How to Measure the Value of a Modern Retail Martech Stack
As your team continues to optimize investments to build out a modern retail marketing technology stack, how do you evaluate its performance? You need to track certain metrics to identify if you made the right investments and to measure the value each solution delivers.
Traditionally, marketing teams have focused primarily on short term consolidation and cost efficiency over measures like compound growth that evaluate incremental revenue over time. However, this focus has resulted in tradeoffs, such as lengthy implementations that require significant human capital, slow turnarounds on returns in investments and the need to hire more people to manage this technology.
Going forward, this measurement focus — and, as a result, the way technology decisions get made — will need to change. For modern retail marketing programs built around best of breed technology, the most important points of measure will center around incremental revenue growth as well as cost and time savings (in other words, doing more with less).
With that in mind, five of the most critical points of measurement for the modern retail martech stack include:
1) Time from Opportunity to Campaign
First is the time it takes from your team identifying a potential opportunity to actually launching the campaign. For instance, this might involve noticing a trending product or a product that received unexpected press and capitalizing on that momentum with a dedicated campaign promoting the product to customers who are likely to be interested in it.
For best in class solutions, this time should be less than one hour. This measure may sound fast, but this type of speedy turnaround is required to give teams the necessary agility to react quickly to changing situations, such as trending products, customer demands and external events.
2) Percent of Personalization
As consumers continue to place more of an emphasis on experience, and as that experience continues to become one of the biggest differentiators among brands, personalization only grows in importance. Ultimately, the most personalized marketing programs perform better in terms of engagement, purchases and ongoing loyalty because they make it easy for customers to buy and regularly discover new products they love.
The best measure of success in this area is the ability to personalize at least 90% of campaigns with 1:1 products, content or offers to create truly relevant experiences at every stage of the product discovery lifecycle. This level of personalization delivers the biggest returns on investment and performance increases. For example, data from Bluecore reveals that retailers who personalize 90%+ of campaigns see a 188% increase in conversions and 456% lift in revenue per email compared to retailers who employ a more even mix of personalization vs. static elements within email campaigns.
3) Level of Automation
Given the growing importance of both speed to launch new campaigns and scaling personalization, it should be no surprise that level of automation is also a critical measure for success. After all, the best way to both increase speed in workflows and intelligently grow 1:1 personalization is through automating this previously manual work.
Going forward, the most modern marketing teams will have at least 50% of elements within any given campaign automated. Reaching that minimum level of automation (if not more) is the only way to achieve the necessary speed to market and properly scale intelligent personalization to compete effectively in the modern retail environment.
4) Continuous Feedback
Next, regularly improving campaigns based on intelligent feedback will be an essential success measure, as that type of ongoing improvement is the only way to continue to surprise and delight customers on a regular basis. Once again, automation is a key component to this success measure.
Specifically, performance-driven technology should deliver an automated, continuous feedback loop that regularly improves campaigns to optimize for specific goals based on each customer’s engagement with previous outreach.
5) Performance Model
Finally, each technology’s pricing should align with performance, rather than volume, to ensure shared goals between your program and your technology partners. This alignment is essential to making sure that everything and everyone is working in tandem toward a very clear set of goals around customer loyalty and revenue.
Optimizing Your Retail Marketing Technology Investments
What else do you need to keep in mind as you build your retail martech stack? Download The Retail Marketing Tech Stack Guide, a comprehensive guide from Bluecore, Google Cloud and True Fit on how to optimize your technology for digital-first commerce, to find out everything you need to know.
