There are three zero sum truths about your marketing tech stack:
- The more tools you use, the higher your cost of doing business
- The more tools you use, the more complicated your life gets
- The more non-native tools you integrate with your website, the worse your site performance gets
From an accessibility, performance, and cost standpoint, the fewer tools you're using to achieve your target outcomes, the better. Therefore, your goal should be to keep your tech stack as lightweight as possible.
Luckily, as ecommerce technology evolves, it’s actually consolidating. To use an example we’ve touched on previously, Klaviyo began as an email marketing system (EMS) for small businesses. Now it’s an enterprise level tool that handles SMS and markets itself as a CDP. We covered the general types of marketing tools that belong in your tech stack in section two, as well as a few that we recommend consolidating (like your email and SMS marketing platforms). Realistically though, you’re not going to carve out the time for a technology audit unless one of your tools is severely underperforming or creating revenue-blocking issues.
But wait, you’re in luck again! There’s an easier, more efficient approach to streamlining your tech stack: Rather than periodically auditing your tools and comparing them with what’s available on the market, simply wait for your ecommerce platform to release a new version, and review the release notes for new marketing tools.
This is a legitimate passive strategy because the major ecommerce providers win customers by offering more useful features to merchants than their competitors. Since the pandemic, the competition for merchants has only increased, spurring the pace of innovation. In fact, at time of writing, the leading platforms have already subsumed many of the marketing capabilities that used to require a third-party app or platform, including:
- Email & SMS Marketing
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM) functionality
- Customer Data Platform (CDP) functionality
- Customer Service Chat
- Modals, Popups & Forms
Granted, there’s a huge potential difference between using a native marketing feature within your ecommerce platform, and leveraging a dedicated marketing platform designed for power users. But the potential efficiency gains, plus the tantalizing prospect of unifying your data and reporting, make it worthwhile to vet your platform’s newly offered marketing tools with your team.
