Case Studies
Big box retailer transforms customer engagement with MessageGears’ direct data access
Getting the right tools in place is crucial for enterprise brands
A major big box retailer faced some common marketing and data challenges. They were happy with their investments in Movable Ink and Google BigQuery but also had goals they couldn’t reach with the martech they had in place.
They needed an upgrade, and MessageGears was perfectly positioned to provide it.
With MessageGears’ data activation and engagement platform, the brand could connect directly to BigQuery giving them full access to their customer data, live and in real time, so they could finally maximize its potential.
Not only are they sending more personalized messages overall but they’re also taking full advantage of their investments in both a modern data warehouse and Movable Ink.
Key outcomes
Better data access
MessageGears’ direct data connection allows this big box retailer to use their entire dataset for personalization.
Improved ROI from martech investments
MessageGears integrates easily with Movable Ink and Google BigQuery, maximizing the potential of both.
No more manual uploads
Direct, real-time access saves the brand significant time and effort by eliminating tedious manual CSV uploads.
Instant website updates
Using MessageGears, the retailer keeps pricing and inventory up to the minute on their website.
The problem
Taking full advantage of some great tools
After migrating to Google BigQuery, the major big box retailer wanted a data activation and engagement tool to make use of the rich data and powerful features of their new data storage platform.
Legacy solutions were either unable to leverage their new database’s functionality or required completely duplicating the data within, nullifying many of the advantages it had to offer. These solutions weren’t able to directly connect to the retailer’s data warehouse and weren’t built with the necessary scale to support open-time personalization for such a large sender.
The major retailer’s marketing team used Movable Ink for render-on-open personalization of email campaigns using real-time context data, but they found they could only use a portion of their large dataset. As a result, the team could only use a fraction of Movable Ink’s functionality.
When customers interacted with the brand’s website, the site had no way to fetch the internal user ID for each interaction to see if the visitor qualified for a coupon. And, when showing images in their emails, the retailer used a legacy platform to provide product and customer data to Movable Ink for image presentation – but the data was almost always too stale to be relevant.
After centralizing the brand’s data into the BigQuery environment, their martech stack came up short because it didn’t have the capability to connect to BigQuery. In the meantime, they manually uploaded CSV files from several different places to Movable Ink as often as they could in order to provide some semblance of data availability.
The solution
Enable live, real-time data to maximize utility
Together, MessageGears and Movable Ink enable this major retailer’s campaigns to quickly access their customer data via an API layer and activate it for real-time personalization. This is the perfect fit for their needs. Because MessageGears refreshes incremental pieces of the dataset, the retailer is no longer concerned with significant strain on their database. MessageGears simply loads a list of user IDs and dynamically fetches the data post-interaction. This allows the marketing team to use all of the brand’s data for dynamic messaging.
MessageGears’ partnership with Movable Ink provides a seamless integration, making the big box retailer’s implementation smooth and quick. Because the integration was already in place, there was no complicated technical work needed to make the MessageGears and Movable Ink tools speak the same language.
The results
Direct data connection improves results from BigQuery and Movable Ink
The big box retailer can now use their entire dataset for cross-channel campaign personalization, live and in real time. Because MessageGears provided immediate connectivity between Movable Ink and their BigQuery database, they’re able to more efficiently and effectively use all of the customer data they’ve expended resources collecting.
Previously, some of their data sources either couldn’t be accessed from their website or couldn’t withstand the load, but now the brand can use their data to power really impactful custom messaging for web visitors. This allows them to keep inventory and pricing live up to the minute. MessageGears provides direct access to their live data via an always-available cache that’s highly performant and able to handle unlimited API calls.
This gives customers access to better and more accurate deals and offers, and it gives the brand a complete sense of how each customer interacts with the website.
By connecting to the retailer’s on-premises BigQuery data store and making the data available at an extremely high number of queries per second, MessageGears fully replaces their old martech solution.