When your martech stack isn’t cutting it: How to make a switch
If your martech isn't doing the job, you can't do your job. Find out what to look for in a new marketing solution.
Customers are using more channels than ever before. Acquisition costs are three times what they were a decade ago. Inflation is pushing retailers to tighten their purse strings and forcing customers to reevaluate their definitions of “value.”
In this state of constant change, one thing’s clear: It’s a tough time to be a retail marketer.
However, amid this change, a handful of marketing tenets have held strong, serving as guiding priorities to keep brands one step ahead and avoid sinking into oblivion.
Focusing on these priorities will help you dial in your retail marketing strategy, do more with less resources, and ultimately, get closer to your customers:
- A single, connected marketing tech stack
- Great customer experiences
- Marketing automation
1. Build a marketing tech stack that cuts manual effort
With more than 8,000 martech solutions available today, forming a single technology stack to drive a retail marketing strategy is far from easy.
The amount of choice can be overwhelming for marketing teams. In fact, on average, marketers employ around 120 marketing cloud technologies and services.
With this volume of platforms, teams run the risk of having siloed data, which leads to disconnected customer experiences.
Merging your technology and data into a single connected retail marketing platform can save time and establish a foundation for more responsive marketing strategies.
The more your tech is unified, the simpler it is to personalize, scale, and effortlessly connect with customers across multiple channels. Tech stack consolidation also makes analytics easier, helping you to see which retail marketing activities are moving the needle and driving results.
2. Deliver experiences that customers love
At its root, customer experience is simple to understand — good experiences build your brand, and bad experiences damage it.
There’s no shortage of data to back up this claim. When more than 30% of customers will stop shopping with a brand after a negative customer experience, it isn’t something retail marketers can afford to ignore.
On top of this, an improvement in customer experience of just one percent can drive more than $1 billion in additional revenue, according to Forrester.
So, this begs the question: When customer experience has such a profound impact on driving loyalty and revenue, why do so many brands struggle to find success with it?
It comes down to focus. Recognize CX as a key driver of revenue and growth, and make it a focus for your team.
Retail brands that successfully keep shoppers coming back, spending more, and recommending brands to their personal networks don’t rely on batch-and-blast messaging. They rely on 1:1 marketing that creates highly engaging, value-adding customer experiences.
If you want to achieve the same, you need to create personalized retail marketing campaigns with relevant content tailored to each customer, as opposed to constantly hitting them with irrelevant messaging.
Achieve this, and you’ll set the foundation for end-to-end customer experiences that drive the outcomes your business demands.
Personalized email: Relevant messages get real results
What's the secret to getting email marketing right? Discover how personalized emails boost customer experience, open rates, and conversion.
3. Use automation to free up marketing resources
When we conducted a survey of retail marketers, over half of them reported not having enough hours in the day to deliver on business expectations.
Marketers already have a lot of hats to wear. So, with such little time available, minutes are precious and efficiency is a must-have in your retail marketing strategy.
Fifty-five percent of marketers in our survey said that a significant chunk of their time is spent working with multiple tools across several channels, and a shocking 91% reported spending a most of their time on data preparation and segmentation.
If you want to drive results, you need to find time for your team to do what they do best: strategy, creativity, and getting to know your customers.
Incorporating AI and automation transforms retail marketing teams from reactive to proactive by allowing them to engage with customers in the moment with personalized offers. Plus, AI algorithms fuel accurate predictions of campaign performance in real time, allowing campaigns to be optimized instantly.
This not only frees up time for your team — it also makes real-time personalization easier, leading to higher levels of customer engagement and ultimately, increased revenue for your business.
Marketing in an age of high-frequency change
We face a constant barrage of daily disruption, but a data-first strategy gives marketers the agility to come out ahead.
Empathy is the key to driving retail marketing results
These three priorities boil down to empathy. A marketer who can empathize with their customers and their teams is a marketer who can create relevant, personalized experiences. In the same light, empathetic marketing leaders employ strategies to make the lives of their teams easier.
With the retail industry standing on uncertain ground, marketers have a tough task ahead of them. Anything that makes their day-to-day work easier — and improves job satisfaction in the same swing — is worth pursuing.
