Optimizing Your Martech Stack to Improve the Overall Customer Experience

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The adoption of martech across industries is steadily rising year by year, as companies understand the value of implementing new software tools to help their marketing teams be more productive and generate better results.

That being said, while the adoption of all of this technology helps automate complex marketing tasks, it also presents some issues – mainly, the fact that we’re rapidly eliminating the human factor.

We use bots to answer customers’ questions.

We use more bots for handling our customer service issues.

We use personalization software to deliver highly personalized content and campaigns to the right person and at the right time.

We use marketing automation to reach our leads and customers.

In other words, we’re using increasingly more AI (artificial intelligence), algorithms and triggered actions when it comes to interactions with our customers.

And that presents a new challenge: how do you ensure that you’re still delivering a great customer experience when most interactions and messaging are completely automated, with little human interaction remaining?

Not only that, but it can also mean that your martech stack can become highly cluttered and difficult to manage – tools that you don’t really use, apps you’re not making the most of and technology that doesn’t actually help you achieve your main marketing objectives.

In this blog post, discover how to optimize and use your martech stack to improve the overall customer experience.

Improving the management of your SaaS applications

Marketers have to use a huge amount of applications and software – not just the ones they purchase, but even the ones created in-house.

In fact, HubSpot has found that 65% of sales and marketing pros have up to five completely redundant tools in their stacks and that 82% of us lose up to an hour every day due to the time investment that managing all these tools requires.

 

Source: https://blog.hubspot.com/sales/tech-is-making-us-less-efficient

In many cases, companies use more than double the SaaS applications that their employees are even aware they’re using. Because of this, it’s easy to get lost in all the technology you’ve got in your stack. You’re either spending too much on unnecessary applications or not making the most of your existing apps.

Which is why it’s very important to stay on top of these things and properly manage all of your SaaS apps – this is the first and arguably most important step in optimizing your martech stack.

The easiest way to go about this is to leverage a SaaS management tool, particularly if you’re using a lot of different tools and apps and if you’ve created your own applications in-house.

To help, you can use Torii, which is a technology/SaaS app management tool built for IT professionals to help them with all SaaS management needs.

Source: https://toriihq.com/

 

For one thing, it allows you to see clearly exactly what apps you’re using – even the ones you kind of forgot about.

But more importantly for marketing teams, it shows you whether your marketing apps are actually being used – which is actually a big problem as there are so many freemium/free-trial options nowadays that it’s all too easy for unnecessary new apps to find their way into your stack.

This will help optimize your spending, too, but for marketers, it’s probably more important that it allows them to see whether they’re using the tools in their stack at their maximum potential and whether there are any redundant apps that deserve to be taken out of circulation.

Plus, it’s an easy way to keep track of new apps being added, new features and updates coming up and other relevant information about the apps you use – and, you can use this information to see if there are any better options that you can use that do the same things, but don’t cost as much.

Consider your strategy when optimizing your martech stack

As we’ve seen earlier, most companies have too many tools and apps in their arsenal, and their productivity suffers as a result.

With the huge amount of new technology coming out all the time and the options to try these tools and apps for free, without the need to install anything locally, stack bloat is an obvious outcome.

That’s why it’s very important to evaluate your overall marketing strategy when optimizing your martech stack.

The principle behind this is very simple: all you need to do is ask yourself, how does this app help me achieve my marketing goals? How does it help improve the customer experience?

And if it doesn’t – then it’s probably worth removing it from your stack (unless, of course, it helps you be more productive). When building and optimizing your martech stack, focus on the apps and tools that will actually make a difference to your marketing.

There’s no point in getting – and keeping – tech just for the sake of it: only keep the apps that actually help you achieve your marketing goals.

Optimizing your martech stack for better customer experience

One of the key objectives of marketing teams all over the world is to improve the customer experience on all channels, in order to improve the overall sales, by building up loyalty and convincing more people to buy.

And in order to achieve these results, it’s important to build a martech stack that supports these goals.

Some of the most important apps you should include in your martech stack from a customer experience point view, include:

  • Customer data platform: As I mentioned in the introduction, one of the struggles of automating so many marketing tasks, is that can hinder the customer experience by eliminating the human touch. This is why a customer data platform is arguably one of the most important apps you need in your arsenal: something that allows you to view the full picture and help you understand your customer.
  • Marketing automation and personalization tools: Personalized marketing has evolved a lot over the year, especially as consumers are increasingly expecting personalized experiences. In order to provide them with personalized experiences that get them to convert, you need to leverage personalization software that can handle all of your needs – from tools like HubSpot that offer marketing automation to more complex personalization software like Emarsys, which helps you personalize the customer journey across all your different channels.
  • Source: https://www.emarsys.com/
  • Live chat and customer service: In order to deliver great experiences to your customers, you also need to be there when they need you, whether they have a question for you when browsing your website or they have a customer service issue that they need you to sort out. Tech can help you solve this problem through bots and live chat tools that allow you to help your customers – or potential customers – completely automatically.
  • Delivering an omnichannel experience: Personalization is only the first step in delivering a great omnichannel experience; you also need to leverage your martech stack to deliver unified, cohesive, customer experiences across all the different channels your customers use: social media, your website and blog, on messenger channels and even in-store

Your main focus should be on leveraging your martech stack to better understand your customers and deliver better personalized experiences, across channels.

Conclusion

Leveraging technology the right way is imperative for the modern company. After all, it’s impossible to deliver a great customer experience online without making use of various apps and software.

That’s why it’s so important to optimize your martech stack regularly and ensure that you’re leveraging the right SaaS apps in order to offer an amazing experience for each of your customers (and potential customers). Always focus on your marketing and business goals when optimizing your martech stack and ask yourself: “How does this app actually help me achieve my goals?”

Lilach Bullock
Highly regarded on the world speaker circuit, Lilach has graced Forbes and Number 10 Downing Street. She's a hugely connected and highly influential entrepreneur. Listed in Forbes as one of the top 20 women social media power influencers and was crowned the Social Influencer of Europe by Oracle. She is listed as the number one Influencer in the UK by Career Experts and is a recipient for a Global Women Champions Award for her outstanding contribution and leadership in business.

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