As a marketer, it’s very likely you’ve run into marketing technology bloat. After all, there are so many tools out there, and if you’re trying to juggle separate logins, data sets, and learning curves, something’s bound to slip through the cracks.
According to a recent survey, businesses that use more than five different marketing tools spend 20% more time on administrative tasks than those with a streamlined tech stack. Read on to learn why consolidating your marketing tech stack can save time, reduce costs, and improve your overall marketing strategy.
What Is a Marketing Tech Stack?
Your marketing technology (or martech) stack consists of all the software and tools you use to execute, analyze, and improve your marketing efforts. From email marketing platforms to social media schedulers and analytics tools, these technologies all contribute to helping you execute, analyze, and optimize your marketing initiatives.
A comprehensive marketing tech stack typically includes the following key components:
- CRM systems
- Email marketing platforms
- CMS platforms
- Analytics tools
- Social media management platforms
- SEO tools
- Advertising platforms
- Marketing automation software
Integrating and optimizing these tools empowers teams to execute cohesive, data-driven marketing strategies, driving engagement, conversions, and overall success.
Why Consolidate Your Marketing Tech Stack?
Of course, simply having solutions in place doesn’t mean you’re set up for success. If you’re mired in daily maintenance tasks for disparate solutions, that’s time taken away from driving real value for your brand.
Let’s take a look at three compelling reasons why consolidating your marketing tech stack can be a game-changer for your business.
Improved Efficiency and Productivity
Consolidating your martech stack allows you to manage all your marketing activities from a single platform. This streamlining eliminates the need to switch between different tools, logins, and interfaces, saving you valuable time and reducing the risk of errors.
With a unified tech stack, your team can easily collaborate, share data, and automate processes. Let’s say you want to create a campaign for both email and SMS and support it with paid ads. With disconnected point solutions, you’d have to create content (and variants for testing) for each platform, make sure your audience segmentations align, customize the level of personalization per channel, and then track results one by one.
A consolidated tech stack allows your team to easily duplicate the same campaign across channels — including segmentations, content, crucial insights, and more — and make platform-specific changes as necessary. It makes your teams considerably more efficient and frees up time spent on manual maintenance so they can be more productive.
How Alshaya Saves Time and Generates Revenue With a Consolidated Tech Stack
Alshaya, a leading international retail franchise operator, transformed its operations and boosted productivity by consolidating its tech stack. The company faced numerous challenges managing multiple brands across diverse markets. Its fragmented tech stack caused inefficiencies, data silos, and higher operational costs. With Bloomreach, Alshaya could bring various systems into a unified platform to streamline its operations.
Thanks to this, the marketing team at Alshaya could easily clone campaigns and take their previous work with them (reports, scenarios, predictions, etc.). This has allowed the team to spend half the time they used to on creating campaigns, which in turn has allowed them to focus on boosting revenue.
Enhanced Data Integration and Insights
In a world where data is king, consolidating your martech stack is not just a nice-to-have; it’s a necessity. Enhanced data integration leads to more comprehensive insights, which in turn drives better decision-making and improved ROI.
When you need to track insights for each channel separately, it becomes cumbersome to have to figure out how they all connect holistically. These data silos won’t be able to provide a complete picture of each customer’s preferences, resulting in a shopping experience that doesn’t feel seamless or personalized.
Integrating all your solutions into one cohesive system allows you to get a single customer view, which enables more connected experiences no matter where the customer is coming from.
How Bensons for Beds Uses Unified Data To Improve Online Sales
Bensons for Beds, a British retailer known for its wide selection of beds, mattresses, and bedroom furniture, boosted decision-making and ROI by integrating data solutions. Thanks to its digital transformation with the help of Bloomreach and Voxwise, the company was able to personalize marketing campaigns, utilize data-driven insights, and engage its customers across multiple channels. This led to a 7% like-for-like increase in sales, as well as an impressive 41% increase in online sales.
How boohooMAN Uses Personalized SMS To Boost ROI
Meanwhile, boohooMAN, a leading online fashion retailer, found big success with its SMS campaigns using Bloomreach Engagement. The brand compiled zero- and first-party data into a single customer view in Bloomreach, sending personalized SMS campaigns that fed into broader omnichannel efforts.
As a result, boohooMAN saw an incredible 25x ROI on a birthday flow SMS campaign sent specifically to customers who weren’t opted in for email marketing. It also saw a 5x overall ROI on SMS in the UK. This approach not only optimized the SMS channel but also improved customer engagement and retention within an omnichannel strategy.
By consolidating marketing tools into one platform, businesses can ensure accurate data for informed decision-making and the ability to develop targeted, data-driven strategies efficiently.
Reduced Costs
For many executives, one of the biggest reasons to move forward with consolidation is the cost savings that come with it.
When you examine the total expenses associated with a fragmented tech stack, you’ll find a long list of different costs that add up to a sizable chunk of the budget. Consolidating to a single, comprehensive platform can reduce subscription fees, licensing costs, and overhead expenses, and your business can allocate more resources toward strategic growth initiatives.
Let’s consider a hypothetical scenario to illustrate potential savings:
Imagine a mid-sized company using five different tools for email marketing, social media management, customer relationship management (CRM), analytics, and project management. Each tool costs an average of $100 per month per user. With 10 users, the total monthly cost is $5,000, or $60,000 annually.
By switching to an all-in-one platform offering comparable functionalities for $300 per user per month, the company would spend $3,000 monthly, or $36,000 annually. This consolidation leads to a direct saving of $24,000 per year. Additionally, consider the indirect savings from reduced training costs and improved team efficiency, which could further enhance the financial benefits.
Plus, tech stack consolidation provides more than just direct cost savings. Here are some additional financial benefits:
- Lower IT maintenance costs and less downtime
- Increased productivity and better return on investment (ROI) on your marketing efforts
- Adding users and functionality without the need for extensive integration work
In short, optimizing your tech stack helps you save big on costs while also enhancing your ability to adapt and thrive in a rapidly evolving market.
Drive Ecommerce Success With Bloomreach’s All-in-One Solution
Consolidating your marketing tech stack offers efficiency, enhanced data insights, and cost savings. Now’s the perfect time to assess your current tech stack and consider the advantages of consolidating into an all-in-one solution like Bloomreach Engagement.
Bloomreach Engagement is powered by Loomi AI, which can intelligently take your first-party customer data and turn it into personalized marketing campaigns across all your channels. Loomi AI enables marketers to surface the right segmentations, create and launch campaigns with ease, automatically determine the best variant on an individual level to boost conversions, send campaigns at the exact right time, and much more.
Ready to take the next step? Learn how Bloomreach can help you consolidate your marketing tech stack, saving you both time and money. Request a personalized demo and start transforming your marketing strategy today.
