2015 Predictions: Marketers Will Realize Cost Savings Through Holistic, Natively Built Platforms

This post is based on insights from the Sailthru ebook “2015 Marketing Technology Predictions: The Future of Marketing” available for download now.

Marketers who consolidate the number of tools they use will undoubtedly see cost savings. Those savings are more dramatic when the new solutions are holistic and natively built. But what will really make a difference to marketers are not the savings they realize right away, when they ditch their old, cumbersome, inflexible software. It’s the cost savings they will reap into the future (not to mention the revenue those new solutions will generate).

Forrester recently published a total economic impact report that showed what happened when one midsize ecommerce company replaced a leading email service provider and an internally developed recommendation engine with a single, holistic, natively built solution. Over three years, Forrester predicted that the email service provider would cost the company $3.2 million; the recommendation engine, $590,000. The single solution cost $2.1 million over three years. That’s nearly 50% less.

Obviously, the organization saw significant and immediate savings by dumping their legacy systems. Forrester estimated that the payback period was less than a month. Over three years, Forrester also expects to see a 7.5% jump in incremental revenue as a result of the switch.

But the real cost savings go beyond those figures, which are impressive enough. This particular ecommerce company is now, basically, ready for anything. We talk to marketers who have nightmares that they will wake up one day to a new social network or device, and their boss will want them to have a strategy and best-of-breed partner from day one. This ecommerce company no longer has to worry about that. If two new social networks and three new browsers come out next year, they’ll be ready.

Sure, there will be point solutions for emerging channels, and the big legacy players will buy them up and attempt to integrate them. As far as this ecommerce company is concerned, all that will be irrelevant. Their solution is based on the user, not the channel. A new channel will represent just one new stream of data, and their systems will be ready.

Cost savings today is one thing. Future cost savings, with a platform that can adapt to any new channel or device – without having to integrate acquisitions – is marketing nirvana.

Neil Capel, CEO & Founder of Sailthru

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