The red-flag signs it’s time to rethink your marketing technology

The signs that it’s time to change marketing platforms often begin with a general feeling of frustration that’s hard to pin down. But then, one day, all becomes clear when a competitor launches a campaign that leaves you thinking: “I have no idea how they did that.”

It might be due to a technical limitation, a knowledge limitation or a support limitation, but any time you feel like you’re on a pedal bike while those around you are riding motorbikes, it might be time to upgrade.

Another indicator to look out for is stagnation in strategic execution. If you’re running the same campaigns using the same tactics as last year and the one before, there could be a shortcoming with your technology, or a lack of thought leadership and guidance from your tech partner.

Engagement with email marketing, for example, can often be a strong indicator of customer satisfaction and loyalty. So if you’re seeing a reduction in open rates, clicks, subscriber numbers or new sign ups, that’s a strong sign there is a gap in your tech or your strategy.

How personal are you?

Personalisation has become a key difference-maker to engagement with marketing messages, and not being able to do it effectively is a major red flag. In Marigold’s recent European Consumer Trends Index report, 50% of consumers revealed they have been frustrated by irrelevant content or offers in the last 6 months. Furthermore, 78% of consumers specifically said they were likely to engage with personalised emails that were tailored to their interests.

On the one hand, marketers have a huge opportunity to impress the vast majority of consumers by tailoring messaging to their needs, but you also have to be wary that over half of consumers will be frustrated if you send generic messages or try to personalise and get it wrong.

In terms of figuring out the capabilities of their tech stack, marketing teams should start by mapping out a few key customer scenarios, and then challenging their current or new supplier to make sure they can fulfil them. This could be by working with the customer success or support teams within your existing supplier, or the pre-sales team at a new potential supplier.

If you aren’t sure which scenarios would apply to your brand and customers, you should be able to rely on your tech partner to provide a ‘crawl, walk, run’ model of digital maturity. This will explain the evolutions to focus on at each stage of transformation.

There are always a variety of compliance issues to be aware of around personalisation, but if marketers are treating customers with respect and aiming for the gold standard of consent-based marketing, they should already be at or above the levels demanded by regulations. Aiming high is also the only real way to get the level of engagement and loyalty from your customers that modern businesses need to thrive.

Integrating data and technology

Even when marketers set out to adopt a new platform with the best of intentions, aligning the data necessary for personalisation and more effective email marketing can still be frustrating. You might have invested in a powerful execution engine and amassed a wealth of rich customer data, but you still need to be able to connect the two.

A really great partner should be able to have their solution architects build a proof of concept with the technologies a client needs to integrate, so long as a marketing team can provide clear ideas of what’s required and give the provider a little time. Marketers should never be afraid to ask a partner to prove they can do what they say they can.

Also, when selecting or reviewing a supplier, it is a good idea to share strategic goals, not just the list of data fields you need to use or campaigns you want to run. This will help them to build a more holistic, future-proofed view of the data you may need and where you will need it.

Support that delivers

When new technology is eventually in place, good customer support will be pivotal because there are so many factors at play in any given campaign. Email marketing at its heart is a combination of multiple technical systems – data, HTML rendering, queuing systems, segmentation and so on – all colliding with the complex preferences of recipients. Every email campaign has an incredible number of potential points of failure. So, when an error occurs – and it happens to everyone – you need a team within reach who have seen it all before and can fix or mitigate the issue.

The other key risk factor with email marketing is scale. It’s very common for email campaign audiences to be in the tens-of-thousands or millions. That’s a huge amount of people who will experience any error you encounter. When things go wrong, you need the right response to get you back on track because the impact can be huge.

When renewing providers or looking at a new one, be sure to ask plenty of ‘what if?’ questions. What happens if a campaign fails for a technical reason? What happens if we lose a team member and our platform expertise goes with it? What happens if we don’t understand how to do something and we can’t get the answer we need? Be confident in posing these queries to a provider’s customer success or sales team, and know that the great suppliers will have a confident reply.

There are an enormous number of factors at play and marketers shouldn’t expect to be responsible for every single component of a technology platform. You should be looking for a partner who offers assurances, and real people who you can actually talk to during the pre-sales and support processes. If the provider doesn’t offer those things, it might be a sign that they don’t put enough emphasis on this area or don’t have the expertise to cover it themselves.

Convincing the CMO

Having done all the due diligence and identified your preferred partner, the final part of any upgrade or switch is to know the platform has a roadmap so it can grow with your future needs. This is a good starting point for a conversation with a CMO on de-risking any potential switch or upgrade, however the main business case for investment will have to focus on what the new platform can tangibly deliver in the short and medium term.

New technology is only one part of the puzzle when it comes to improving marketing metrics, but a good partner will be able to provide estimates of potential uplift, and these should be backed up by credible case studies. Knowing, for example, how customer engagement and churn rates are likely to improve alongside click-throughs and conversion rates, and how numbers of abandoned carts can be reduced, is vital in building a compelling case for investment.

Armed with this understanding of how a new or upgraded platform will improve marketing performance, teams will have the best possible chance to convince their CMO to allocate budget. The longest and most successful relationships always start with full and honest conversations.

Five tips for more effective messaging

Regardless of the technology used, a strong strategy is needed to add value. To help marketers achieve the best results possible, Marigold has produced a guide covering the five stages of the effective email marketing customer lifecycle – from the point of view of both marketers and customers.

1. Acquisition – from a newsletter sign up to a poll or form, getting an email and the informed consent to stay in touch is the first step.

2. Conversion – a great welcome email positioning a company as a helpful, trustworthy supplier can help make the initial sale.

3. Next sales – this stage is often overlooked: the message you are a great supplier has to continue to keep a buyer active.

4. Retention – keeping a loyal customer long-term can achieved through signing them up to a loyalty scheme and perhaps a subscription package. There might also be other product lines they could be interested in.

5. Win back – reaching out to keep people engaging with you if they have lapsed is vital in maintaining a relationship. or parting on good terms that might lead to further sales at a later date.

For more detailed advice, download the full guide here.

By Ben Burns, senior product marketing manager, Marigold