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Picture this: you and your marketing team tackling your day with real-time customer insights that fuel your campaigns. You’re powered by insight-led marketing capabilities that make you work smarter to craft personalized, cross-channel customer experiences.
No more spending hours trying to sift through data manually. No more repetitive processes on your disconnected channels. Just instant insights, dynamic action at scale, and time saved. It’s what marketers are dreaming of, right?
And yet, this dream remains elusive to many. Our State of Customer Experience survey uncovered that 71% of businesses found a lack of resources/bandwidth to be the top reason for not doing more.
“Many are still juggling siloed tools, carrying out time-consuming manual tasks, and spending too much time taming the technology behind their marketing. They’re stuck in this continuous loop and can’t optimize their cross-channel strategies effectively. With so much time wasted, investing time in better strategic planning to grow their revenue potential is almost impossible,” explains Ricardas Montvila, our VP of Global Strategy.
In this blog, we’ll demonstrate how to boost your productivity to grow your marketing team’s maturity. We’ll take you through the most common productivity challenges, how to activate insight-led marketing through your MarTech stack, and share seven marketing solution must-haves that save your team valuable time, budget, and resources.
FORRESTER FOUND THESE COMMON CHALLENGES SET-BACK PRODUCTIVITY
We commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study on Mapp Cloud. Based on a composite organization, our platform increased marketer productivity by 25% over three years. Here’s what our client informed Forrester in their interviews.
“[Previously], we spent two to three hours manually assessing what the best sellers were and populating them. With Mapp, we no longer do that. We use personalization blocks to help structure our content and make product recommendations as well. That saved a huge amount of time.” Paid and organic performance marketing executive, retail
While it’s great to see how Mapp Cloud helped solve our client’s productivity pain point, we’d like to focus on the challenge in their story. Sound familiar? This sheds an important light on critical problems that marketers generally have, but fail to recognize.
When conducting client interviews, Forrester found these common challenges that our clients had before investing in Mapp Cloud:
Missing foundation for understanding customers Marketing teams lacked the means to identify and connect customer purchases with their marketing efforts due to unorganized data caused by limited integration with legacy marketing solutions. Common systems included customer data platforms (CDPs), customer relationship management (CRM) systems, and data warehouses. This led to non-personalized marketing messages and missed business opportunities.
Limited capabilities to reach and engage customers Using individual tools with siloed customer data led to fractured outreach, repetitive messages, and inconsistent, non-personalized content across channels. This negatively impacted their customers’ experience. Over-messaging would make it hard to track performance. At the same time, unautomated messaging delivery failed to respond to customer interactions, such as abandoned carts, leading to missed customer follow-up opportunities.
Lack of bandwidth to scale marketing efforts The marketing team lacked bandwidth as manual processes took up too much time, leading to limited evaluation of marketing efforts. Managing multiple tools also hindered their ability to build automated customer journeys at scale.
Collectively, these make it almost impossible to orchestrate a cross-channel customer journey quickly and seamlessly. Your customers deserve an exceptional experience on every channel, every time. But when your tools and data are siloed, you’re forced to try and work in a fragmented way. This disconnect limits your team’s capabilities, time, and productivity, making it difficult for them to deliver revenue-driving customer experiences you know they’re capable of.
NO TIME FOR STRATEGY = NO BUSINESS GROWTH
Constantly focusing on manual and tricky operations keeps your business on a flat level of increase. All this while the market around you grows incessantly day by day, also means you don’t have the capacity to keep up with your competitors. For this reason, it’s critical to review your MarTech platforms and ask yourself: do these really work together to conduct insight-led marketing?
ACTIVATING INSIGHT-LED MARKETING THROUGH YOUR MARTECH
In our State of Customer Experience survey, 28% said their increase in eCommerce sales was down to improved use of marketing technologies. Additionally, 34% of respondents attributed it to a better understanding of data and team maturity. This makes it evident that it’s critical to speed up your daily marketing using tools that help you activate insight-led marketing. In theory, you need these capabilities:
data > insights > engagement
While standalone tools, such as a Customer Data Platform (CDP), Marketing Automation, and Customer Analytics, can help you fulfill each capability, the silo problem still stands. It’s an outdated way to work in today’s fast-paced and innovative MarTech environment because of the inefficiencies, limited collaboration, and fragmented marketing that’s based on incomplete or inconsistent insights.
SEVEN FACTORS IN MARKETING SOLUTIONS
After identifying the common challenges, Forrester identified the following elements that helped address those challenges to improve productivity:
Open integrations and GDPR compliancy: Being able to gather information from different data sources, such as CDP, CRM systems, data warehouses, and any other client tools. These can be used to enrich Unified Customer Profiles and must be General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliant. It also requires minimal technical maintenance from IT staff.
Easily readable analysis: Getting a complete 360-degree view of your consumers on a profile level helps you draw meaningful insights into your marketing performance. You can spend less time reviewing data from different siloes and platforms to assemble takeaways.
Responsive templates: Take advantage of not starting from scratch whenever you build campaigns. It reduces team effort in preparing cross-channel messages. Of course, they should also be responsive to cover both the desktop and mobile versions, requiring minimal technical skills in customization to properly leverage personalized messages.
AI-based KPIs: Enrich the collected data with further KPIs calculated from Artificial Intelligence engines, which can give you deep knowledge about your customers and activate more accurate campaigns. Best send out time, best delivery channel, churn and conversion predictions are critical to delivering the greatest customer experience.
Accurate segmentation engine: Target your audience leveraging all the gathered data in the unified customer profile: sociographic, demographic, transactional, behavioral, engagement, and predictive. This is the starting point to activate advanced marketing campaigns, so it needs to be marketer-friendly in preparation, without requiring tech knowledge or any other skills, which can slow down and limit the process of audience creation.
Cross-channel activation: Enable automated and personalized messaging delivery across digital channels, including email and mobile (e.g., SMS text, app push notifications) and support for personalized web messaging. It’s also critical to remove siloes in terms of standalone delivery tools, to facilitate the implementation of cross-channel customer journeys to reach your customers in the best possible way while having all campaign performance stats under the same profile.
Expert tips: And finally, the ongoing support from the vendor Customer Success Team who can provide hints from similar prospects’ (lookalike) experience and deep platform knowledge.
Transitioning to a platform that combines all these elements helps ramp up how your business operates and performs. This saves time in analysis and manual activities to rededicate this effort in discussing new strategies with colleagues. For example, you can work on building more complex customer segments and campaign workflows through the platform.
CONSOLIDATING YOUR MARTECH STACK
Simplifying your MarTech stack enables you to eliminate the challenges of limited capabilities to reach and engage customers and lack of bandwidth to scale marketing efforts. Automated messaging delivery that responds to customer interactions and personalized marketing messages based on an enriched unified customer profile also helps to eliminate repetitive messages and inconsistent, non-personalized content across channels. Integrating such tools ensures a more productive work environment where marketers can spend less time on manual processes and more time on strategy and evaluating marketing efforts.
Consolidating your tech also enables seamless cross-channel orchestration. Marketers need insight-led marketing platforms with cross-channel capabilities at the core of their MarTech stack that integrates with tools and centralizes data. This can help them break down data siloes, unify their customer data, activate their insights with automation, and analyze their performance with AI. Ensuring a seamless daily operation is crucial in enabling marketers to have free time to focus on other essential aspects of marketing. Having this seamless connection means increased team productivity and time for enhanced new strategy development that benefits the business.
FORRESTER FOUND A 540% ROI FROM MAPP CLOUD
Mapp Cloud is a powerful insight-led customer experience platform that helps you focus on what really matters: data-driven optimizations. With customer intelligence and marketing analytics, businesses can use multichannel customer insights to trigger personalized marketing activities from their fingertips. With AI-supported forecasting models, cross-channel campaigns can be targeted and self-optimized. Automating messages being sent via the right marketing channel at the right time becomes seamless, with optimal contact frequency.
In Forrester’s TEI study of Mapp Cloud, its analysis of a composite organization saw:
Year 1: 15% improvement in productivity with Mapp’s streamlining analysis, automation capabilities, and templates
Year 2: 20% increase in productivity
Year 3: 25% increase in users developing best practices and maturity from their usage of Mapp Cloud
Collectively, these improvements help generate an ROI of 540% over three years!
One benefit Forrester highlighted is the importance of Mapp Cloud in the growing maturity of the marketing team. The study found that they became more mature in recognizing the value of personalization, building up more complex customer segments, and adopting a more granular focus with their targeting to reach hard-to-get customers.
This article was first published by Mapp. Permission to use has been granted by the publisher.
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