It’s a question many businesses, or at least those with large enough teams and resources, have faced. Should we fulfill our mobile customer needs with a commercial solution? Or should we build it ourselves to meet our exact requirements—or even hire a third party to bring these capabilities in-house?
There’s a success-driven way to approach this dilemma: by asking the right questions, collecting the right answers, and knowing exactly what it will take to achieve your desired outcomes. Easier said than done.
Some positives of building your own solution: control over included functionality, and it can be built to suit your requirements perfectly (that is the hope at least). In addition, as time passes and your requirements change, your IT team, under your direct control, will prioritize what matters to you. There’s no need to juggle competing demands from multiple customers, as may be the case with an independent vendor.
This all sounds simple enough. But you don’t always have to search very far to find regrets associated with custom-fit software solutions. Outcomes like bloated budgets, restrictive data silos, and missed deadlines often occur when the right questions were not asked before deciding to build internally.
Our mobile marketing experts have seen it all, worked with the best, and have been in enough rooms to hear the mobile marketing horror stories that are a result of regretful investment decisions. The truth is, many enterprises are more than capable of building an extensive, in-house mobile marketing solution. But it all comes down to execution, and a keen awareness around all the factors associated with today’s continuous evolution of modern customer experience, along with long-term agility and upkeep.
Before making your decision, read To Build or Buy: The 2019 Mobile Marketing Buyer’s Guide. You’ll learn the types of questions you should be asking to make the most informed decision possible, get expert answers to those questions, and the specific requirements needed for successful mobile marketing in today’s multichannel world, including:
- The scale of communications
- Targeting and triggering specifications
- A/B Testing capabilities
- Data and analytics capabilities
- The depth of common integrations
