Thomas Peham, VP of Marketing at enterprise CMS Storyblok, discusses the need for businesses to better evaluate their marketing technology

We recently asked 500 business owners and senior decision makers at medium-sized ecommerce companies a range of questions about how they view their marketing technology. When we analysed their answers a few stats really jumped out at us and initially left us scratching our heads. First, on average, businesses have spent nearly half a million dollars on their marketing technology over the past five years and more than 90% believe this was money well spent – they declared they received ‘good’ or ‘great’ ROI. However, these same businesses also believe they lose, on average, $72,000 a year in sales due to poor website user experience. A staggering 48% said their website had embarrassed them in front of a key stakeholder or customer.

So how do we marry these contradictory positions? The likely answer is that business owners and senior marketers have low expectations in relation to what martech can and should achieve. This isn’t a new phenomenon – there’s a well known saying in marketing which dates back to the late 19th century – ‘Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.’ This is to say that marketing departments often have a complicated relationship with accurately measuring the success of their output. There is also the perfectly understandable scenario that if you spend a lot of resources on technical solutions you may be more inclined to convince yourself that it was money well spent.

Unfortunately, this really isn’t a tenable position. The current economic climate and the growing complexity and competitiveness of customer acquisition and retention mean that a business’s marketing department has to operate at the peak of its powers. For this to happen the technology that is employed must be fit for purpose.

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The starting point for any company is ensuring that their website is the best it can be. After all, it is a complete waste of resources to invest in driving users to your website if, on arrival, the website fails to function properly and the potential sale is lost. To put it into perspective, we surveyed 6,000 consumers about their online shopping behaviour – 42% said they decide whether to stay on or leave a website within 10 seconds – 20% within 5 seconds. 60% of consumers said they abandoned purchases due to poor website user experience. We calculated the value of these missed sales to total £1.41 billion per year in the UK alone. Limited payment options, poor navigation or layout, and slow loading speeds were the top reasons why customers abandon a website. Consumers have very clear demands from what they want for a site and the only way to meet these expectations is to have the right tech infrastructure in place.

To ascertain whether your website is fit for purpose, the first port of call is your site analytics. How many people are bouncing or abandoning baskets? At what stage is this happening? The data will tell you a lot about what could be going wrong. You can then employ a series of tests, for example, Google’s speed test to determine page loading times. Go through your site’s navigation again and again – is it intuitive enough to a first time visitor? Are the features you are using adding to the experience or clutter the design? Is the content up-to-date, How does your site perform on different devices, and so forth. Finally, ask your customers what they think.

All of this information will tell you where the most important areas of improvement are. Some of these issues could be rectified by better web design, but more fundamental problems around the user experience, such as loading speeds, a lack of features and ease of updating content are likely to stem from outdated tech infrastructure. The increased complexity of websites and marketing in general, means that big, monolithic tech stacks aren’t flexible enough or appropriate for most businesses. They are also usually much more expensive to implement and maintain than newer solutions.

One of the major hurdles to updating tech that we come across at businesses is the misconception that the process of renewing tech infrastructure will be incredibly costly, risky and time consuming. That may have been true in the past, however, it is far from the case now as many solutions can be more easily incorporated into existing tech stacks. There is also generally a trend away from needing ‘power users’. A lot of platforms, such as Storyblok, prioritise being able to be operated effectively by non-technical users. As a result extensive retraining or making new specialist hires are generally not needed.

It can still be daunting, in the current economic environment, to consider spending money on your website, especially if you seem to be ‘getting by’. However, muddling through by continually patching or bending your outdated solutions will ultimately be more costly and inevitably lead to your business losing its competitive edge. And remember, you do not need to do everything all at once. Undertaking small pilot renewal projects will enable you to keep costs down and give you the opportunity to better assess your ROI. We have seen first hand how updated infrastructure can very quickly pay for itself with large increases in customer engagement and satisfaction leading to substantial growth in sales.

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