The average enterprise uses 120 martech tools. Imagine a carpenter wearing a belt with 100+ tools, many of which perform the same function and have similar effect. It’s a heavy, costly, unnecessary load to carry, and impossible to sustain. So, it’s worth asking if your existing marketing tools are delivering tangible outcomes. Do they increase efficiency, support business goals, and simplify your work? Or, is there a high cost of ownership with significant time, money, and resources needed?
If you want to take charge next year, consolidate your martech stack. You won’t regret it or the outcomes! Let’s explore four reasons to do it, ways to start and complete the process, and stories of organizations reaping rewards.
What It Means to Choose a Lean Stack
The modern martech stack is powerful, but each application must be thoughtfully chosen to create a stack that works in unison towards your business goals. When you prioritize a holistic view of your stack and consolidate to a leaner, more efficient, and results-driven infrastructure, these perks can be achieved.
- Maximize ROI for a stronger bottom line: When marketing invests time and resources to adopt a tool and onboard staff, you better be sure the added technology is used for more than just one feature. If not, there’s an opportunity to simplify. Streamlining your stack in alignment with top business goals ensures every marketing tool is used at maximum efficiency and enhances your organization’s bottom line. It’s smart to first define benchmarks for tooling use to ensure full value When they aren’t hit, you should seriously consider what to cut.
- Reduce or eliminate redundancies: There are several marketing tools that overlap in features and capabilities. According to Gartner, only 42% of the capabilities available in martech stacks are used by marketers. By rethinking your martech stack, it’s possible to experience cost savings of 30% to 40%, shares Bain & Company. Start by eliminating tool sets with redundant features and functionality that don’t regularly benefit your team, customers, strategic goals, or value drivers, and use tools that best enhance the customer (and marketer!) experience, blending specialization and simplicity.
- Scale impact: In the “do more with less” environment, marketers must help their brands engage and scale for immediate, lasting impact. A martech stack with all functions in one place that integrates end-to-end, streamlines expenses, and improves the customer experience enables you to scale with the pace of growth and demand.
- Improve collaboration: A disconnect between tools creates silos in and outside of marketing and silos hinder performance and results. However, a centralized platform with an extensive partner ecosystem and easy-to-use integrations is advantageous for collaboration. Some pieces you should be looking for in your centralized platform include:
- A data warehouse integrating behavioral data with the orchestration platform.
- A unified identity solution that brings data together.
- Content creation tools that expedite campaign creation and execution.
- Web optimization tools that maximize external presence for audience attention, and which integrate with the orchestration platform.
This list of benefits isn’t exhaustive. Just remember the golden rule is to consider your most important use cases and choose a modern platform that supports seamless execution and maximum performance for each. The burden is lifted, time and money is saved, and your customer experience will be future-proof.
Helpful Steps to Consolidate
The next logical question is: “ok, now how do I consolidate?” Well, we’ve got a list of some steps to help you do it.
Take inventory of the tools you use to ensure your stack foundation is solid and can handle key areas like campaign orchestration, audience targeting, and analytic insights. A few practices include:
- Documenting the current ecosystem.
- Mapping tools to strategic drivers.
- Defining KPIs that allow for consistently tracking and measuring success.
- Measuring value based on delivery versus expected performance against KPIs.
When you uncover redundancies in this process, it’s time to cut some fat. As marketers, we can use more simplicity, am I right?
Centralize governance to put ownership and responsibility in the hands of stakeholders who can guarantee consolidation happens quickly and effectively.
- Choose an ecosystem owner in marketing with an empowered perspective who will set boundaries for decision-making.
- Develop a cross-functional steering committee to establish shared goals and resources and reinforce adoption throughout the organization.
- Set a schedule to evaluate performance metrics and utilization, and ensure maximum efficiency in resources spent.
Finally, consolidate (where you can) to experience the key benefits mentioned.
- Map tools to your customer journey for a more seamless experience, from beginning to end, with your brand.
- Eliminate the tools that have overlapping features and functions.
- Seek out a platform that has a strong partner ecosystem, flexible data model, and proven experience working with brands similar to yours or experiencing some of the same challenges.
Enterprises that Consolidated and Now Thrive
Iterable has helped numerous customers consolidate their martech stack for great benefit. For instance:
- Furniture brand Joybird streamlined their disparate platforms for email and event tracking in Iterable. Now, they benefit from maximum data flexibility, robust segmentation, and real-time event streaming. The measurable business value included a 93% reduction in engineering time and marketing being able to spin up new campaigns in an hour instead of two weeks.
- The Body Coach fitness app relied on two platforms for customer emails and push notifications. Choosing Iterable, they gained one solution that delivers individualized, automated, cross-channel communications to attract new members, keep them in a renewal cycle, and support their pursuit of health and fitness goals. Now, 60% of members who interact with voice messages from founder and trainer Joe complete a workout in a few days and more consistent, personalized customer engagement increases the odds of stronger retention and member renewal.
Visit Iterable.com to schedule a demo and learn how we help marketers elevate customer engagement, w and explore resources like this more extensive, downloadable checklist to maximize your martech stack.