What is data friction?
Familiar with the back and forth toil between marketers and I.T. teams to get “real-time” data? That’s data friction.
Data friction increases lag time in marketing campaigns, and generally is caused by the movement of data back and forth between multiple marketing providers, ESPs, CDPs, systems of record, or internal data stores — typically in large quantities.
Why data friction is a problem for enterprise organizations
The more data, the more places it “lives,” the greater the need: the more data friction. Imagine needing to launch a cross-channel campaign related to a recent event, but you won’t get your copied data for 1-3 days. No control over where your data is stored and you need to pull it from multiple places? No time! What if you need more data and have to interface with the I.T. team to adjust the query or API they are using? Forget it. Spending more than your allotted budget on tools that don’t work well together? We hear you! We are here to solve these problems. Read more here.
Issues arising from data friction
How much time and money is spent by marketers synchronizing data with their ESP?
No matter the industry, enterprise marketers rely heavily on their ESP, and the data that comes with sending campaigns. As, statistically, 20% of total revenue is still generated from email campaign activation. But, this revenue is spent paying all of the fees associated with data duplication and storage. When, data is disorganized and copied into many “solutions,” it is slower and usually costs more to move. Not to mention, the opportunity costs of delayed campaigns in terms of lost customer conversions and customer loyalty.
What resources are dedicated to replicating data in your organization? Where would the marketing team divert those resources if they could?
Enterprise marketers know that integrated cross-channel communications are crucial to providing positive customer experiences, and they lean on ESPs to execute these campaigns. This process is usually led with the replication of customer data and synchronization of their database with an ESP regularly for personalization, segmentation, and targeting efforts. However, with all of this data movement, they are stuck with their version of “real-time” data, not “true” real-time data, like MessageGears customers experience. All of their time is spent doing operational “tasks” to make sure their data requests are in, changing those aforementioned requests, or updating the I.T. team when they need more data for a campaign.
How often do data feeds fail while updating?
Broken data feeds are a driver of high costs associated with managing and replicating data with ESPs, and a significant issue faced by marketers more than they’d rather admit. Broken data feeds are more problematic and frequent the more data you have, of course. This paired with poor data infrastructure can be a recipe for disaster.
Why don’t other platforms build their product to solve for data friction?
A major limitation of most vendors (SaaS/hosted providers) today is the data storage requirement. This gives your team a veiled view of your data, and limited access when it matters most. Instead of getting stuck with bits and pieces of customer data from the cloud on their time, find technology that puts you first, and that plugs directly into your database.
Most other platforms either were built long ago or unsustainably bolted on to the larger solution, so it’s structurally impossible for them to solve this problem. This paired with competing priorities keeps them kicking the data friction ball down the road.
Solving data friction issues
MessageGears’ unique solution is simple: live where your data lives. Have your data directly at your fingertips for fast iteration in visual segmentation, cross-channel marketing campaigns, and more. Maximize your investment in consolidating your data with MessageGears, and allow your team to build sophisticated campaigns in real time without having to face setbacks like lacking I.T. resources, failing data feeds, lengthy queries, scattered data storage, and data lag. Our entire customer engagement platform is built with the idea of being centered around your data, so that enterprise marketers do what they do best without having to worry about the technology they’re using.
IT teams love working with MessageGears
We are not a typical solution provider. Typical ESPs require a stored copy of your data to be kept in sync over time, but with this copy comes lag time and stale data. But, because MessageGears lives on top of your live data, you can utilize your data in place, reducing data friction in the platform.
I.T. teams have more control, and less ETL, less troubleshooting for stored files, and virtually no more requests to modify data transfer processes to add new data. If it sounds too good to be true, it’s not, it’s MessageGears.
Not to mention, data security is enhanced because MessageGears’ platform sits directly on top of your data — wherever it may live. Meaning that data is much more secure than it is sitting within a traditional marketing cloud ESP. Secure data unites tech teams and marketing teams, creating data harmony, not friction.