It sounds illogical, but enterprise companies have a harder
time doing email than smaller businesses, partly because they can’t move their data to a marketing cloud vendor. That’s the view of Roger Barnette, CEO of MessageGears, a company that
offers a hybrid database-cloud solution.
In a survey, MessageGears found that showed mid-market firms are more likely than enterprise outfits to adopt cloud-based, SaaS/hosted email services.
For insights into this problem, Email Insider interviewed Barnette, who joined MessageGears last year.
Why is email more difficult for enterprise companies?
It all comes
down to customer data. A few things are happening simultaneously. One is that customers and prospects are expecting tailored and contextually relevant communications from the companies they buy from.
It could be an email or text, or on mobile or on a computer, but it takes information and logic and data science to do it. What makes it difficult for large enterprises is the volume of data and the
number of sources it comes from, combined with heightened sensitivity around personally identifiable information.
How do you define an enterprise marketer?
For us, it would be
a large B2C company. It’s about the number of customers. You could be a large B2B business and have 5,000 customers versus 5 million for a B2C company. It’s almost exclusively B2C.
Why do smaller companies have an advantage?
There are a lot of really great tools and solutions for small businesses. MailChimp comes to mind. And if you’re a mid-market or B2B
firm, then Salesforce can be your single source of truth — your customer database. Your data is right there.
And enterprise companies can’t do this?
The largest
enterprises keep their data behind a firewall in a local marketing database, or in a CRM system or a data warehouse — all different flavors of the same thing. And there’s security
compliance concerns about shipping PII outside the firewall, so they keep it local. That’s a big part of it. But mostly it’s the quantity of data, the number of sources that prevent them
from using an off-the-shelf marketing cloud enterprise system.
Why can’t these enterprise players move to the cloud?
The process of taking even some portion of this
massive complex, and ever-changing set of data to the cloud is a costly, time-consuming endeavor. What I’m talking about is 5% or less of email marketers. But cloud-based software doesn’t
work for that group. It’s a little anti-intuitive. They’re frustrated, don’t know there’s another way to do this.
Where does MessageGears fit into this?
Our product addresses that issue. MessageGears is based on a hybrid cloud solution. Our email campaign management solution sits locally next to your data. All of the limitations and problems of IT
go away. It looks like it’s in cloud, and we keep our deliverability services in the cloud.
Are people adopting your product?
Yes, we work with a variety of national
brands like Expedia, Orbitz and Ebates. But we don’t win 100% or our pitches. Some people just have a whole workflow around their current vendor. And some marketers don’t have a close
relationship with their IT department. Our solution works best in situations where marketing and IT work in partnership.
Are you saying that enterprise marketers can’t do
email?
No, they can. They do get to the one-to-one level of messaging, often with some pain. A lot of companies have developed internal email tools and will use SendGrid or SmartPost to
send the emails. But all of the email solutions offered by the major firms that cater to this group — Oracle, Salesforce, IBM, Epsilon — are cloud-based. And all of the features they have
are predicated on having access to the customer.
It sounds daunting. Why is it such a problem?
They feel that the solution they have may not be perfect, but
it’s the devil they know. Then there’s the budgetary issue — a guy at a large hotel chain told me he has to get the budget to change vendors. He’s right —
it’s time-consuming and expensive. But our solution is much cheaper.
Does the privacy issue affect this?
Yes. We have a client, a national brand launched earlier this
year, that was on the marketing cloud solution. One of their marketers went to the IT department and said, ‘I need more data in my cloud — I can’t segment against this data
field.’ But IT is security conscious, and they decided that this data cannot leave their firewall. They had just been certified as being compliant with SOC2 security standards.
What
else is happening in email marketing?
The trend is toward omnichannel marketing. Marketers not only want to send this message to their customer in email form, they want to
take the same message and put it into a banner ad and pick up the phone and call them.
Anything else?
Wearable technology is another piece of it. It gives you a contextual
device for you to communicate with your customers. If they’re reading your message on a watch versus a phone, an iPad or a laptop, you’re in a completely different context.
What about MessageGears? Will it acquire or be acquired?
We’re not looking to be acquired. We feel that there’s a massive opportunity in catering to the unique needs and
challenges of enterprise marketers, and we expect to continue to grow and be a major player in this space. We probably will make some complementary acquisitions along the way.