Marketing leaders are under more pressure than ever (I know a thing or two about this as a marketing leader myself!). Gartner recently reported that budgets have fallen by 15% on average in 2024 and the concept of doing more with less has long been the bane of marketers everywhere. Strategic investments in technology are a primary investment focus for marketing leaders, with martech representing 30% of marketing budgets.
However, the pressure to reduce costs and gain an edge in this new era of AI-powered experiences is most targeted at the tech stack. Martech adoption exploded in the late 2010s, as decreases in cloud computing costs and increased VC investment led to unprecedented levels of innovation and adoption. As a technologically literate marketer myself, I love a good demo and a free trial. If there’s a tool that can exponentially improve my business, make my team more efficient, or find the hidden revenue under that rock we’ve been looking for, I’m going to try it! However, like you, I’ve been disenfranchised by tech vendors that tell a great story but ultimately don’t deliver results. This has led to many organizations finding themselves with an expansive, disconnected martech stack, the sheer complexity of which makes it hard for marketers to do their best work.
To succeed moving forward, marketing leaders must consider the lifeblood of AI — data. In order to effectively leverage data and build great customer experiences, ALL of your data and ALL of your channels have to be connected. The side benefit — but the one that will get your teams on board with your genius plan to consolidate — is HUGE cost savings. We’re talking millions.
Understanding the Modern Martech Stack
As customers have come to expect personalized experiences across more and more channels, the majority of teams across the marketing organization have begun to utilize marketing technology to deliver a modern customer experience. But most companies we work with go something like this: IT picks a CDP or data warehouse for data management, the email team picks their tool, the ads team picks theirs, the BI team chooses an analytics tool, AND the CMO pays the price tags and still doesn’t get a big uplift in experience or growth.
This uncoordinated approach results in what we affectionately refer to as a “frankenstack” — a cobbled-together set of tools that can result in several challenges and inefficiencies like:
- Data silos. Every tool has its own limited, unique data set, and connecting data across tools requires manual work and/or engineering support.
- Redundant capabilities. Different tools offer similar or overlapping capabilities. Teams aren’t always sure which tool to use for each use case, and you end up paying for excess functionality.
- Limited collaboration. Groups across the marketing organization are using different tools and working with different data sets. It’s difficult for them to collaborate as they’re comparing apples to oranges.
- Lack of a single customer view. With different tools supporting each stage of the customer journey, it’s impossible to unify insights across systems and access a holistic view of a customer’s path to purchase.
If you find yourself paying for the same functionality across multiple tools or struggling to foster collaboration and understand your customers, you should seriously consider consolidating your tech stack.
How Consolidating Your Tech Stack Can Help You Reduce Costs
Consolidating your martech strategy to a unified marketing platform can have significant benefits. In addition to the immediate license savings, it also sets your team up to deliver better results in the long run. Obviously, I have a dog in this fight — this is the product we build and deliver at Bloomreach. But I’m at Bloomreach and passionate about what we do because I happen to very strongly believe in this strategy. Here are the reasons why:
Improved Team Efficiency
There’s nothing worse than coming up with an exciting new campaign idea only to realize that execution will require weeks of data wrangling and manual work. These kinds of delays postpone launch dates, decrease momentum, and impact morale. In short, it’s bad for business.
With a consolidated tech stack, everyone has access to the data and capabilities they need, when they need it. Your team can move from ideation to launch in days, not weeks.
Multinational retailer Alshaya, for example, was operating 15 different brands in six different markets. Because the team was using a combination of different tools across these areas, stakeholders struggled to collaborate and launch CRM campaigns in a timely manner. By transitioning to a unified marketing platform, however, the team was able to reduce their time-to-launch by 50%. And with all teams collaborating with the same data and tooling, Alshaya was able to create more impactful CRM campaigns, leading to a 6x increase in the contribution of CRM to total revenue.
Increased ROI (And I Mean Actual $$$)
Access to a holistic data set on a unified platform will also allow your team to deliver impactful campaigns.
When numerous tools are used throughout the customer journey, it becomes difficult to construct a unified view of the customer. Instead, stakeholders are forced to work with fragmented customer profiles, which increases the risk of delivering inconsistent personalization across channels. Consolidating your martech stack to a single platform, however, enables you to develop comprehensive customer profiles and deliver more relevant customer experiences.
For example, Nordic home supply retailer Proffsmagasinet was struggling to develop a single customer view as its customer data was siloed across different email marketing, web push, product recommendation, and SMS tools. By consolidating its marketing automation to a unified platform, Proffsmagasinet was instantly able to build holistic customer profiles and better understand the customer journey. With these insights, the team could take its email personalization program to the next level, achieving a 200% increase in email conversion rate while also decreasing its unsubscribe rate by 65%.
Lay the Foundation for AI and Keep Your Job Next Year
This is my PSA for marketing leaders: AI is evolving at a tremendous rate, especially in its applications for ecommerce marketing.
Every martech tool is offering its own AI functionality, but when marketing organizations have complex, disorganized tech stacks, it can be difficult to leverage AI to its full potential. AI in a single channel is presenting challenges and teams already aren’t equipped to handle the training required to make it work. Multiply that problem over every investment in your tech stack…and just go ahead and start your job hunt! Fragmented data sets, disconnected AI workflows, and varying levels of AI adoption across the organization prevent teams from connecting the potential benefit of AI into a holistic strategy and translating insights into business value.
By developing your strategy on a unified platform leveraging AI at every stage, you enable all stakeholders to access the same AI insights and leverage them across channels to deliver a seamless customer experience. This results in greater efficiency, lower costs, and better insights.
Evolving Your Tech Stack Strategy
As leadership consultant Marshall Goldsmith said, what got you here won’t always get you to where you need to be. Although many marketing organizations have transformed the customer experience by leveraging a wide variety of different martech tools, the reality is that success in the future will require higher efficiency and greater ROI.
Already, we’re beginning to see the market trend in this direction, with the average stack size shrinking by about 10% from 2022 to 2023 after years of consistent growth.
Transitioning from an expansive stack to a unified martech platform with a single view of the customer is absolutely critical — it’ll enable you to increase efficiency, deliver better results, and prepare for a future where you’ll need to use AI effectively (all while keeping your jobs!).
Plus, unifying their tech stack is how our customers have achieved an average of 251% ROI. Learn more about how they used Bloomreach Engagement to drive incredible results.
