Have you noticed marketing solutions today have more “gotchas” that prevent marketers from implementing innovate use cases? You’re not alone – there is a reason for this.
In recent years, marketers have a dramatic change in the architecture of the leading marketing automation tools with the push to the cloud. In the early 2000s, large monolithic solutions like Unica (now owned by HCL) offered on-premise solutions that were designed to work across a diverse combination of operating systems, databases and web servers. These large solutions offered administrators and professional services experts the back end access and tools necessary to introduce complex customization and unique integrations. This openness also provided a means of introducing workarounds when (inevitability) bugs and issues were uncovered. For marketers, this often meant that with the right creativity and ingenuity, a solution could be developed to meet their unique need that was not on the product road-map, yet critical for their success.
Today, the widespread adoption of marketing clouds (e.g. Adobe Marketing Cloud, Salesforce Marketing Cloud) has changed the roles that IT and business focused marketers can play and the degree of product flexibility. Although technical resources are able to develop their own solutions that work with the marketing cloud’s customer exposed APIs, it is no longer to “open the hood” and directly make more specialized customization – especially at the operating system or infrastructure level.
“This isn’t an academic difference and marketers should take note.”
Business focused marketers notice this architectural change when their IT peers respond with “we can’t do that”. This respond can be baffling, as the unmet requirement may only be a slight deviation from the use case demonstrated to them during a sales meeting with the vendor only months ago.
IT leaders supporting your implementation of your organization’s selected marketing cloud have their hands tied. They lack the unrivaled access that they enjoyed from years gone by with on-premise installable solutions. Instead, they are limited to “power user” and “administrator” functions that are in-front of the veiled infrastructure curtain; often, they can help meet unique requirements with workarounds “around” the cloud, but rarely “in” the cloud.
AWS Pinpoint does not suffer from the same limitations as these newly emerged marketing cloud providers. AWS Pinpoint escapes this limitation by being built up from existing AWS infrastructure services that you have full control over. For example, the data ingestion capabilities for marketing events are based on AWS Kinesis (see further detail here), which is already well integrated and offers a robust open architecture. Similarly, the audience management capabilities (further reading here), offer native synchronization with storage services like S3.
“Pinpoint offers the ultimate ‘gotcha killer'”
In addition to the benefit of being built with existing AWS services, AWS Pinpoint offers one ultimate “gotcha killer”, which is the campaign hook for AWS Lambda functions. Lambda is at the centre of the AWS push for modern serverless architecture and can be invoked to filter or modify campaign executions at the last moment before delivery. When a marketer’s imagination extends beyond the intended scope of AWS Pinpoint’s marketer friendly user interface, the campaign hook powered by Lambda offers an extreme level of flexibility and ability to customize (without compromising the reliability and integrity of the solution). The campaign hook could be used for real-time suppression based on credit scores, last minute personalization or other scenarios that fall outside the out-of-the-box scope of AWS Pinpoint’s features.
See Lambda Hooks in Action for Outbound Marketing
For a video on the use of AWS Lambda hooks, see how we integrated AWS Personalize with AWS Pinpoint here.
AWS Pinpoint + Inbound Marketing
Are you looking for an interactive inbound marketing tool powered by AWS to complement AWS Pinpoint? Reciprokal helps you to deliver the next best action and personalization for inbound channels like web, mobile or with a customer service agent.