MoEngage’s Michael Ricciardone explains why adopting a selective approach will help businesses cut out the heartache
For marketers, the choice of tech-powered platforms to help you do your job better is extensive.
Recently I spoke to an industry peer who was bemoaning the lack of clarity in his business’s marketing strategy. The problem, as they explained it, lay in the sheer complexity of accessing the right data points.
Apparently within the one business there were multiple CRMs in use, two web optimisation tools and two separate data warehouses. This made for a veritable Noah’s Ark of digital solutions, with different internal teams championing their preferred options.
The result was a left hand and right hand that weren’t just not talking – they were in need of marriage counselling.
This scenario got me thinking about the major pain point I hear about time and again in our industry: marketers already have plenty of valuable data, they just can’t make it accessible and actionable. At least not as quickly as they need to.
In most cases the problem boils down to having too many tools, which leads to analysis paralysis. And when that’s the case customer retention strategies tend to suffer. Finding a clear way forward becomes harder and a lot of ‘why’s’ creep into conversations. “Why aren’t they reading the email?” “Why aren’t they engaging with the call to action?”
It also becomes an operational problem, with businesses running up a substantial ‘tech debt’, where the costs of running multiple platforms outstrip any gains that might have been made.
Naturally, everyone wants to retain the customers and sell to them for longer and extend lifetime value. And martech providers have long championed the importance of personalisation, or at the very least, the importance of knowing your customer better. Just about every vendor is going to promise the deepest, most actionable insights.
But not all are providing the end user with the best experience – many legacy platforms have evolved their systems at a glacial pace, which can make for a clunky experience, meaning brands are not always getting the most up-to-date insights.
I do get it. Sometimes staying with an incumbent, or trying many, is easier than taking the time to do the due diligence and finding one that best suits your business’s needs. This sort of thing is fairly common in large businesses.
There are many advantages to making this investment of time though. Brands I have worked with using a platform that provides an easy to interpret and unified view have reported implementation timelines for campaigns dropping from months to just a few days.
What I have observed consistently is that businesses that bring together analytics with engagement efficiently are the ones that lift their ROI.
And having a single solution that provides real-time customer journey insights and behavioural analysis inevitably means you focus on one set of results, instead of constantly trying to interpret whether one data set is more valuable than another.
So if you are looking for a solution to the overwhelm of SaaS options, I’d recommend looking at a platform that gives your business everything it needs in one spot as a first priority. Equally important is having a plan to bring your senior stakeholders together at an operational level and agreeing on the one solution that best sets you up for success.
When your business divisions are singing from the same hymn sheet, you’ll not only avoid your own Noah’s Ark of tech solutions, and crippling overheads, you’ll also be able to make expedient decisions that get those campaigns to market much quicker.
Keep up to date with our stories on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
