How MessageGears and Movable Ink Are Solving the Data Friction Problem

MessageGears is a Movable Ink partner that gives marketers direct access to their data, wherever it lives, allowing the world’s biggest brands to deliver timely, personalized campaigns that speak directly to customers. In June, their CEO Roger Barnette delivered a keynote speech at Movable Ink’s annual Think Summit conference, where he outlined the biggest challenge marketers are facing today.

Outdated technology is holding you back

Let’s cut to the chase: most companies don’t love their ESP. And yet, they keep signing up every time renewal comes around. Why? Because if you’re switching from one legacy product to another, things don’t really change that much. The truth is that many ESPs lack the ability to retrieve data and act on it quickly. Despite all of the technological advances in recent years, they’re doing things the same way they were 20 years ago.

With no significant payoff for switching, it makes total sense why companies would spare themselves the headache of migration and stick with their existing ESPs. If you’ve ever been through a migration, you know that it’s a lengthy, painful, disruptive, and expensive process.

Meanwhile, customers' expectations have changed dramatically. While a first name merge field might’ve had a certain wow factor in 2002, it’s not providing any shock and awe in 2022. It’s just the bare minimum. Today, customers expect fully customized messaging that meets them where they are, anticipating their wants and needs.

In other words, it’s time for brands’ communications to catch up to their customers’ expectations.

The challenge: data friction

The good news is that most brands already possess the data they need. The bad news? A lot of it is pretty inaccessible. And more often than not, different data types are housed in different places, without any way to speak to each other. As such, it’s really hard for marketing teams to use it effectively, or even get a hold of it. 

In addition to internal frustrations, data friction also complicates things when it comes to leveraging your martech stack. Without having direct access to your data, vendors are usually working off a copy, which means it’s out-of-date the moment you hand it off to them. And not only that, each vendor is housing a copy of your data in their own storage space, opening up a world of security and privacy issues.

So, what can brands do to get rid of all this friction so they can give customers timely, personalized messaging?

The solution: access, activation, execution

In order to do personalization right, companies need more than just core customer data. They need data on inventory, pricing, store location, offers, weather — the list goes on. With each of these living in separate places, it becomes quite the challenge to get timely, accurate information to martech, especially when you have millions of customers. This fundamental disconnect is one of the biggest frustrations for marketers today.

In addition to knowing who their customers are and what they want, brands also need to know when and where they want their communication to happen. That is, how to deliver messaging at the time and place a user is most likely to take action.

Luckily, the technology for that is here.

MessageGears’ platform sits within your data environment, giving marketers direct access to everything they need to personalize at scale, without any copying, synching, or mapping. And they can activate all the segments and attributes around that data to any vendors or channels that need it.

This makes migrations and implementations faster, since there’s no data to move. And with no copies to store, it’s much less expensive and much more secure. Data never has to leave your firewall. Perhaps most importantly for marketers, it’s incredibly powerful.

When used together with Movable Ink, marketers get a world-class, data-connected customer experience platform.

With MessageGears’ ability to join disparate internal data and Movable Ink’s ability to leverage that data, marketing teams can ensure that every communication with customers is a true 1:1 experience containing accurate, timely content. With data-activated content, messaging will update at the time of open and reflect users’ most recent behaviors.

For companies with millions of customers, the power to execute this at scale is a game-changer.

So if fear of migration is holding you back from modernizing your marketing, worry no more. No matter how big your martech stack or user base, personalization can be simple — it’s just a matter of finding the right partners with the right tools.

Miss out on Think Summit 2022 and looking for more recaps? Visit our post-Think Summit resource page!