How to Build a Best-in-Class Growth Marketing Stack

Your marketing technology stack supports everything you do in building your campaigns. From analytics to data management to specific features like email deliverability, each and every need must be addressed for your team to be successful. 

If you’re on this blog, you likely already know that a “one-stop shop” isn’t going to meet those needs effectively. After all, no one is really that great at multitasking: Legacy marketing clouds and suites often handle many aspects of automation but aren’t exemplary at any one of them.

So instead you know to select the best solutions and integrate them together in a robust stack. But how can you evolve past MarTech that’s merely business as usual and build a tech stack that truly supports growth marketing?

Evaluating technology providers is all about finding partners that embrace collaboration in a tight-knit ecosystem. And that’s why we’re here today. 

What Do Pancakes Have to Do With This?

Bear with us for this analogy.

When imagining a stack—of say, pancakes—you aren’t visualizing each individual piece. You’re seeing the whole, the glorious, syrupy whole that is the sum of all its parts, working in harmony. 

You wouldn’t eat plain pancakes isolated from butter, blueberries and maple syrup, would you?

In a similar vein, your growth marketing stack should be built with a key consideration in mind: eliminating silos. If your analytics are separated from the rest of the group, for instance, how are these numbers supposed to better inform your campaigns?

And so, with that in mind, we have outlined below the core needs for a successful growth marketing stack and how Iterable’s own partnerships establish a harmonious ecosystem to achieve your business objectives.

The Core Parts of the Growth Marketing Stack

Before we dive into specific solutions, it’s important to note what a modern growth marketing stack could look like—one that addresses your needs at every step of the customer lifecycle. 

The diagram below shows just one version of how these core parts of the stack can work together. The order and arrangement of these parts may vary depending on the nature of your business. Once you understand how each plays a role in your marketing campaigns, you can piece together the puzzle of your own stack.

The best growth marketing stacks form a cohesive, collaborative environment to make the most of your customer data.

Starting at the bottom with analytics and data management, it’s crucial that your growth marketing stack is supported by powerful solutions that keep your data clean, organized and actionable. Whether you’re using a data warehouse or a customer data platform (CDP), your data must be easily accessible to route to the rest of the stack. 

Customer acquisition can come in many forms, from e-commerce purchases to marketing lead capture. With your data infrastructure set up and your subscriber list in place, you can segment and filter your audience for personalization.

Your growth marketing platform then brings that personalization to life, enabling you to decide when, how and to whom your campaigns should be sent.

Those campaigns leverage service providers to ensure the successful delivery of each message to their respective channels, including email, direct mail and mobile.

A cross-channel approach is the optimal way to achieve the ultimate goal: engaging your customer and maximizing their lifetime value.

We’ve included bidirectional arrows at each connection of this diagram because all parts of the stack create a cohesive feedback loop with data flowing freely from one platform to another. No silos, no breakdowns in communication.

The unified view of the customer isn’t a pipe dream anymore—it’s within reach.

How to Build the Best-in-Class Stack

Great! Now that you understand the core parts of the stack, you just need to fill in that diagram with actual platforms. Good thing there are only 7,000+ companies from which to choose. In order to save you valuable time, resources and a considerable amount of stress, we have partnered with the best solutions in the MarTech landscape.

Read on for our vetted recommendations so you can build the best-in-class growth marketing stack.

Analytics

Your analytics are essential to determining the impact of your marketing campaigns and identifying ways to iterate on your strategy. Without these crucial insights, you won’t truly be able to understand what’s working and where there is room for improvement. 

Likely you’re already using Google Analytics, which is undeniably helpful in measuring conversions and engagement. Other platforms, like Amplitude and Mixpanel, make it exponentially easier to understand user behavior and optimize all of your lifecycle marketing campaigns.

Data Management

Every brand collects massive amounts of first-party data, and the challenge lies in leveraging the full potential of it. Data management platforms route this data to the right places and make it actionable. 

Customer data platforms like mParticle, Segment and Tealium unify data from all sources and sync it across the stack with modern APIs. Integrations don’t need to be complicated with tools like Zapier that connect your web apps and automate the workflows between them.

E-Commerce

From our experience with e-commerce brands, we understand that it can be difficult to scale your online business and maximize ROI.

Shopify and Magento empower e-commerce companies with the tools and services they need to start and grow their businesses, from shipping and order management to point-of-sale features.

Privy, another e-commerce solution, uses advanced targeting rules to drive sales through powerful on-site displays and coupon management.

Lead Capture

Your growth marketing stack is incomplete if you’re not actually acquiring new customers. Lead capture is a critical player in building subscriber lists and converting consumers or prospects.

Digioh allows you to create personalized, targeted web forms to grow your user list. Instapage optimizes the post-click process while maximizing conversions at scale. Revv, a solution for political and non-profit organizations, optimizes leads to increase engagement and donations.

Personalization

Consumers today are demanding individualized brand experiences. They want to know you’re paying attention to their unique preferences and motivations by delivering messages that are catered just for them.

Liveclicker enables marketers to utilize live open-time data for enhanced email personalization. Phrasee uses AI to write better email subject lines, push notifications and Facebook ad copy. Movable Ink generates personalized visual experiences across email and other digital channels that are unique for each consumer.

Growth Marketing Platforms

Growth marketing platforms act as your central hub to leverage all the data from the solutions above and execute upon it. Unlike traditional ESPs, they go beyond email marketing—seamlessly integrating other channels like SMS, in-app, mobile push and web push into one place.

Iterable is the leading growth marketing platform that empowers marketers to create, execute and optimize integrated campaigns. We partner with the following channel service providers below to orchestrate a unified brand experience.

Direct Mail Services

Growth marketing platforms enable you to communicate with your customers across a variety of online and offline channels, one of which is direct mail. With high engagement rates, the mailbox can play just as important of a role as the inbox.

Inkit incorporates existing customer data to automate personalized postcards to increase your offline conversions. Poplar offers a full range of retargeting options for fully dynamic direct mail campaigns. Lob provides comprehensive per-piece mail tracking and analytics to allow for quicker integration of direct mail into your marketing automation.

Email Services

As you build your email lists, you will no doubt strive for quantity and quality. To accomplish both, you’ll need the sender infrastructure and performance to ensure your messages are arriving in the inbox. 

Pathwire and SparkPost provide powerful, secure delivery that safeguards your sender reputation and builds consumer engagement. 250ok offers deliverability products and services to track all the signals critical to your email program.

Mobile Services

There are a host of things to consider to make a top-notch cross-channel experience, and optimizing your mobile messaging is a critical component of marketing strategy.

AppsFlyer provides mobile attribution and analytics to help app marketers make better decisions. Foursquare harnesses the power of location-based targeting and engagement with a hyper-accurate understanding of where your users go. Twilio virtualizes the world’s telecommunications infrastructure through APIs, making access to text, voice, chat, and video easier.

Professional Services

One key function that we didn’t cover in the diagram above—but that is equally important—is professional services. Sometimes you need a specialist to come in and help you make the most of your growth marketing stack. That’s where these trusted agencies come in. 

Digital Pi is a marketing services agency that makes your efforts repeatable, scalable and measurable. Lister Digital implements a heightened brand experience by refining customer journeys to boost conversions. Ragnarok, a full-service digital agency, specializes in performance-driven content.

The Growth Marketing Stack for You

As mentioned, these are just a few of the thousands of options and combinations possible for your growth marketing stack. This is only scratching the surface of the partners we work with, so check out the full Iterable ecosystem.

The key is understanding your company’s needs and how these solutions can integrate to meet them effectively. After all, a successful MarTech stack means more stacks of cold, hard cash for your business (and those stacks may be even more delicious than pancakes!).

We know we’re biased, but building a best-in-class growth marketing stack is simple when it starts with Iterable. Learn more by scheduling a demo today!