Orchestrating Sustainable Growth Through An Agile Martech Stack
An agile martech stack is table stakes for brands to drive unparalleled brand growth and consistent customer experience
It’s never been easier for customers to switch brands to seek bespoke personalised experiences. A recent study surveyed leaders across leading global brands to understand how prepared they are to meet their customers’ ever-evolving expectations and demands. The survey found that 64% of consumer brands agree that customer behaviour, preferences, and expectations from customer experiences are evolving rapidly.
The Current Market State- Why Marketers Need to Cut the Bloat?
Around 51% of these enterprise brands agree that their team has the right skills to meet customers’ rapidly changing needs. While marketers realise the need to embrace agility as the key tenet of successful customer engagement, only 35% of them state that their current martech setup empowers them to fulfil these rapidly changing customer expectations. This gap could be caused due to a staggering percentage of these brands (around 61%) still using legacy enterprise tools.
Brands that invest in legacy tech modernisation witness a 14% increase in revenue and a 13% reduction in business costs (according to a study by Tory Haris). A bloated martech stack can result in up to 5X in time to value due to longer go-lives and time to campaign.
However, despite the research strongly indicating the need for brands to modernise their martech stack in favour of an agile one, not all marketing teams are so quick to hop on the agile marketing bandwagon. 18% of marketers cite the lack of the right tools as one of the challenges they face in adopting agile marketing (as per research by Agile Sherpas).
The Competitive Edge- A Unified Agile Martech Stack
Today, nearly 10,000 marketing technology platforms cover everything from advertising and promotion to data and customer journey management. While the explosion of such varied platforms brings forth multiple opportunities for engagement innovation that lead to exceptional customer experiences and therefore increased ROI, it has also resulted in data siloed within those specific platforms.
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This challenge gets considerably worse as non-integrated stacks grow. Without consistent and accurate data across customer journeys that span offline and online it becomes difficult for teams to understand customer preferences, friction points, and other nuances that can help brands personalise customer engagement.
With unified platforms like an insights-led Customer Engagement Platform (CEP), brands can easily centralise customer data from both physical and digital engagement channels to understand customer preferences, behaviour, reasons for dropping off, and much more. Such platforms enable you to send targeted messaging over various channels such as email, SMS, chat, push notifications, and more. CEPs come equipped with intelligent segmentation and personalisation capabilities that help you understand each customer’s requirements and tailor communication accordingly.
These platforms have a native machine-learning aspect that aids in analysing, gaining insights, predicting, and engaging with customers the way they want to be spoken to over a channel they enjoy interacting with.
With brands growing their customer base at an unprecedented rate, it is also of utmost importance that martech platforms empower brands to prioritise customer experience and support scalability. Marketing teams today need to onboard a platform that is capable of handling data points from millions of customer interactions to then be able to analyse these accurately and launch omnichannel campaigns in a jiffy.
Future-proofing Your Martech Stack
A brand’s martech stack can be the driving force and a competitive edge behind their success, empowering them to automate tasks, make data-driven decisions, personalise customer experiences, and adapt to a rapidly evolving marketplace. Building a unified and agile martech stack isn’t just about cleaning house and ridding yourself of the tech stack you’ve worked so hard to build. It’s about realigning your martech stack to ensure you have at least one holistic platform that helps you establish a strong connection between the different tools in your stack, increase cost efficiency, and faster time to market.
