Building a successful marketing strategy has many moving parts, so being able to determine exactly what your customers need is critical to fostering engagement and retention as well as creating a long-lasting approach. But if your existing marketing tool can’t keep up with your growing business, this process can be time-consuming and overly complicated. So, how do you know if you are outgrowing your current marketing tool? Here are five signs that it may be time for an upgrade!
1. Your customer data is scattered
Making sense of customer data that’s scattered across multiple POS or eCommerce systems is challenging and messy. When your customer data lives in multiple places it causes more work (and headaches) for you, such as manually importing and exporting spreadsheets. If your current tool doesn’t offer a holistic view of your data, you have no easy way of fixing the errors or duplicates that your data is likely to contain. Many marketing tools lack the ability to ingest all this data from your various systems and aggregate it into one central view and because of that, you spend too much time on manual tasks.
2. You can’t pinpoint your customers’ needs
When you understand your data, you understand your customers. It's why having all your data in one place is so crucial. Your marketing tool should make it easy for you to see each customer’s personal identifiable information (PII), such as their email address, phone number, or geographic location so that you can gauge their interests, purchase behavior, or how they’ve interacted with your business in the past. These actionable insights are what allow you to send personalized, segmented emails to every type of customer.
3. You’re unable to segment or personalize your emails
In today’s marketing environment, the old “batch-and-blast” method of communicating with every customer the same way simply doesn’t work anymore. If you are having to send generic, blanketed emails to your entire customer database, no matter if they are a loyal customer or a first-time shopper, a majority of them will be deleted, go unread, or result in an unsubscribe. Today’s customer demands a made-for-them approach; they refuse to be treated like just another number on a list—that’s where segmentation and personalization come in.
Brands that excel at personalization generate 40% more revenue on average than those that don’t.
Shopify
4. You spend too much time building campaigns
If you want to level up your marketing, there are two key components your marketing tool should provide:
1. The ability to use, customize, and save proven-to-perform email templates
2. The ability to automate your campaigns to run in the background
With an outdated or insufficient tool, the biggest challenge to personalized outreach is the time-intensive and costly task of building emails from scratch and manually scheduling them to be sent. Many run-of-the-mill tools require you to switch back and forth between your marketing tech stack and your email service provider, creating unnecessary headaches for you and your team.
5. You can’t measure the success of your marketing strategy
Without sophisticated reporting capabilities, it’s difficult to know which of your campaigns are over or under-performing. Are you able to track the time between purchases, view open, click, and bounce rates, or measure sales and revenue by campaign? Your marketing tool should do all the heavy-lifting for you—it should tell you what is or isn’t working, how much revenue each campaign or email has generated for your business and allow you to adjust your strategy accordingly and as needed. Marketing isn’t just about sending emails or advertising on social media; it’s about identifying what resonates with your customers and adjusting your approach so that you can drive more revenue for your business.
Are you ready for an upgrade?
If any of these five signs apply to you, it’s probably time to upgrade to a more sophisticated marketing tool. At Ascent360, our data driven marketing automation platform is built to meet every one of these needs. We ingest data from hundreds of systems, aggregate it, then cleanse and enrich it to provide you with a crystal-clear view of each of your customers. No more manually exporting spreadsheets or having to switch between systems – with the Ascent360 tool, everything you need is in one place.
Once your data is ready to go, our platform allows you to easily create customer segments based on the criteria you choose and helps you identify your customers’ needs and communication preferences. We also have an extensive library of ready-to-send templates that you can plug and play alongside advanced automation to keep your campaigns running smoothly. Finally, our advanced out-of-the-box reporting shows you all the key performance indicators you need to make the right decisions for your business.
To see your customer data in action, request a demo today!
