modern data warehouse like Snowflake to work with, watch the full webinar today.