Saying goodbye to data friction with MessageGears and personalized messages at scale

Last week at ClickZ’s Marketing Innovation Forum, leading markets gathered virtually to exploring the latest technologies and strategies to harness the power of automation. Nick Zeke Lopez, Director of Product Strategy at MessageGears, shared insights into what is happening in the world of data, issues with Email Service Providers (ESP’s), and how their Customer Marketing Platform has grown to become the only one that can attach directly to a marketers Enterprise Data Warehouse.

Having recently raised a $12 million round led by Argentum and Bridge Bank, MessageGears is growing quickly on its mission to empower the world’s most demanding marketers to deliver more relevant messages than with legacy cloud ESP.

The ESP’s of yesterday and the customer marketing platform today

During his Tech Talk Lopez highlighted how legacy marketing cloud ESPs have failed to address many of the data challenges that enterprise organizations have.

Going back 20 years, the need that marketers had for their data warehouses and environment were more than the actual data source could handle.

Customer and offer data was often stored on-premises in different places, and remote marketing tools needed pieces of data shipped to them. Marketers could work off that data even though the data was older, and the situation was far from sufficient.

According to Lopez, “The problem is if you fast-forward there are so many different uses of this data, different vendors and the landscape get super-complex that what you end up doing is looking at a customer data platform (CDP) that let’s say collects your site view and your app data. What it is going to do is typically keep a copy of your data, and you’re also taking your data from your data and copying it into your ESP. Hence, what we see in many large organizations is multiple copies of essentially the same data, but a little out of touch and with a time lag – owned by multiple vendors in multiple places.”

Workarounds are cumbersome and cause many issues such as:

• Data lag – time in between data copying between platforms
• Formatting – does not match what your company has or needs
• Expense – To get into the right format
• Sync – so much data streams break

Now fast forward a little bit, and the big thing that has changed is that the data sources that marketers are using are not the data sources that we had 20 30 years ago.

Specifically, in the last five to ten years, we have seen a total turnaround in this private cloud database, modern data warehouse database as a service industry where they have turned things around.

The MessageGear solution

For the team at MessageGears, it is clear that they see a colossal disconnect between data and ESPs. Enterprise marketers need direct access to their customer data to send personalized messaging at scale. MessageGears allows them to do just that.

MessageGears is the only customer marketing platform built for today’s Super Sender and was created to address legacy ESP’s failures and their connection with data.

Their unique Hybrid technology connects directly with a company’s database, enabling marketers to maximize the value of their customer data in real-time with no syncing required. 

Their customer marketing platform attaches directly to marketers’ customer data sources, allowing them to orchestrate sophisticated email and mobile marketing campaigns using live customer data wherever it lives.

With limitless capabilities to connect to third parties and enable audience segmentation, they put the power to personalize in the marketer’s hands with:

• Direct data access
• The ability to personalization at scale
• Simple and efficient migration
• Superior Service to Super Senders

You can view more about MessageGears and the full Tech Talk here.

Customer success

Many of MessageGear customers have large customer databases and onboarded as they needed a solution to send personalized messaging at scale to millions of customers. Brands that work with them include Chick-fil-A, Expedia, Home Depot, OpenTable, T-Mobile, and Rakuten.

Utilizing their technology, Expedia managed to drive costs down overall while getting 100% email ROI through campaigns that were highly personalized and secure.

MessageGears work with Expedia is an excellent example of bridging a gap that once existed between the marketing department’s goals and technology’s limits.

The future

Founded in 2010, MessageGears has raised a total of $29 million in funding and is growing rapidly.

The team is expanding as they look to scale the company’s sales and marketing team, alongside continued investments in engineering and customer success team.

As organizations become more dissatisfied with legacy marketing cloud ESPs and the failure to address enterprise data issues, they turn to MessageGears to help them execute email marketing campaigns with more precision and scale for better performance.