4 benefits of warehouse-native segmentation for retail brands

How enterprise retailers can hyper-target audiences at scale

For retail marketers, segmenting large customer bases into targeted audiences is nothing new. When you’re putting together personalized campaigns, it’s an essential part of the work. In whatever platform you use, you’ve probably created many different customer journeys to help you visualize how campaigns will branch out to different groups of people based on the attributes you select.

All that is table stakes. So when we say that MessageGears’ data activation and engagement platform is fundamentally different – and better – for enterprise retailers when building dynamic audiences, you may be skeptical. What could MessageGears do that the other industry players don’t? Well, it all comes back to our foundational principles: easy direct data access, and increasing the speed at which marketers can do their jobs. That’s where we thrive, and it’s how we can change the way retail marketers build and engage audiences. 

Let’s dive into four key benefits of a warehouse-native approach to retail campaign segmentation. 

1. Use any attribute you have on your customers

How many attributes do you have access to that you can use when segmenting your audiences or triggering campaign personalization? There are multiple reasons some attributes might be off limits to your marketing team – ranging from privacy concerns, to how recently a data point started being collected, to data storage and budget limitations with your martech tools. If you want to start using a data point that you haven’t previously been activating in your campaigns, gaining access to it can often fall somewhere between impossible and incredibly time consuming.

But MessageGears’ warehouse-native architecture gives you complete, live, and real-time access to your enterprise dataset, so adding any new attribute can be as simple as checking a box to make it part of the campaign. No putting in endless tickets with IT for revised SQL queries or submitting a request to your ESP to add a new field. Just do it, and keep going. And because your data never leaves the safety of your firewall — MessageGears eliminates any copying and shipping of the data — there are no security concerns around using it for personalization. In fact, you can even redact PII within our platform so it’s safely concealed from marketers, while still using it for campaign segmentation and personalization.

2. Abandoned carts go out faster and more accurately

Abandoned cart campaigns may be the most common example of how disruptive data sync delays can be. Let’s say a customer on your website puts a product in their cart, then gets distracted for whatever reason. When you’re always working off a copy of your data in your ESP’s marketing cloud, it may be hours — or even days — before that data is updated enough to reflect that action and trigger the abandoned cart message. By that time, the customer may have moved on. Or they actually did come back and buy the product in the meantime, so you’ve confused them and given them a poor brand experience.

With direct data access, though, the data you’re using to trigger campaigns is always live. Never a stale copy. This means your campaign goes out at exactly the time you want it to – and if the customer returns to make the purchase beforehand, she’s immediately pulled out of that abandoned cart audience. Crisis averted. You’ll get better abandoned cart results and have happier customers. Warehouse-native reverse ETL use cases like this can ensure your retail marketing strategy drives a lot more growth.

3. Fine-tune your audiences without drowning in SQL

With traditional marketing cloud solutions, making changes to a customer journey once you’ve built it can be incredibly difficult. In many cases, the only viable solution is to clone it and/or to start over by building a completely new framework that includes the changes you want to make. That can be incredibly frustrating and time consuming when all you want to do is make a few tweaks to the audience.

With MessageGears, everything is live and fluid for marketers within a drag-and-drop audience builder. No matter what stage of the journey a customer is in, you can always go back and make adjustments, and the segmentation filters will immediately change. This makes it fast and easy to adjust who’s in what campaign. So, go ahead and tweak as much as you want. Nothing is stopping you.

4. Live audience counts give you more control

As you’re segmenting audiences into different tracks, one challenge with traditional martech is that you often can’t know for sure how many people will be included in each segment as you build it. Since you’re working with copies of your data and your live data is always changing, live audience counts simply aren’t possible.

MessageGears provides live audience counts as you go, so you can immediately see how many people meet your defined criteria, and who will get a particular message you’re planning. This makes it really easy to refine audiences as you plan your campaigns. The segment you were planning for doesn’t have enough people in it? Make a change to bump the numbers up. You’ve got full control over what your audiences look like and how customers move through their own personalized journeys.

Takeaways: Retailers need better segmentation tools

For retail marketers, there are so many frustrating factors about traditional martech tools. Don’t let yourself settle for less when MessageGears offers powerful direct data access. You don’t even have to change ESPs to get on board. Let’s talk about what adding our warehouse-native data activation capabilities could do for your team.