Globally, customer-centricity has become one of the cornerstones of the retail industry transformation. One would think, it’s the Walmarts of the world that are setting high customer expectations in retail experiences. Not at all. It’s actually the tech giants that have shifted the paradigm and redefined buying experiences.

Leading the way are Google (Omniscient, Omnipresent!), Netflix (Disruptive Content Viewing recommendations!), and Amazon. And what about the introduction of the familiarly deep voice of Amitabh Bachchan on Alexa? Innovative to say the least and an absolute bestseller marketing strategy!

With such stratospheric expectations, it is only natural that retailers worldwide are investing in AI-powered solutions. These are built on robust customer data that promises a stellar end customer experience.

Of course, challenges in this spectrum aren’t new. Cloud computing becoming de rigueur and ubiquitous. Digital transformations was accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic, resulting in changed consumer behaviour. Harnessing the best of customer data to take ‘intelligent’ decisions is the need of the hour. But the real issue is about the competing claims and varying tech offerings that promise the moon, but fail to achieve (flatter to deceive) when it comes to results.

Customer Data Platform (CDP), are the new kids on the block and in the rather over-crowded MarTech space they have definitely caught the fancy of all. Despite a purported market size of USD 1.6 Billion, there is still confusion and hesitation on part of the buyers, when it comes to the actual advantages of investing in such a platform/solution.

Based on multiple successful case-studies and applications from across global retailers, let’s look at three ways in which the CDP has generated massive positive payoffs not just for the marketers but for the entire enterprise.

A CDP can help identify your ‘best’ customers to engage with. Here are three fundamental aspects of how it enables this for a marketer.

1. Create a Single View of the Customer
   A retail customer data platform unifies data from every single customer touchpoint across the enterprise to create what is known as the ‘Golden Customer Record’. This enables building up an in-depth profile of every individual customer to start identifying the right behaviours/opportunities for growth, retention, loyalty, and lifetime value.
2. Act on Real-time Customer Behavioural Trends
   CDP helps the marketers capitalize on those ‘Moments of Truth’ during a customer journey and ensures improved engagement, leading to faster conversion.Use cases can range from the more common cart-abandonment interventions and, on a shopping app using personalized in-app banners or push notifications leading to more complex journeys that could string together his search experiences, search terms and personalized recommendations. Based on this, marketers are orchestrating a triggered email marketing that is also dynamic and depending on the time he/she opens their email.
3. Ensure Campaign Success Based on Optimal Audience Lists
   CDP drives analytics-based decisioning for multiple use cases. Say, for example, a retailer plans to introduce a new product and launch a promotional campaign for the same. CDP helps identify the most appropriate campaign audience for the same, with the help of lookalike profiling and finally give an appropriate audience that has a higher propensity to buy the new product/category or brand that one is promoting.

CDP literally becomes the ‘brains’ behind all marketing operations leading to precise targeting through better knowledge of customer needs. This has an impact both on the top-line revenue through improved metrics like frequency and on the average order value that can be influenced by such optimal marketing influences. What a CDP also focuses on, is improvement in the bottom-line margins through multiple cost-saving efficiencies. Here are a few examples:

1. Better Managed Data – By unifying relevant data from multiple silos into a single purpose-built ‘lake-house’ for the marketing team’s end-usage.
2. Cost Savings Through Improved Marketing Performance
   • Decreased cost of managing creatives by using template libraries for creatives.
   • Optimizing your paid media campaigns by the use of Custom Audiences with the right set of real time customer segmentation for all re-targeting campaigns on GA/FB/etc. This leads to decreased CPA on all your performance marketing initiatives.
   • Marketing Automation leads to faster Turn-Around Time for your campaign go-live – and this can be achieved across multiple types of customer journeys (E.g. On-demand CRM, trigger base, lifecycle based, drip journeys, etc.)
   • Improved App performance through native dynamic content personalization on the mobile app and lesser development efforts for any campaign requirements from external development resources/project management, etc. for the technology teams.

With a CDP at the center of your MarTech, retailers can focus on building out a best-of-breed stack to understand what combinations can bring in the best results; all this without any disruption to customer experience. They can use the CDP as a central point of defining all customer experiences, including say, a new personalization engine that powers experiences on their app or change the underlying platform that powers their ecommerce personalization platform, etc.

Gartner defines a ‘Smart-Hub CDP’ as one of the most progressive types of CDPs.

The potential benefits of such a customer-centric master mind solution is not just for the marketers but also for the entire organization focused on deriving values by improving top-line growth (incremental sales) and staving off costs (bottom-line optimization) to bring in the best bang-for-the-buck from investments.

As we move into a world with fewer cookies and other identifiers, maintaining accurate measurement will depend heavily on the intelligent use of first-party data, privacy-safe techniques like data aggregation, and machine learning models.

A CDP gives marketers all of these, in an easy-to-use interface. The marketers who thrive and succeed, will be those who act on it and adopt it today. Are you one of them?

This article was first published on Times Internet.

A Customer Data Platform (CDP) is used to collate consumer data from diverse first, second, and third-party sources into a single central location. It records and distills your consumer interactions into unified identities, and provides insights that help you drive marketing content and offers that resonate with the individual customer.

Let’s dive deeper to understand how this works.

Recognizing who your customers are and understanding their affinities, needs, and motivations is critical in marketing. The faster you do so, the more relevant and individualized your services and communications become. Identity resolution is key to achieving this objective.

Identity Resolution, or ID Resolution, involves the combining of user information to create a unified profile based on the data obtained from diverse online and offline sources, stitching together known logins with anonymized user sessions.

This means that irrespective of whether a user is logged in to their account on an eCommerce website or not, through recognizable data such as IP address or device, a CDP solution can identify the user or the household and update and enrich the existing customer profile.

Further data enrichment (using third-party data) turns every unified customer profile into a comprehensive Golden Customer Record, which then serves as the single source of truth. This ensures that, at any given juncture, organizations have an always-evolving 360-degree customer view for better engagement and targeting at an individual and household level.

The process of profile-building initially involves the standardization of data from different touchpoints. These touchpoints include online and offline sources, such as web search, mobile app browses, communication between customers and CRM executives at physical stores, POS data, and social media engagement.

Data taken from such disparate sources are generally in different formats and sizes. A CDP converts them all into a common format – a process known as data standardization.

Before getting into the various ways in which a CDP can build individual profiles, one must know the unique types of data that a CDP collects. The most vital of these is first-party data, which is the information your customers give you voluntarily. For example, the phone number, email address, and location a user provides while using a newly-installed mobile app. Other examples include data from loyalty programs and purchase history.

Another important first-party user data is identity-based, which is how a user wants to be identified by people and companies. This includes their name and gender.

Behavioral data comes from tracking users’ online behavior, such as social media engagements and customer journeys on eCommerce websites (think search, page views, click-throughs). All this data is collected dynamically from different user sessions on your site or app, after which the CDP starts the identity resolution process.

Using a common identifier such as IP address, clusters of duplicate records are created and one surviving record overrides the rest. This process is called deduplication.

Some of the characteristics of ID resolution are:

• Persistency of ID — the assigning of an identifier to a given individual and maintaining it even when some of their details, like their phone number and postal address, change.
• Deterministic matching, which involves associating multiple identifiers belonging to a given person to a given shared ID during profile building.
• Probabilistic matching, which involves associating different identifiers across different devices or accounts that appear to relate to a given person even when no deterministic match is there between them. Probability-based data collection and identification may involve machine learning and AI algorithms.

Profile building is an essential aspect of customer data management through CDP. Building evolving profiles enables businesses to adopt a dynamic and omnichannel customer engagement model in marketing.

Omnichannel customer engagement is one of the several benefits of employing a CDP for marketing in an age wherein the boundaries between multiple channels of communication are getting increasingly blurred.

Omnichannel engagement requires businesses to blend multiple channels for seamless transitions, a task that is made possible by CDPs. By arming you with 360-degree customer views and deep customer insights, a CDP helps you deploy the right offers and product recommendations to the right user at the right time—whether the user is on your app or website, or at the physical store.

Say a customer is looking for Mother’s Day gifts on a beauty website via desktop. A few hours later, they download the app on their phone and continue searching for a gift.

Instead of a fragmented experience where the user has to start all over again on the app, with a CDP-resolved unified customer profile, the app experience can be personalized to directly show the user products similar to what they were searching on the website or the most popular Mother’s Day gifts of the season, and even offer them an incentive to complete the purchase.

Such a personalized experience will ensure conversion and seamless customer engagement across channels.

In conclusion, the ability to resolve customer identities and create ever-evolving Golden Customer Records is key to enabling hyper-personalized omnichannel experiences. ADA Global’s Real-time CDP addresses this need. The platform is built for retail with online and offline data management capabilities. Further, it uses AI-ML algorithms to create micro-segments and uncover marketing opportunities throughout the customer lifecycle.

Request a demo here.

Today’s consumers want highly personalized services and digital experiences. In fact, about 3 out of 4 users get frustrated when they do not get that convenience. Ecommerce personalization is, therefore, crucial in today’s eCommerce-dominated marketing landscape.

The key requirement for personalization is coherent customer data. There are many data management solutions that process and analyze customer data to help you create personalized marketing strategies, targeted ad campaigns, and optimal experiences for your customers.

The most popular of these data management solutions are:

• Customer Relationship Management systems (CRMs)
• Data Management Platforms (DMP)
• Customer Data Platforms (CDPs)

CDP, CRM, and DMP all have a common modus operandi—analyzing and compiling data collected from multiple sources to create detailed customer profiles. These profiles are used to optimize and personalize products, services, adverts, customer relationships, and other marketing-based functions.

At the same time, these platforms also have some fundamental differences. You need to know these differences to be able to choose the solution that is best for your business. Choosing the ‘wrong’ solution can affect your business operations and ROI, as all three options can be expensive to implement.

Let’s delve deeper into each tool to understand the differences.

A CDP is used to aggregate customer data from a wide array of sources to create a coherent, comprehensive, and evolving profile for each customer. These sources include your website, mobile app, social media pages, Point of Sale (POS) systems, live chats, and email marketing systems, among others.

A CDP gathers first-party data from the channels it is connected to and the systems it is integrated with. The data can be of different types: behavioral, demographic, technographic, transactional, and more.

The platform uses this data to create real-time customer profiles and build a comprehensive customer database. It gives you a 360-degree, unified view of a customer.

More importantly, a CDP centralizes this database, making it accessible to other enterprise systems that handle different functions like demand forecasting, CRM, data analytics, marketing automation, personalization, marketing campaign creation, A/B testing, and dynamic content personalization.

All the while, the system keeps collecting new data to update millions of customer profiles seamlessly and simultaneously.

DMPs are used to collect and organize data from first-, second-, and third-party sources to build individual customer profiles. The aggregated data can then be shared with other business or marketing technology systems.

The data is specifically used to drive targeted advertising and personalization on different digital channels. That doesn’t mean that a DMP independently manages customer data and creates advertising campaigns. It acts as an intermediate entity between data sources and the places where the content will be used.

Now, the key differences between a DMP customer profile and a CDP customer profile are:

1. Both the data and profiles in DMPs are anonymized. These profiles are accessible to marketers not as identifiable individuals but only as customer segments.
2. The data and profiles can be stored for a limited time only.

For instance, say a marketer is looking to create a targeted marketing campaign for a certain demographic of people. They can use the DMP to find data for the segment they want to target, such as the number of women below the age of 30 currently using a Samsung Galaxy phone.

Once the DMP system gathers and runs this data through various analytical tools, marketers can target the customers in that segment. All the individuals in a segment will receive the same marketing messages, emails, and adverts on social media pages or other online touchpoints.

As a result, where a CDP is geared more towards profiling and serving existing customers, the primary use of a DMP is winning prospective customers with data-driven online advertisements.

A CRM uses a series of data collection, management, and analytical tools to manage relationships with customers. This system uses AI and machine learning-based tools for pattern recognition and in-depth data analytics. Chatbots—which are essentially AI-powered customer service executives—are prime examples of CRM tech.

Where a DMP is primarily used for targeted advertising, CRM is associated with sales teams. One of the main uses of CRM is analyzing data in user reviews and feedback to develop better products over time.

Like CDP and DMP, this solution too dynamically gathers customer data, but the purpose is to evolve and improve the quality of services. You can employ CRM systems to simplify customer interactions, resolve post-purchase grievances, and optimize the functionality, reliability, and durability of products and services.

A CRM platform enables you to align your sales and marketing operations through integration with CDP, DMP, and other similar tools. You can achieve this by tracking individual customer journeys by sourcing first- and second-party customer data from feedback forms, surveys, responses to emails, activity on your website, call center communications, cookies, and others.

Due to today’s cutting-edge competition, many products and services have similar quality, capabilities, and functionalities. So, customer opinions and purchase decisions are formed based on their marketing interactions and overall experience with your business. CRM tools help optimize these interactions.

A CDP is a well-rounded customer data management solution for many reasons.

• First, only a CDP helps you unify data collected from diverse sources, including your legacy databases and other digitized records, to relentlessly update real time customer engagement profiles in real time. You can also integrate CRMs and DMPs into a CDP to help augment its first-party customer data.
• Second, the centralization of data lets you break down any existing data silos between different sub-departments within your marketing department. This lets employees and managers across the board participate in marketing-related strategizing, thereby making decision-making more balanced and data-driven.
• Third, the 360-degree customer profile lets your business optimize marketing campaigns and other engagement efforts by enabling hyper-personalization for individual customers. After all, dynamic personalization not only improves customer retention over time, but also revenue by 5-15% and cost efficiency by 10-20%, according to McKinsey.
• More than anything, a CDP helps you make the most of every interaction between you and your customers across every channel and touchpoint. A CDP is more than just a data collection and unification tool–it enables audience activation and campaign orchestration across different communication channels.

The above-mentioned capabilities make ADA Global’s Real-time CDP a trusted and reliable solution among major retailers and brands worldwide. It is built for retail with online and offline data management capabilities, and tracks customer behavior using over 1,200 out-of-the-box measures and dimensions.

Further, it uses AI-ML algorithms to create real time customer segmentation and uncovers marketing opportunities throughout the customer lifecycle.

Request a demo here.

So, you put in the work, try to optimize where you see opportunity, and leverage new techniques. You’re excited about this email. Yet, you don’t see the results you were expecting.

It’s frustrating.

In today’s social-media driven world where everything is quick and easy, it is forgivable to assume that email marketing is past its glory days. Yet, this couldn’t be further from the truth.

Marketers still vouch for email to deliver results and here’s why:

 Source: campaignmonitor.com

But the question remains – how do you improve your email marketing campaigns? Where do you start and how do you go about it?

In this blog, we will cover how you can make the most of your email channel and the best practices in deliverability, personalization, and dynamic content personalization.

Let’s dive right in.

When is the last time you saw an email that resonated with you? One that had you hooked right from the get-go. One that covertly but seamlessly navigated you to click on the CTA button. The brilliance of a well-crafted email that leads to conversions is its simplicity in encouraging action.

While there is no definitive formula to craft the perfect email, here are a couple of pointers to help get you started:

• Focus on Your Key Objective For The Email: While it’s tempting to cram in as many ideas and offers in one email, it is important to hone in on one objective. This is the theme of your email around which everything else falls in place. Imagine crafting an email centered on trying a new holiday theme recipe. However, the email also includes content about passes to a concert. Confusing, right? Always begin with a clear objective. Your content and design must speak to this objective.
• Maintain a 60% Text to 40% Image Ratio: It’s important to structure your email in a way that appeals to the reader. No one has the time to read chunks of text in an email. It is off-putting and can result in a dip in your KPIs. Conversely, an email laden with images can come across as too promotional. Maintain a healthy balance of text and image that conveys a message than a sell.
• Keep Your Subject Line Short And to The Point: Your subject line should not exceed 41 characters or 8 words. This is the first interaction your audience will have with your email – if it doesn’t convey the message on the first read, the reader will most likely ignore the email.
• Your Subject line, Content, And Visuals Need to be Aligned: Imagine a subject line that speaks of an exclusive summer offer, but the banner contains winter cues, while the main content holds information about an upcoming launch. It is haphazard. It will not translate. Nor will it meet its objective for the campaign. The messaging right from the subject line to the CTA must all be aligned.
• Include a CTA in Every 3rd Fold of The Email: This draws attention back to your objective and keeps the reader engaged. This also aids in improving the conversion rate of the email.
• Ensure Your Email is Responsive And Within the Recommended File Size: Bear in mind that your audience accesses and views your email on different devices. With over 60% of emails being opened on mobile devices, it is important to ensure that they are responsive and load with ease. The recommended file size is 80-100 kb.
• Use Valid Links With UTM Tags: Ensure that the links used in your emails contain no typos or errors. It is especially important when your CTA links to a different landing page or sign-up sheet. An error in your link may cost you conversions. Remember to add UTM tags in your emails to track its progress across online platforms. Data is key – gather, analyze, and optimize to make the most of your email channel.

While the guidelines above will help you speak your message to your audience, it is also important to speak to your audience.

Here are three key factors to help you clinch gold in your email marketing efforts:

1. Experiment With ai email personalization: Gone are the days when a cookie-cutter mass mailer did the trick. Your audience wants you to speak to them on a personal level. They want to form a bond with your brand. It is this connection that will drive engagement. Here is how you can experiment with personalization:
   • Lifecycle Email Campaigns – Based on the different life stages in your audience’s journey, create and share emails relevant to each segment. For example, share a welcome email as soon as someone subscribes to your newsletter. Or share an email reminding them about their cart. It is important to cultivate your relationship with your audience at each stage. Sharing emails at each nodule engages them and helps to motivate them along their lifecycle.
   • Always-on Campaigns – Share emails to your subscriber list based on their individual loyalty points accrued, offers based on past purchases, as well as festive offers to help keep them engaged with your brand.
2. Drive engagement With dynamic content platform: The more relevant an email is to your audience, the more value you add to your campaign. Dynamic content empowers you to offer your audience a personalized experience at scale. The dynamic content you can leverage to increase the effectiveness of your campaign are::
   • Text – It is the most common and effective type of dynamic content facilitating personalization. You can personalize a line, a sentence, or even a paragraph to different subscribers. For instance, if you are a clothing brand, based on past purchases, you can create a dynamic paragraph on clothing and footwear that can be personalized for each audience segment.
   • Visual – You can change the image, GIFs, and videos based on the segments you target. You can also experiment with various visual elements based on your segment.
   • CTA – You can customize the size, shape, color, and text within your call to action to drive your click-through rate and result in conversions.
   • Offer – Include customer offers in your hyper-personalized email campaigns based on seasonality, gender, interests, available inventory optimization, timing, and other personalization variables. For instance, let’s assume you run an email campaign with an offer for shoes at a discounted price. Say this email resonated with the people from Japan (in the JST time zone) and they made use of the discounted price. Consequently this resulted in you running low on stock. The people in the Pacific Time zone have yet to view this email. This gives you a leeway to switch the offer with a discount on another product. So, when a person from the PST time zone views the email, they will see the new offer.
3. Analyze and Enhance Deliverability: With elements of the email now in place, it’s time to dot your ‘i’s and cross your ‘t’s. Deliverability does have an impact on the performance of your triggered email marketing campaign. Here’s how you can avoid dips in your performance owing to low deliverability:
   • Authenticate – Ensure that your SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records are in place. This will help internet service providers verify that your mail server is authorized to share mass emails.
   • Monitor – Routinely check if your brand or sender ID figures on any blacklists. Review your brand’s score in senderscore (you want to fall in the 90-100 percentile), and errors in postmasters, to ensure that you are clear of any shortcomings. This will help ensure that your emails go out without a hitch.
   • Act – It is important to monitor and make changes as your campaigns progress. When you notice a spike in the number of unsubscribes, it is wise to reduce the frequency of emails being sent. This helps to sustain your sender reputation until you can adopt a different strategy. Routinely purge the ID with bounces and non-openers that show up after 180 days. This will help you maintain a healthy list and in turn healthy email campaign performance.

In summary, email continues to remain a robust and effective digital marketing tool. When executed the right way, a successful email marketing campaign can lead to a great customer experience and higher sales. The vast opportunities available with email give you the ability to experiment and improve as you go. Don’t be afraid to get creative with your emails (emojis add flair too!). In closing, always remember to adapt, test, and optimize!

A marketer who is looking to invest in a customer data platform (CDP) grapples with the build vs. buy conundrum. The points of view are more entrenched in this space than any other. This is primarily because the end deliverable is a data platform that caters to the unique needs of each retailer. Let’s compare the build and buy options.

If you know exactly what you need, you can specifically define your requirements, and you have a service partner or a large in-house IT team that can deliver on the requirements, build may be a path to consider. A large-scale IT project is often lost in translation – what the customer explains is different from what the project manager understands. Further translations happen to the engineer, and then to the programmer, and alas, the result ends up looking significantly different from what was envisioned.

The people investments required to deliver a custom CDP and maintain it are considerably higher than the buy option. Make sure to build it atop an established cloud that provides you with resources to operate and support the platform. Besides, you may have to wait for 6 to 12 months to be able to start using the platform.

If time to market is not a critical consideration, you could opt for the build route for a fully customized solution instead of compromising with a generic software. If done right, there could be competitive advantages with a custom solution. However, one should be cautious of budget overruns, time delays due to expanding scope, and post-implementation support.

A pre-packaged customer data platform for retail that is crafted for a specific industry offers the best of both worlds – quick time to value of a plug-and-play solution and close fit of a bespoke solution. While you would need some technical resources for the set-up and upkeep, the time and costs involved are much lower, and there are no harsh surprises.

This means you can run pilots and POCs quickly before you go all-in. You can examine and be sure that the solution really works for you. A much lower upfront cost and quick onboarding takes away risks, and still provides a solution that is tailored for your needs.

Most CDPs come with out-of-the-box connectors to integrate with existing MarTech systems, and you have the vendor’s professional services to take care of seamless integration with systems of record and orchestration.

A good CDP caters to all use cases in a way that is specific to your industry. A CDP is a means to an end – with the end being contextually relevant engagement. This means the CDP needs to necessarily have these features:

• Streaming ingestion of demographic, transactional, behavioral, known & unknown customer profile data from online and offline systems.
• Identity resolution by creating a single, 360-degree view of the customer and a golden record by deduplicating and enriching the data.
• Granular real time customer segmentation and advanced customer insights powered by micro-segments, segment analysis, market basket, churn, lookalike, propensity, and lifetime value analyses to drive next-best actions, and measure ROI with campaign and journey analytics.
• Real time customer engagement activation to drive hyper-personalized, journey-based marketing orchestration across online and offline channels and connect with customers in the moment.

• What are the use cases I want to address?
• Are these use cases unique to my organization?
• Is the scope likely to change with time?
• What is the budget I’m willing to invest for a solution?
• By when do I want to have this up and running?
• Do I have in-house IT resources to allocate that are rightly skilled?
• Do I have the resources for long-term support?

Customers today are truly omnichannel which increases the complexity of knowing what, how, and when they want to shop. It is no wonder that the worldwide CDP software market will grow at 19.5% CAGR from $1.3 billion in 2020 to $3.2 billion in 2025. It is a quintessential tool to understand customers as their tastes and behaviors evolve and connect with them at the right time, on the right channel with the right dynamic content personalization message.

Looking for a real-time CDP that promises fast time to value and low cost of ownership?

Request a demo here.

The Marketing Technology or MarTech industry is moving so fast that marketers are struggling to keep up. Hence it’s crucial for marketing leaders to have a well-defined approach to building their MarTech stack and an effective approach for managing the various technologies and systems.

This brings us to the topic of what’s the right approach. Marketers are divided between best of breed and best of suite when it comes to MarTech investments. Both approaches have their pros and cons. On one side sit advocates for best-of-breed technology solutions with market-leading functionality. On the other are those who prefer the simplicity of integrated technology suites with broad capabilities.

In the recent past, the popularity of best-of-breed marketing technology has grown as thousands of specialized MarTech startups have mushroomed, offering advanced AI technology to solve one problem well. However, with the sudden need to accelerate digitization driven by customer demand, marketers are looking for digital transformation partners – those that drive a customer-centric approach wherein they enable deep customer understanding and leverage those insights to engage with the customer in a relevant way, at the right time, in the channel of their choosing.

A marketing software is evaluated based on its ability to provide a differentiated customer experience for the brand. This is evident in the direction the MarTech industry is moving towards – Salesforce purchases Evergage, Manthan and RichRelevance merge to form Ada Global, Sitecore buys Boxever, and many more. The aim is to be able to solve the pertinent problem of personalized customer experience.

Now, is this adding to the confusion that you thought you had it all sorted? I’m not an advocate of the one-size-fits-all approach. So, I believe marketers must evaluate the technologies that are out there in the market with a clear agenda of what challenges they want to address while keeping in mind their existing position.

There are multiple factors at play in choosing one approach over the other. Let’s evaluate the approaches based on five key factors: time to value, functionality, scalability, flexibility, and seamless experience.

In a world where digital adoption is rapidly increasing, quick ROI is an important criterion that marketers must evaluate marketing technology on, with a win or fail fast agenda. The ones that deliver the fastest time to value are those that come with out-of-the-box algorithms that cater to industry-specific use cases. In general, marketing clouds tend to be generic and horizontal where the gestation periods are long and immediate business impact is elusive.

A platform that is ready to use without the need for marketing teams to further tune the algorithms to fit your objective is the one that delivers the least time to value. For example, retail-specific strategies could include ‘Buy Together for Cross-sell’ or ‘Category Top Offers for Offer Based Strategies’.

The biggest advantage of best-of-breed marketing vendors is that they offer highly specialized solutions with levels of functionality that suite vendors are unable to provide. For example, personalization product vendors offer end-to-end personalization — which is powered by advanced machine learning algorithms — covering search, content, recommendations, browsing, navigation, and more across all channels.

There aren’t too many full-suite vendors who provide great quality products for specialized functions with deep integration across products. Full-suite vendors that have a strong product development team for individual products or those that have brought together best-of-breed products and stitched them well could be worth considering too. They also offer good customer support ensuring that the best practices are available to you and will constantly help tune your business for the best results. Best of breed or best of suite, marketers must look for the availability of key functionalities based on their business requirements.

If you’re looking for a MarTech stack that supports large-scale customer data management and large volume campaigns, then an integrated stack is a good place to start. The challenge with best of breed is that they break when the volumes are big. Your current volumes and pace of growth are important factors in making that decision. The other aspect is the ability to make system/product updates without impacting the performance of the existing system or without needing to train the staff on the new system.

I’ve noticed that flexibility is a factor of the business model the marketing technology company embraces, not so much whether it is a focused product or an integrated suite. While mostly smaller companies are more flexible to allow for customizations to suit your business requirement, there are many suite vendors who not only offer the flexibility but also bring the right teams with the right skills to custom-build some of the features or provide custom support.

Here, one must note that many full-suite vendors who specialize in providing industry-specific solutions offer best-of-breed solutions that focus on specific niches and may provide functionality that’s more tailored to your organization. At the end of the day, products that are interoperable and adaptable are essential for building out an effective MarTech stack.

Seamlessness is a must-have, both for end-customers and users in the marketing team. A critical aspect of providing frictionless user or customer experiences is in a well-integrated MarTech stack which provides a single customer view and helps you drive personalized customer interactions. Marketing suites or platforms connect seamlessly out of the box, and this reduces the effort required for implementation. This also means it’s easier for users to get started with using the platform.

With the best-of-breed approach, building a seamless MarTech stack usually requires substantial effort. While most best-of-breed MarTech products have APIs that make it possible for seamless integrations, problems do often arise. Not every best-of-breed technology plays well with other technologies. It’s important that the technology you invest in has robust integration capabilities across ingress and egress of data for smooth orchestration.

When it comes to choosing between a best-of-breed or suite approach, it really does come down to your brand’s circumstances, resources, and existing software stack. However, maybe choosing between the two isn’t necessary. Perhaps the best option is a combination of the two approaches – best of both worlds, if you will.

Customer is a good place to start in identifying where the gaps are in providing a best-in-class experience for them. Evaluate your existing stack and look for platforms or products that provide fast time to value, with the required functionality and the flexibility to meet your specific requirements. Look for products that can scale without breaking and provide great user and customer experience.

This could mean choosing niche products for specific functionality that can easily integrate with larger solutions or an integrated, robust MarTech stack that provides a frictionless experience. Either way, look for a vendor whose skin is in the game and one who intends to be your strategic partner for the long run.

Are you looking to drive omnichannel marketing with maximum precision and minimal effort? Learn about Ada Global’s Customer Journey Orchestration that helps retailers automatically orchestrate, test, and optimize personalized campaigns across the entire customer journey.