Is Yesterday’s Messaging Solution Today’s Problem?

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To get underway, many companies chose quick fix, low cost email marketing solutions based on open source or early generation technology. While they may have sufficed in their day, changes in consumer communication behavior, advances in messaging technology and the requirements of a dynamic environment have rendered these solutions obsolete. Yet, many companies continue to rely on them. To keep marginally abreast of today’s requirements, they’ve thrown more and more scarce IT resources at them (custom coding, manual operations, etc.). The bottom line: cost of ownership has gone through the roof while business results have taken a nose dive, leaving companies with inflexible solutions that can’t scale and certainly aren’t extensible to the multi-channel, interactive digital messaging environment that lies just around the corner.

It’s time for marketers to ‘look under the hood’ at the messaging infrastructure within their companies and lead initiatives to adopt next generation platforms that will ensure their future success. Failure to do so will leave them at a significant disadvantage relative to competitors who do.

In building the business case, it’s important to understand the ‘true costs’ of your current solution. Cheap technology could be draining your budget and eroding your bottom line in ways you don’t even imagine. Consider:

• Hard Costs: What are the costs of your servers, power consumption and other operational requirements?
• Soft Costs: What are the costs of your IT/ops or engineering staff needed to maintain the operation, trouble shoot problems, make manual fixes or continually write/maintain custom code?
• Opportunity Costs: What are the costs to your business of downtime, poor throughput, poor deliverability or a bad reputation?
• Personal Costs: What are the costs of middle of night calls, inability to satisfy internal clients, no time or resource for other business-critical projects?

It’s not unusual to see 50-75 percent reductions (or more) in all of these costs when switching from yesterday’s point solution to a next generation message management platform and to see them within months of deployment. After all, such a platform is by definition a fully integrated, multi-faceted solution—controlling gateway, intelligence router and advanced message transfer agent—for handling messages across the enterprise. It’s designed to serve as the central integration and processing hub for all forms of digital messaging within your infrastructure, connecting it with internal and external data sources, applications and systems. And that’s a far cry from the MTAs of yesterday.

Points to evaluate are:

• Performance: The capacity to efficiently manage all your messages—millions per hour on each server—with reduced infrastructure and costs.
• Reliability: One hundred percent availability, automatic failover and full (3rd tier) to support your business-critical messaging needs.
• Extensibility: A rules-based, modular framework with open APIs tailored to your unique business needs and easily modified as those needs change (future-proof).
• Scalability: Limitless horizontal growth with efficient app integration and centralized management across geographies to keep pace with your business success.
• Visibility: The clear, unobstructed real-time view into your messaging processes, interactions and results for informed decision making and business agility.
• Usability: The tools and support to use the solution according to your exact specifications in business processes across your organization.

These next generation messaging solutions already exist. Adopting them will not only pay significant dividends today, but also enable companies to take advantage of tomorrow’s trends in multi-channel digital communication and commerce. The time to graduate to next gen technology is now. 

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About Dave Lewis

Dave Lewis is the chief marketing officer for Message Systems, and is a 26-year direct marketing veteran and a recognized industry thought leader. He writes and speaks frequently on digital messaging opportunities, challenges and best >practices.