Four steps to leaving SFMC for a direct connection to your Snowflake data warehouse

The disconnect between Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) and your Snowflake data warehouse is felt in delays, repeat requests, bloated budgets, and overall frustration. 

You’ve already invested in the data-driven future of your brand in the form of a centralized data warehouse, so why should you settle for older tech that’s duct-taped together and can’t activate your data without extensive workarounds and major headaches?

And still… change is hard, especially when you’re talking about moving away from SFMC. You know how much work it took to move to SFMC, and you don’t want to do it again and end up with another platform whose sales team lies about how easy everything will be. Might as well stick with the devil you know.

However, solving data friction problems and costs can be shockingly simple: connect directly to your Snowflake data warehouse.

Your Snowflake instance can and should be the true system of record for your cross-channel customer experiences and MessageGears can help. 

A direct connection to your Snowflake instance

You need to confidently collect and leverage data for an endless number of personalization points – all while assuring your customers that the information they’ve provided to your brand will remain secure and protected. 

The largest enterprises have unique marketing needs that aren’t being served by legacy marketing platforms like SFMC. Users regularly report performance issues with increased data that are particularly noticeable in large audience segments. That’s not acceptable when your brand is trying to set the standard for customer experience.

Thanks to MessageGears’ unique architecture, these performance issues are eliminated. You can access all of the data in your brand’s Snowflake instance – securely and in real-time – without copying, syncing, or mapping. MessageGears sits within Snowflake, allowing you to create audiences and trigger sends based on your Snowflake data.

With a direct connection to your data, the moment a new field is created or updated, it can be deployed in your campaigns. You can leverage as much customer intel as you want from your entire Snowflake data set for advanced segmentation, targeting, triggering, and analytics. 

Older SaaS platforms, like SFMC, simply don’t have the proper structure to do that.  But MessageGears does and for brands that store customer data in Snowflake, moving off of SFMC to MessageGears is exponentially faster than a move to another platform.

If you’re interested in direct access to your data, we’re here to offer a lifeline. Not only is it possible to migrate off SFMC, but it’s also far faster and easier than you think. In just 60-90 days, we can get you fully divorced from SFMC. Promise. 

Not to mention, you’ll enjoy big wins along the way. Curious? Keep reading.

Step 1: Getting Off the Ground 

🗓️ Timeline estimate: 2-3 weeks

How are you using SFMC? Are you filtering audiences and building campaigns within the Salesforce cloud? Or are you shipping customer lists up to their cloud for matching with the customer data they’re holding?

If you’re doing your filtering and building in SFMC Audience Builder, they’re both holding your data and providing the chief means for you to get your campaigns out the door. Examine how you’re filtering on your data inside of SFMC, and find relevant data points to perform the same work in your own data environment. Because MessageGears sits directly within Snowflake and has no predefined schema, all your queries with us will deal with your data as it sits behind your firewall. You also likely have additional data within Snowflake which could be used for filtering but doesn’t exist in SFMC. MessageGears can help unlock that data, too.

If all you’re doing is shipping lists up to SFMC, you’re set up perfectly for an even quicker transition since you’re already doing a lot of the necessary work while referencing your data. All you need to do to start is write the same command to make that list and transfer it to Snowflake, where MessageGears can read it directly. That will result in all the right people coming from the same source in your language. 

Step 2: Identifying analytics

🗓️ Timeline estimate: 1-2 weeks

Salesforce is a massive product and they claim to be able to do a nearly uncountable number of things. For brands that aren’t exactly sure what they want, that can be tempting: your teams may dream of the day they’ll need X feature, when in reality you’ll never realistically use 90+% of the features offered, especially since SFMC will charge you for every small add-on.

In this step, you want to consider what analytics are really important to your team. What do you need to measure? Instead of telling you all the analytics we’ll allow you to have for $X, MessageGears provides the tools you need to get reports on whatever analytics you need. 

Because all your engagement data is accessible in real-time, you can see whatever reporting you need because you have direct access to your Snowflake data. So you’re not reliant on MessageGears for that. Let us get out of the way and provide you with the data relationship you haven’t had before.

Step 3: Filling out your branding

🗓️ Timeline estimate: 1-2 weeks

When it comes to cross-channel messaging, your branding is an essential part of your identity. If you’ve set all those brand templates up in Salesforce, the idea of ripping them out and moving them over to another platform may make you quite nervous.

With MessageGears, it’s easy. We don’t force you into any particular schemas or templating language. Instead, we use the open-source language FreeMarker. That means the vast majority of your templates can simply be converted from SFMC over to MessageGears during migration. 

It’s worth considering how dynamic your branding and templates are so you can configure your template to meet your expectations. To whatever extent your team needs help getting this done, our customer success team has years of rich experience walking new customers through every step of the process. You can feel confident that you’re not only set up how you want but that everyone on your team is set up for success.

Step 4: Program migration and IP Warmup

🗓️ Timeline estimate: 4-6 weeks

This is the step where so much depends upon how many campaigns you have, and how many you feel it’s necessary to migrate over. 

MessageGears allows you to create campaigns in a much more free-form and flexible way than Salesforce – particularly with cross-channel setups. Some customers find that while they need five separate campaigns in Salesforce, they can cut down to just one or two on our platform, reducing the amount of work to migrate.

All things being equal, the time to migrate is dependent on the number of campaigns you have to move. Our customer success team can get your program migration going at whatever speed is necessary for you to meet the goals and deadlines at your organization. We’ve migrated thousands of campaigns for customers, and we’re prepared to help in whatever way we can. And we don’t put you into an endless customer queue like Salesforce does. 

You’ve completed your Salesforce Divorce

At this point, you’re completely migrated from Salesforce, and you’re fully utilizing your live, real-time data to send dynamic cross-channel campaigns with MessageGears. No headaches. No dragged-out timelines. No frustrating waits on hold for a customer service rep who just sees you as another number in their queue.

Not only did it take 2-3 months instead of the year-plus it took you to get onto Salesforce, but we’re also ready to help you achieve incremental wins along the way.

“We’re able to create more targeted campaigns layered with customizable metadata, much faster, and we’re also able to run comprehensive reports which allows us to segment better. In one of our tests, we were able to increase our conversion rates by 70%, which is huge. And my favorite is our zero dependency on daily data syncs across two platforms.” – John Tsou, OpenTable’s VP of Marketing

💡 Learn how OpenTable reduced campaign production time by 80% with MessageGears

With MessageGears, start building audiences with that live data and uploading them to third-party services like Facebook and LiveRamp to target customers with better, more timely personalization. Enjoy improved data access for render-on-open tools like Movable Ink. Thanks to an always-available cache of data that can handle unlimited API calls, you can personalize emails based on whatever data you’ve set up in your database.

We’re happy to show you exactly what we mean because you shouldn’t have to just take our word for it. With a live POC, you’ll see exactly how MessageGears works with your actual live data. We’re not talking about a video we recorded months ago, but a real, live POC that displays the power of having direct data access.

Want to see for yourself? Get in touch, and we’ll show you how a direct connection to your Snowflake data warehouse could be the best decision you’ve ever made.