Getting the right tools in place is crucial for enterprise brands
A major Big Box Retailer recently came to us with common marketing and data challenges. Our customer engagement platform’s direct data connection was going to be the biggest transformation for them, not only helping them to send more personalized messages overall but also allowing them to take full advantage of their investments in both a modern data warehouse and Movable Ink.
They were happy with their investments in Movable Ink and Google BigQuery, but were also smart enough to know there was a higher ceiling than they were able to reach with the martech stack they had in place.
They needed an upgrade, and MessageGears was perfectly positioned to provide it.
Better data access
MessageGears’ direct data connection allowed the major Big Box Retailer to utilize more of their data for personalization
Take full advantage of martech investments
Because MessageGears integrated easily with Movable Ink and Google BigQuery, they could maximize the potential of both
No more manual uploads
With direct, real-time access to their data, they saved significant time and effort by eliminating tedious manual CSV uploads
Keep website updated
Using their real-time cache of data in MessageGears Engage, they’ve been able to keep pricing and inventory up to the minute on their website
The Problem: They couldn’t take full advantage of some great tools
After migrating to Google BigQuery, a major Big Box Retailer began looking for a campaign management solution that could make use of the rich data and powerful features of their new data storage. Legacy platforms were unable to leverage the new database’s functionality, or required completely duplicating the data within, nullifying many of the advantages that 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 Big Box 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 utilize a portion of their large dataset, and could only partially take advantage of Movable Ink’s functionality because of that.
When users interacted with their website, the site had no way to fetch the internal User ID for each interaction to see if a user had qualified for a coupon. And, when showing images in their large “Marketing Blast” emails to their user base, the retailer would utilize a legacy platform to provide real-time product and information data to Movable Ink for image presentation. But, after they centralized their data into the BigQuery environment, this solution came up short because it didn’t have the capability to connect to BigQuery. In the meantime, they would manually upload 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 them to use their live, real-time data to maximize its utility
MessageGears had designed and developed a product (MessageGears Engage) that enabled the major Big Box Retailer’s team to copy a cache of data into the MessageGears cloud in order for Movable Ink to be able to quickly access it via an API layer. This was the perfect fit for their needs. Because MessageGears Engage refreshes incremental pieces of the dataset, the retailer doesn’t have to be concerned with significant strain on their database. MessageGears simply loaded a list of User IDs into MessageGears Engage and dynamically fetched the data post-interaction so that the marketing team could make use of all the data they had available to them for personalization.
Because MessageGears Engage refreshes incremental pieces of the dataset, the retailer doesn’t have to be concerned with significant strain on their database.
Further, MessageGears’ partnership with Movable Ink was extremely beneficial, providing a seamless integration that would make the major Big Box Retailer’s transition smooth and quick. Because the integration was already in place, there was no complicated technical work that needed to be done in order to make the MessageGears and Movable Ink tools talk to each other in the same language. And the two teams had already worked together for several customers previously, so that relationship made it easy to make plans and stick to them.
The Results: Direct data connection made BigQuery and Movable Ink better
The major Big Box Retailer can now utilize any and all of their data for personalization throughout the content of an email campaign, live and in real time via Movable Ink and MessageGears Engage. Because MessageGears provided immediate connectivity between Movable Ink and their data, they’re able to more efficiently and effectively use all of the customer data they’ve expended resources collecting.
They have additionally been able to use the data to power website presentation because other data sources either couldn’t be accessed from their website or couldn’t withstand the load. This allows them to keep inventory and pricing live up to the minute because MessageGears Engage provides them direct access to their live data via an always-available cache that’s highly performant and able to handle unlimited API calls.
Because MessageGears provided immediate connectivity between Movable Ink and their data, they’re able to more efficiently and effectively use all of the customer data they’ve expended resources collecting.
All this enables them to present better and more accurate deals to users and to have a more complete sense of how each user interacts with the website in ways that were impossible previously without a significant amount of I.T. investment. And, by connecting to their on-premises BigQuery data store and making the data available at an extremely high number of queries per second, MessageGears Engage was able to fully replace their old solution.
