Acquiring customers, exploring new markets, building the brand, running effective campaigns — Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) are expected to manage or oversee all of those things and more, all while ensuring company goals are met.
You know this, you do it every day. And one of the ways you’re able to complete this juggling act of managing a design team, campaign team, performance marketing team, or maybe even an entire ecommerce function is to make sure your team has the tools they need to be effective.
In the modern age of digital commerce, your martech stack must be:
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Able to collect data and have it be accessible in real time
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Able to execute campaigns quickly and compliantly across multiple channels and customer segments, all at once
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Able to show impressive time to value to the CEO and/or board members
Is your martech stack actually able to achieve these things? Is it driving as much top-line revenue as you’d like it to? Is it offering the teams you manage enough freedom to work independently on their daily tasks? And maybe most importantly, does it support omnichannel personalization efforts that are non-negotiable in fostering brand loyalty for customers?
Keep reading for a look at what the modern martech stack can do for a CMO focused on driving top-line revenue with an emphasis on ecommerce personalization.
Does Your Martech Stack Allow for 1:1 Personalization Opportunities?
There’s so much noise surrounding personalization in today’s market. We’ve transitioned from a time where personalization at scale was something ecommerce companies could only dream about to a time where it has become an expectation of consumers.
But the truth is, personalization doesn’t need to be complicated. It does, however, require having a modern, agile and efficient martech stack to facilitate your efforts.
Your martech stack must have the visual tools that make it easy for anyone on your team to build uniquely personalized campaigns or web experiences for your loyal customers. The martech stack must empower your employees to balance the art of brand and the science of campaigns.
Additionally, personalization should be simple. You shouldn’t need a bunch of integrations or tech dependencies to do this. Instead, it should all come from a first-party data analytics platform that is easy for non-technical people to access, analyze and utilize.
Truly impactful personalization is only really achieved when customer behavior is understood and anticipated. That means your martech stack must have advanced customer journey analytics that can be understood in real time and allow your teams to quickly target the right segments so you’re not leaving revenue on the table.
Unlocking commerce growth with ecommerce personalization is every company’s goal. Finding a martech stack that allows you to do that quickly and efficiently is key.
How can you win quickly with the right martech stack?:
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First off, consider a vendor that can provide you with out-of-the-box use cases that can be deployed within hours instead of days. Work with your IT team to implement these use cases and tie them with your brand and campaigns. Then craft a unifying strategy and consider how you’ll deploy them to your customers.
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Collect zero-party data from customers via pop-ups to optimize their experience on your website. No, not those annoying pop-ups we all experienced on the internet in the 1990s, but pop-ups that provide value to the customers and to you. For example, give customers a 20% off discount code in exchange for key information that will optimize an experience on your site. Then, you can drive towards a purchase and offer a better experience when they come back next time.
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Make sure your martech stack can predict customer behavior. Artificial intelligence (AI) and smart machine learning algorithms can help you create intelligent and highly targeted campaigns. These campaigns will reach the right audience at the right time on the channels they prefer.
If your martech stack can’t facilitate your team’s ecommerce personalization strategies, then it’s simply not up to par in today’s market.
Can Your Teams Work Independently Within Your Martech Stack?
Even if your martech stack is equipped to personalize experiences for your customers, if you’re running to IT every time you have to launch a campaign or there’s a minor issue, that’s going to cause other problems.
The IT team has a lot on its plate to keep marketing technology solutions, and the rest of the company for that matter, running most efficiently. It is perfectly reasonable that requests from the marketing team can take some time to get to — even the most urgent requests. If you want to get your business done faster, you need marketing technology solutions that allow even your least technical marketers to work independently and complete tasks on their own.
In addition, I’m sure the IT professionals at your company would be the first to tell you that the fewer requests they get from your team, the happier they’ll be during their week. That twitch they’ve developed every time their Slack notifies them of a message from your team doesn’t have to be a long-term problem.
You can solve this by implementing marketing technologies that allow marketers to work independently in an effective manner within the solutions. Everyone across the organization is happier when the marketing team doesn’t need to wait for IT assistance to get their tasks done.
Another big help with this? Public documentation. These documents offered by vendors should provide insights on not only what a feature does within the martech stack, but why it does this, and how to actually execute it with the product. A good documentation library allows IT to be free from the daily task of helping marketing.
One more consideration prior to making an addition to your martech stack is training. What type of training will be provided to non-technical professionals on how to use the solution being implemented? The solution will not do anyone any good if people on your team can’t use it. Whether this is an entire Academy with multiple courses, or just a one-time offering, ensure that the training being provided to the daily users of the platform is satisfactory.
How Will This Martech Stack Help Drive Growth?
Customer loyalty and revenue are two of the most important metrics you need to own to be successful as the CMO. Does your martech stack truly facilitate that? Is it working with you in partnership? Or does it often get in your way of these goals?
You oversee several different teams that have worked together to create an all-encompassing strategy to drive revenue growth. Your martech stack must be able to do what your teams need it to, and help you accomplish and exceed the goals that have been laid out.
Your company’s IT team will be the first to tell you — a martech stack works best with as few different solutions (from as few different vendors) in it as possible. The term “all-in-one solution” is more than just an industry buzzword. It’s an important consideration that will help your IT team make sure the martech stack is always capable of delivering value.
Having 20 vendors supply point solutions for your martech stack is going to have your legal or procurement teams popping up far too often to ask questions and bog down IT. There are also technical and legal concerns that come into play with point solutions that can be avoided by contracting with fewer vendors and keeping things simpler.
Why does that matter to you? Because you’re trying to drive value and revenue in the long term with your martech stack, not just in the first six months. This investment isn’t being made to just make a quick profit. It’s being made to develop a long-term strategy around that will help foster customer loyalty and drive revenue.
The more effectively your marketing technology solutions work together, the more effective they will be in the long run. Working with IT to examine the total cost of ownership, potential technical debt, and the impact of having too many vendors is an important task for the CMO.
With site speed being such an important KPI, having an older legacy tech stack or a newer tech stack with solutions that don’t communicate well together because they are from different vendors risks slowing down the speed at which your ecommerce customers can shop. That’s a major issue.
The best customer experience online is offered by an all-in-one solution that allows your team to develop a strategy that moves customers along their journey with your brand.
Bloomreach Engagement Frees the Marketing Team From IT and Drives Revenue
With your key KPIs of speed, time to value, and executing in real time in mind, it’s important to have an all-in-one marketing technology solution that won’t slow your consumers down online. In other words, your team needs a martech stack that is easy to use and that will drive top-line revenue growth.
Most importantly, it has to give your team options. Personalization options, that is. Whether that be personalized email campaigns, mobile marketing, or something else, your martech stack has to facilitate 1:1 personalization that allows your company to connect commerce experiences for your customers and foster brand loyalty.
Your best option to accomplish all of this? Bloomreach Engagement.
Bloomreach Engagement is a marketing automation and personalization solution that combines the power of a customer data platform (CDP) with native artificial intelligence, an email service provider, and web personalization, so you can create marketing campaigns across channels that drive revenue.
Instead of working with siloed point solutions, your team can unify all of its customer data and deliver connected customer experiences with a single solution. The best part? Your team won’t need to constantly bug IT to help them do it. Bloomreach Engagement creates a single customer view for marketers that helps facilitate the creation of personalized product recommendations, personalized email campaigns, and so much more in real time.
Interested in learning more? Watch our short video to learn exactly how Bloomreach Engagement functions and how it is specifically designed to help digital commerce companies drive revenue.