Imagine: You and your marketing team start the day with real-time customer information that drives your campaigns. Your team is equipped for insight-driven marketing, so they can work smarter and create personalized, cross-channel customer experiences. No more hours of searching for data. No more repetitive processes on isolated channels. Instead, instant insights, dynamic actions at scale, and time savings. A marketer's dream, right?
And yet, for many, this dream remains out of reach. Our survey on the status quo of customer experience found that 71% of companies cite a lack of resources as the main reason for not doing more.
“Many are still juggling siloed tools, performing time-consuming manual tasks and spending too much time mastering the technology behind their marketing. They are stuck in this endless loop and unable to effectively optimize their cross-channel strategies. With so much wasted time, it is nearly impossible to invest time in better strategic planning to increase revenue potential,” explains Ricardas Montvila, our VP Global Strategy.
In this blog, we'll show you how to increase productivity to empower your marketing team's expertise. We'll address the most common productivity challenges, show you how to enable insight-based marketing through your MarTech platform, and share seven must-have marketing solutions that will save your team valuable time, budget, and resources.
FORRESTER IDENTIFIED THESE COMMON CHALLENGES THAT AFFECT YOUR PRODUCTIVITY
We commissioned Forrester to conduct a Total Economic Impact (TEI) study on Mapp Marketing Cloud . Based on a collaborative organization, our platform increased marketer productivity by 25% over a three-year period. Here's what our client told Forrester in the interviews.
"[Previously] we would spend two to three hours manually evaluating which products were performing best and tracking them. With Mapp, we no longer do that. We use personalization blocks to structure our content and provide product recommendations. That has saved a tremendous amount of time." Paid and Organic Performance Marketing Executive, Retail
It's great to see how Mapp Marketing Cloud helped solve our customer's productivity problem, but we want to focus on the challenge described in the story. Does this sound familiar? This sheds important light on critical problems that marketers in general have but often fail to recognize.
In the customer interviews, Forrester identified the following common challenges our customers faced before investing in Mapp Marketing Cloud:
Lack of foundation for understanding customers
Marketing teams had no way to connect customer purchases to their marketing efforts because data was disorganized due to limited integration with legacy marketing solutions. Common systems included customer data platforms (CDPs), customer relationship management (CRM) systems, and databases. This resulted in impersonal marketing messages and missed business opportunities.
Limited ability to reach and engage customers
Using individual tools with siloed customer data resulted in fragmented outreach, repeated messages, and inconsistent, impersonal content across different channels. This negatively impacted the customer experience. Overcommunication made it difficult to track performance. At the same time, non-automated message deliveries failed to respond to customer interactions such as abandoned carts, resulting in missed opportunities to engage customers.
Lack of capacity to scale marketing efforts
The marketing team had limited capacity due to time-consuming manual processes, which resulted in limited evaluation of marketing efforts. Managing multiple tools also hindered their ability to build automated customer journeys at scale.
Overall, this makes it nearly impossible to orchestrate a cross-channel customer journey quickly and seamlessly. Your customers deserve an outstanding experience on every channel, every time. But when your tools and data are siloed, you're forced to work in a fragmented way. This separation limits your team's skills, time, and productivity, making it difficult to deliver the winning customer experiences you know are possible.
NO time for strategy = NO business growth
If you constantly focus on manual and complicated processes, your business will remain at a flat growth level. Meanwhile, the market around you is growing relentlessly day by day, which also means you don't have the capacity to keep up with your competitors. This is why it is crucial to review your MarTech platforms and ask yourself: are they really working together to execute an insights-based marketing strategy?
Activate insight-based marketing with your MarTech
In our customer experience survey , 28% said the increase in their e-commerce sales was due to improved use of marketing technologies. In addition, 34% of respondents attributed this to a better understanding of data and team maturity. This clearly shows the importance of accelerating your daily marketing activities with tools that help you activate insight-based marketing. In theory, to do this, you need the following skills:
Data > Insights > Engagement
While standalone tools like a Customer Data Platform (CDP) , marketing automation, and customer analytics can help you fulfill each of these capabilities, the problem with siloed data remains. It's an outdated way of working in today's fast-paced and innovative MarTech environment due to inefficiencies, limited collaboration, and fragmented marketing based on incomplete or inconsistent insights.
SEVEN FACTORS OF MODERN MARKETING SOLUTIONS
After identifying common challenges, Forrester identified the seven essential elements of a marketing solution to increase productivity:
Open integrations and GDPR compliance: The ability france phone number data to collect information from various data sources such as CDPs, CRM systems, data warehouses and other tools. These can be used to expand unified customer profiles and must be compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). It also requires minimal technical maintenance effort from IT staff.
Easy-to-understand analytics: A complete 360-degree view of your customers at the profile level allows you to gain meaningful insights into your marketing performance. You spend less time reviewing data from different silos and platforms to compile insights.
Customizable templates: Take advantage of not having to start from scratch every time you create campaigns. This reduces the effort the team has to put into creating cross-platform messages. Of course, the templates should also be responsive for desktop and mobile versions and require minimal technical knowledge to make the most of personalized messages.
KPIs based on artificial intelligence: Supplement the collected data with additional KPIs calculated by artificial intelligence engines. These can give you in-depth knowledge about your customers and activate more precise campaigns. Critical to the best possible customer experience are, for example, information about the best shipping time, the best delivery channel, and predictions about customer churn and conversion.
Precise segmentation engine: Target audiences based on all the data collected in the unified customer profile: sociographic, demographic, transactional, behavioral, engagement and predictive data. This is the starting point for activating advanced marketing campaigns. Preparation should be easy for marketers and should not require technical knowledge or other skills that could slow down and limit the audience creation process.
Cross-platform activation: Automated and personalized delivery of messages across digital channels, including email and mobile (e.g. SMS texts, push notifications in apps), as well as support for personalized web messages. It is also critical to eliminate silos around standalone delivery tools to facilitate the implementation of cross-platform customer experiences and have all campaign performance statistics in the same profile.
Expert tips: And finally, ongoing support from the provider's Customer Success team, who can provide helpful advice from similar customer experiences and in-depth platform knowledge.