8 Essential Marketing Tool Categories for eCommerce Titans with $25M+ Annual Turnover

Have you ever wondered which marketing tools major eCommerce players, with over $25 million in annual revenue, use for their retention strategies, website experience in general, and to maximize...

Have you ever wondered which marketing tools major eCommerce players, with over $25 million in annual revenue, use for their retention strategies, website experience in general, and to maximize the lifetime value of a customer?

In this short article, we will delve into eight distinct groups of marketing tools, exploring their main functionalities and providing examples of specific tools that fall into each category. It is essential to understand that one tool might fit into multiple categories, a nuance that adds complexity to the selection process.

Without further ado, let's dive into the list:

1. Email Marketing Platform

A good email marketing platform is designed to meet four primary objectives. Those are:

1. Ability to capture emails.
   Questions to Consider:

   1. How straightforward is the process of capturing emails?

   2. What strategies can I employ for email collection, such as pop-ups or something more advanced such as a semi-gated experience?

2. Send newsletters.
   Questions to Consider:

   1. How easy is it for me to send newsletters?

3. Send automated email campaigns such as Cart Abandonment or Welcome Series. Questions to Consider:

   1. How easy is it for me to set up automated email scenarios?

   2. How many options are available for sequence triggers (now, after event occurrence, daily,..)?

   3. Are all essential functions like Conditions, A/B testing functionality, and "Wait after this step" available for building out email scenarios?

4. Personalization capabilities of email marketing platform.
   Questions to Consider:

   1. Are there any limitations on the data I can utilize for personalization tactics?

   2. What methods can I use to segment my email subscribers? Possible criteria for segmentation could include their recent interactions with the website or emails, affinity towards specific products, or the buying intent of customers.

Klaviyo stands out as probably the most famous player in this space

2. SMS Marketing Platform

A good SMS platform shares the same core objectives as an email platform, but these objectives are tailored specifically for the SMS channel. Those core objectives are:

1. Ability to capture phone numbers.
   Questions to Consider:

   1. How straightforward is the process of capturing phone numbers? Does this platform offer two tap sign-up process for SMS?

   2. What strategies can I employ for phone number collection, such as pop-ups or something more advanced such as a semi-gated experience?

2. Send newsletters.
   Questions to Consider:

   1. How easy is it for me to send newsletters?

3. Send automated SMS campaigns such as Cart Abandonment or Welcome Series. Questions to Consider:

   1. How easy is it for me to set up automated SMS scenarios?

   2. How many options are available for sequence triggers (now, after event occurrence, daily,..)?

   3. Are all essential functions like Conditions, A/B testing functionality, and "Wait after this step" available for building out SMS scenarios?

4. Personalization capabilities of SMS marketing platform.
   Questions to Consider:

   1. Are there any limitations on the data I can utilize for personalization tactics?

   2. What methods can I use to segment my SMS subscribers? Possible criteria for segmentation could include their recent interactions with the website or SMS, affinity towards specific products, or the buying intent of customers.

Attentive stands out as probably the most famous player in this space.

3. Product recommendations

A robust product recommendation platform provides the technical ability to suggest relevant products to customers across various channels, including websites, email campaigns, SMS campaigns, and more.

When evaluating a product recommendation platform, consider the following criteria:

1. The Diversity of Pre-Built Models: How many options are available for product recommendations, such as suggestions based on customers' last viewed products or product recommendations aligned with profitability?

2. Accuracy of Models: How precise are the predictive algorithms in aligning recommendations with customer preferences and behaviors?

3. Ease of Deployment: How user-friendly is the process of implementing these models into your existing marketing strategies?"

There are several options available when it comes to product recommendation tools. Notable examples include Dynamic Yield and Nosto.

4. Website Personalization & A/B testing

Website Personalization & A/B testing platforms serve two primary objectives:

1. Testing Before Launching: Instead of publishing new website features based on mere hope that they will have a positive impact, it's essential to test them first.
   
   Example: Suppose you want to deploy a new homepage experience. If you simply publish the new design and see an uplift in the conversion rate over the following 30 days, you might attribute this success to the new homepage experience. However, this might be a false conclusion.
   
   Imagine that during the same time period, you ran a highly successful Facebook campaign, and that was the actual cause for the conversion rate uplift, not the homepage changes.
   
   To minimize the risk of such false conclusions, you must approach the situation differently. Before publishing the new homepage experience, you should run an A/B test. This means that visitors to your website have a 50-50 chance of seeing either the previous homepage experience or the new one. By monitoring the behavioral differences between these groups and evaluating which one converts better, you can identify the true cause of any changes in the conversion rate.
   
   If you observe a positive change in conversion rate specifically for the new homepage experience, it's safe to attribute this improvement to the change itself. Both experimental experiences run simultaneously, eliminating the risk of misattribution as described in the previous example.
   

2. Personalizing Your Website Experience: While product recommendations are a part of this category, they don't encompass everything within it. Examples of Website Personalization:

   1. Displaying the number of loyalty points that a customer has already collected directly on the website.

   2. Preselecting a customer's size on the product detail page.
      

   Both of these examples illustrate how website personalization goes beyond mere product recommendations, allowing for a more tailored and engaging user experience.

Optimizely stands out as probably the most famous player in this space.

5. Analytical Platform

In eCommerce, there are generally four key areas that typically require analysis:

1. Customer
   Example: How many customers have spent at least $1000 with us?
   

2. Products
   Example: Which products are trending right now?
   

3. Campaigns
   Example: What was the performance of my latest newsletter campaign?
   

4. Store
   Example: What is the conversion rate from product added to the cart to purchase? Are there any bottlenecks in this process?

A high-quality analytical platform can be evaluated based on:

• Its ability to provide insights into these four categories.

• The accuracy of the data.

• The availability of the data (e.g., how often is it refreshed? How far back can I look?)

Google Analytics is probably the most known player in this space.

6. Search

If you sell more than 1000 products, the search functionality becomes paramount. The primary goal of a search platform is to maximize relevant results based on the text input entered into the search field.

Admittedly, we have limited experience with search tools, which is why we're unable to provide specific examples of what to look for in a search platform. However, we are familiar with some notable players in this field.

Algolia, for instance, is likely considered a leader in this space.

7. Customer Data Platform (CDP)

The Customer Data Platform (CDP) is perhaps the most abstract and least understood of all the categories we've discussed so far, but its importance cannot be understated.

When utilizing various marketing tools, it's common to create data silos. Important customer information becomes scattered across different platforms, leaving you without a central hub to consolidate all your customer-related data. This fragmentation hinders your ability to fully understand who your customers are and how they interact with your business.

Customer data platforms (CDPs) serve as a vital solution to the challenge of scattered customer information. Acting as a central hub, they consolidate customer-related data from various marketing platforms, becoming an essential tool for gaining an in-depth understanding of your customers. CDP also enables the delivery of a consistent, personalized experience across different marketing channels.

The most crucial features of a CDP include:

• Ability to Track Anonymous Traffic: Unlike Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, CDPs can track the behavior of anonymous users, which often comprise 80% or more of all website traffic. Without this capability, vital data for analytics and personalization tactics would be lost.

• Identity Resolution: CDPs enable the identification of more anonymous traffic as known traffic. This is a complex subject that merits further exploration, and I will dedicate a separate article to it.

• Creation of Customer Segments: By utilizing data from all marketing platforms, CDPs allow for the formation of customer segments. This is key to creating a consistent experience across various marketing channels.

• Data Quality Enforcement Mechanisms: The adage 'garbage in, garbage out' rings true in marketing. Strategies reliant on data are only as strong as the underlying quality of that data, making data policing mechanisms indispensable.

Segment is one of the most popular Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) available.

8. Data Warehouse

Why might you need a data warehouse even if you have a CDP in place? While CDPs (Customer Data Platforms) are designed to house customer-related data, an eCommerce business also encompasses other vital data that isn't customer-related. This includes aspects such as the performance of your paid advertising campaigns, total marketing spend across all platforms, and details like your product inventory.

Technically, building a custom CDP within your data warehouse is possible, but it's easier said than done. By analogy, you could also code a custom frontend and backend for an eCommerce store, but many companies choose to use Shopify for practical reasons. Building a custom CDP is akin to constructing a custom eCommerce shop from scratch in an age when platforms like Shopify and WooCommerce provide ready-made solutions.

In our experience, we have constructed multiple data warehouses. Up until now, we've chosen Google BigQuery as our preferred data warehouse, appreciating its integration within the larger Google Cloud Platform.

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As I mentioned at the start of this article, many marketing platforms fulfill multiple roles within the marketing tech stack. For instance, Klaviyo can function as both an Email and SMS platform. The table below illustrates which platforms fulfill which roles.

Our preferred tool continues to be Bloomreach Engagement. It it one platform that is housing six of the eight tools described in this article, working seamlessly together.

In future articles, I will delve deeper into each of these tools, outlining their advantages and disadvantages in greater detail.

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