MessageGears has partnered with Sageflo to launch a joint solution that helps enterprise marketing organizations take distributed marketing, through-channel marketing, and brand-to-local marketing coordination to the next level via a combination of MessageGears customer engagement platform and Sageflo Radiate. The joint solution provides a distributed marketing and distributed sending engine that enables corporate marketing organizations to empower local marketers to build highly personalized and focused messaging campaigns while still imposing corporate standards that matter to them.
For any enterprise organization that needs to provide and coordinate email, push, and SMS messaging capabilities for locations and representatives at the local level — quick-serve restaurants (QSR), professional sports leagues, record labels, and direct sales organizations are common examples — the challenge can lead to restrictions and operational overhead that prevent the sorts of personalized campaigns that truly drive customer engagement and loyalty.
There are many aspects of the MessageGears core platform that help organizations practice more effective coordination, from virtual private cloud (VPC) web app installation and no required data schema (which enables brands to “bring their own” customer data models), to a flexible audience creator that allows any audience segment to be updated with launch variables on the fly.
But the combination of MessageGears with Sageflo Radiate does even more to fuel personalized messaging powered by local community marketers than ever before, providing Super Senders with an essential set of tools for coordinating messaging throughout the company and company channels.
Local marketers know their customers best
For enterprise organizations with marketers at a number of local levels, as organized and cohesive as your corporate marketing team may be, there’s just no way you can know each local market the way the people who live, work, and serve those local markets every day are going to.
The locals understand their communities better than anyone. They know what events are going on that week. They’re familiar with local sayings, and the way people speak. They see first-hand when there’s construction blocking an entrance to their parking lot, or when something important is happening there that could make a certain message inappropriate.
But, maybe most of all, they know the people. They have their regulars who come in a couple times a week. Maybe they’ve been in the community for decades, serving children and their parents before them and their grandparents before that.
That means they can create campaigns that are more personal — not merely personalized — and make customers feel more understood. More known in the place where they live. And that will drive more reliable engagement and resilient brand loyalty, even when they’re not at their local store.
Give local marketers more control
This can be scary for a lot of corporate teams. They’ve put a lot of work into establishing brand guidelines, and they’re nervous about turning control over to local marketers — in some cases, at thousands of locations — for building their own messaging campaigns, some of which will inevitably violate the carefully curated guidelines.
How are they going to keep them on brand? Are they going to have to review every message before it goes out? How much time and energy is going to have to be put into training?
And those questions often just lead to not allowing it at all, removing a key tool from the company’s toolbox when it comes to engaging with customers across the country and world.
With Sageflo Radiate, corporate-established templates ensure each local team remains on brand, while managed image libraries give local marketers the flexibility they need while still allowing the corporate team to maintain control over what’s used. Pre-defined segments limit emails only to subscribers that local market should reach, and no ESP login is necessary for marketers to build the emails.
Easy to use
Even if the corporate team is able to provide local markets with the tools they need to be able to build campaigns personalized to their own customers without branding concerns, there’s still the question of how difficult the tool will be to use.
Especially for enterprise organizations with hundreds or thousands of locations, the local marketing teams are bound to vary widely in size and technical expertise. That’s why it’s important that any platform to help enable distributed marketing has to be built with any marketer in mind.
Sageflo Radiate fits that need perfectly. Users can simply select a template and then customize their content via a streamlined user interface that’s simple for anyone to use with minimal training, no HTML coding required. Users can choose which segments they intend to target without the need to create complex filters, then review proofs and schedule the launch time.
Coordinate messaging
The next step is building the content itself, but there are still plenty of questions to answer from the corporate level on how they’re going to keep everyone on the same page throughout the process.
Especially when there are multiple locations in the same local market or when there are larger marketing campaigns that they need the local marketers not to clash with, it’s essential that there’s an appropriate level of transparency and visibility for the local teams as they build their messaging campaigns.
Sageflo Radiate provides select stakeholders with the ability to contribute and collaborate on campaign creation so that only the right people are directly involved in the process. A shared launch calendar gives marketers and the local teams the visibility they need into overlapping campaigns in order to ensure the right hand always knows what the left hand is doing, while all campaigns are launched through your ESP so that there are no technical clashes.
The power of combining MessageGears’ unique direct data connection with Sageflo Radiate’s ability to make distributed marketing smooth and easily coordinated from the top is that enterprise companies can empower marketers at the local level to build better relationships with their customers, leading to more reliable engagement and brand loyalty. Read more about how Sageflo + MessageGears helps to drive powerful distributed marketing campaigns for Super Senders.
