What is an API?
Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) allow marketers to use data to connect the dots between different programs to which they are interfacing.
What do APIs have to do with data-driven marketing?
Using data to drive content sounds simple, and it should be; however, getting access to that data is another story.
Oftentimes, this generates a lot of friction between I.T. and Marketing. Generating data-driven creative requires scalable and low-latency data access, typically at a rate too high for modern data warehouses to support. This requires I.T. to build an API for marketing’s needs, which change frequently.
What does MessageGears mean by API-as-a-Service (AaaS)?
You may be familiar with Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), and AaaS, has similar intentions: to power data transfer through APIs to provide data access no matter where it lives, and whether you have a modern data warehouse (MDW) or not.
By removing the hurdles of API data access that most marketing organizations face, our hope is to remove the friction of waiting on I.T. to deliver data and empower more marketers to create better brand experiences that are more relevant to consumers.
Simply put, we connect to your hosted data so you can access and use your data as much as you want. This solution doesn’t require your data requests to sit in your I.T. backlog. When your data is powered by MessageGears, it is always available for your needs.
What makes MessageGears Engage different?
There are tools out there that try to solve the problem MessageGears solved: helping marketers personalize messages at the time a consumer engages with them. But, none checks all of the boxes.
Whether your goals are to create live mobile experiences with real-time data, like the latest deal or send more interactive messages, Engage can help make your data more accessible and scalable.Engage gives enterprise marketers access to their real-time data, no matter how much data they have or where that data sits for true, up-to-date, personalized cross-channel marketing campaigns.
MessageGears Engage is absolutely the tool for anyone looking to interact with their customers in real time, whether they are a marketer or a developer. Other organizations have tried to come up with a tool as efficient, but can’t.
How does MessageGears’ API-as-a-Service product help marketing teams?
At MessageGears, we think that tech should liberate, not limit.
That’s why MessageGears Engage was created to be Marketing’s API-as-a-Service (AaaS) to power real-time experiences.
Enterprise marketers at national retailers benefit from using Engage with both customer information and non-customer information. With the proper API connection, Engage data can come from any data source, it does not have to exist within the same data source as other customer information. This, paired with open-time rendering, ensures up-to-date information whenever the customer opens an email.
Boom, elevated marketing experience, tracking your consumers with live, real-time data direct from your data warehouse.
How does MessageGears’ API-as-a-Service product help I.T. teams?
At MessageGears, we hear about the data friction and pain of being slotted into I.T.’s backlog of development efforts.
Time and again, I.T. resources do their best to make data as usable as possible, but the real world doesn’t always allow for easy and “real” use of that data. For instance:
- A lengthy backlog of requests greatly hampers I.T.’s ability to build the APIs necessary to get to the data
- Changes in the data have rendered irrelevant the old APIs built earlier by the Engineering department
- Utilizing the raw data needed to spur open-time personalization isn’t an option because the database isn’t prepared for the demand of real-time data access
It may seem too obvious, but API-as-a-Service solves this problem by making marketers access to data easier, in their hands, and on their schedule instead of waiting for I.T. intervention.
This removes the, all too common, data friction we mentioned above. Connecting MessageGears with your data empowers marketers to do what they do best with the most up-to-data data.
Why is API data access so difficult without an API-as-a-Service based product?
Today, many organizations have normalized using old data in the marketing campaigns they are launching. This is not how it should be.
Some marketers may not even know they are using old data — since, for most senders, information access stops at the point when they launch a campaign.
Imagine, your enterprise marketing team wants to increase the number to the last three most recently browsed products on a promotional email. Unfortunately, this history is not kept in the underlying data store and will require a re-architecting of the solution. How soon do you need this data? Waiting on I.T. is oftentimes unpredictable, but MessageGears Engage only needs an hour to install, providing data at your fingertips.
What if the API that your I.T. team created for you also contained their most recent purchase data? But, unbeknownst to them, that data is kept in an entirely different database and can’t be joined in at this time. As mentioned above, asking I.T. to re-architect APIs adds more wait time, while MessageGears Engage was made to store and deliver data in any format. If your needs change at a moment’s notice, Engage is there with a solution, and no wait time.
How do real B2C organizations use API-as-a-Service?
A fantastic real-life example comes from one of our customers, a Top-10 U.S. Retailer, who has leveraged MessageGears Engage. The goal, which was reached, was to keep the advertisement images on their website homepage in sync with their real-time data, which also tracks what each individual customer has recently viewed or purchased. In this case, MessageGears Engage was used to display up-to-date information, while interfacing with additional information coming from multiple data sources via API.
Is this solution worth it for my team to consider?
What’s your budget? I.T. labor hours are expensive, while MessageGears Engage gives you more freedom than waiting on a whole I.T. team to deliver your needs, and is more cost effective.
MessageGears Engage’s cost-friendly, accessible, and scalable infrastructure is designed for constantly changing needs and data driven demand.
Does MessageGears have any partnerships that highlight this AaaS concept?
With MessageGears, your data is here to work for you, not the other way around.
Notably, Engage comes ready-made to integrate with solutions like Movable Ink. Movable Ink’s intelligent creative platform aids the creation of compelling messages within email, website or display ads. Marketers can now use their real-time data to fuel personalization at message open-time in an email or web interface by pairing MessageGears’ Engage with Movable Ink’s intelligent creative.
Now, any consumer brand interactions that happen post-send are available for open-time personalization. With unlimited personalization availability, marketers can use their live consumer data to their heart’s content.
By MessageGears partnering up with Moveable Ink, data has become more highly available and ready-to-use for launching meaningful campaigns. What’s neat is, users can promote their data to a cloud data source on demand and select the API as a source within the Moveable Ink platform. No I.T. bandwidth required.