While having customer data is vital, the challenge for marketers then becomes figuring out how to use it. The right combination of tools in your tech stack allows you to focus on extracting customer insights from the data rather than getting distracted by the process of collecting it.
The problem for many marketers then becomes understanding how the data can be contextualized in the customers’ lifecycle. What do these granular data points tell you about the customer as an individual? If your data is spread across platforms that aren’t communicating, the process of bringing it all together can be tedious. By the end, you’re burnt out and can’t bear to look at another spreadsheet.
There’s no hard-and-fast “right” method or template to modernize your tech stack, but there are some tools and techniques that can be implemented to help you improve data collection processes to get the most out of your customer data.
The Challenges of an Antiquated Tech Stack in a Growing Business
As companies grow, numerous efficiency issues can arise. The goal of creating a consistent, seamless journey for users can become more and more challenging as new tools are introduced, creating new silos of data that sometimes don’t communicate with one another. On top of that, in a time of growth, businesses set even loftier marketing goals to utilize new channels through which they can reach their customers.
The combination of rapid growth and siloed communication between tools is often the ultimate catalyst for tech stack modernization.
For example, Matt Naturman, Associate Marketing Manager of Lifecycle Marketing at Care.com, a platform for finding quality family care, cited this exact lack of communication as the reason for modernizing Care.com’s tech stack.
Matt said that as a result of the siloed communication:
- The engineering team was bogged down with uploading data to multiple platforms.
- The marketing team was spending all of their time trying to create cross-channel campaigns without a consistent data source.
- And the analysts were feverishly trying to piece together a 360° view of the customer.
As brands continue to grow, creating customer journey maps and testing and analyzing data more efficiently becomes increasingly more important. Having the right combination of technologies that communicate effectively becomes crucial to scaling personalized campaigns.
Improving Cross-Channel Efficiency With Iterable and Amplitude
A big factor of the communication breakdown that happens in many stacks is the utilization of multiple channels. Maintaining a seamless customer journey across channels is necessary, but can become difficult when using disparate systems for each channel.
That’s where Care.com turned to Iterable and Amplitude for help. Paired with Amplitude, Iterable allows marketing teams to get a user-friendly view of cross-channel campaign performance while understanding each customer at an individual level.
In essence, Care.com created an information loop. With Amplitude, they set up alerts to know when metrics within a chart perform outside of a designated range. Matt, for example, set up alerts to inform his team when the number of abandoned cart emails sent increased or decreased 10%, compared to the previous day. Using alerts, the team could monitor metrics more quickly and efficiently to garner insights and capture campaign performance.
Then, via Iterable, these quick campaign insights can be used in real time for testing across multiple channels. Test. Analyze. Test. Analyze. Rinse and repeat.
This efficiency kept insights available in real time to gather more detailed data about each customer and trigger personalized communications based on their actions.
Showing Impact Through Data
Thanks to the seamless integration between Iterable and Amplitude, brands can quickly gain access to a clearer view of how their marketing communications are directly impacting product use.
Specifically, with Amplitude’s funnel charts, marketers can see how customers interacted with an email and then, in turn, how those emails performed against KPIs.
Funnel charts in Amplitude paint a clear picture of the effectiveness of Care.com’s marketing messages.
Matt’s team uses Iterable and Amplitude, in tandem, to constantly test and optimize. For example, users often expect follow-up messaging after they abandon their carts. Matt wanted to understand the impact of using multiple channels and sending a push notification alongside the abandoned cart email.
Testing the abandoned cart workflow in Iterable demonstrated the benefits of sending early push notifications.
The results of the test showed that sending the push notification earlier in the abandoned cart workflow resulted in a statistically significant conversion rate.
Since the Iterable and Amplitude integration allows for quicker testing and easier access to data and test results, impactful conclusions can be drawn faster. This, ultimately, speeds up customer experience optimization.
A Tech Stack That Strives for Efficiency
Tech stack modernization gives brands the ability to test quickly, giving your team more time to analyze the data and understand the users as individuals. Like we said at the top, there is no template for the best way to do this, but the best place to start is by identifying efficiency gaps.
Where is data slipping through the cracks? What sort of visibility is lacking when analyzing your customer journey?
Iterable and Amplitude work together for companies like Care.com to enable that visibility into data to allow for customized alerts, cross-channel testing, quick insights and more—all with the added benefit of more quickly implementing changes for an optimized marketing strategy.
Consumers are increasingly expecting a unified customer experience. Having the right tech stack in place opens the door for new personalization opportunities, which is better for you and your customers.
To get the full story and see more experiments Matt was able to run with Iterable + Amplitude, watch the webinar.
