Want to get more power from your marketing stack? Here’s how to do it.

This is the second installation in a series about how to make your marketing more efficient. (If you haven’t read Part 1, it’s here for you.)

In our earlier post we tackled one side of marketing: figuring out how to target the customers that will bring the most revenue to the business.

In this post we’ll focus on the other side of marketing: doing all of that work more efficiently. In particular, we’re focusing on the toolset that’s supposedly there to make things smoother for everybody on your team. What is it? Your marketing stack.

Most marketing teams are using their stack inefficiently. How about you?

In our work with thousands of marketing teams, we’ve found that most stack problems cluster around the following Seven Deadly Sins:

1. Lack of alignment with business goals leads to poor integration and low productivity.

2. Sloppy data management hinders decision-making and overlooks critical insights.

3. Siloed tools and departments suffer from fragmented data and duplicated efforts.

4. Too many manual processes waste time, introduce errors, and limit scalability.

5. Insufficient training and skill development limits the team's ability to use features effectively.

6. Neglecting performance monitoring and optimization brings suboptimal results.

7. Failure to adapt to evolving trends hampers innovation and competitiveness.

For you to work smarter, your marketing tech stack has to work harder. While many marketing teams use multiple tools, it can be challenging to master them individually, let alone integrate them all seamlessly.

Here’s a new idea.

Our suggestion for making all of these tools more efficient? Put behavioral analytics at the center of your stack. When you make a behavioral analytics system the core that feeds key information to all of your chosen tools, all of those tools can now return the most efficient results. 

We don’t want to claim this is as easy as 1, 2, 3. But maybe it’s as easy as 1, 2, 3, 4?

Here are the main components of your marketing stack, and some key ways to make them more efficient.

1.  Email and marketing automation tools

What do they do?

These tools let you automate and schedule personalized campaigns and customer onboarding. They provide support, announce updates, and deliver special offers and recommendations via email, in-app notifications, mobile pushes, SMS, and other channels.

With automation, delivering timely, relevant messages to high-value audience segments becomes a simple task.

Examples: Braze, Iterable, Intercom, Klaviyo, Marketo

How does behavioral analytics make them more efficient?

For predicting conversion, retention and adoption rates, behavioral analytics beats role-based segmentation any day of the week. Segmenting users based on their specific actions (or desired actions) lets you address their individual needs specifically.

Growth and lifecycle marketers particularly benefit here. They can stay updated on product changes, and measure campaign effectiveness in terms of revenue and product usage, in order to segment users for upsell and cross-sell opportunities.

Messages that truly resonate will absolutely improve your customer acquisition cost (CAC). And who doesn’t want that?

2.   A/B testing and experimentation tools 

What do they do?

These tools make it easy to test the performance of and optimize your sites, apps, and products. Marketers can use them to create multiple variations of their digital content and conduct experiments on various aspects—designs, messaging, copy, user experience (UX), user flows, personalization, and more. Some data-science driven A/B tools can even automatically optimize based on user behavior. 

Examples: Optimizely, AB Tasty, Kameleoon

How does behavioral analytics make them more efficient?

If your focus is on conversion rate optimization (CRO), you already know how essential A/B testing is to improve website performance, user engagement, and overall customer experience. So you’ll like what you get when you add in behavioral analytics: a whole new class of insights.

While A/B testing tools improve the digital experience, behavioral analytics improve the entire practice of testing. Tracking the broader impact of the tests themselves will expand your view from understanding simple click metrics to envisioning their downstream effects on business value.

Seeing how users interact with test variations will show you which actions attract people who are most valuable to your business. 

Do they click on a specific call-to-action (CTA)?
Do they exhibit behaviors associated with long-term retention?

By incorporating behavioral analytics into A/B testing, marketers can move beyond localized optimizations and align their efforts with broader business objectives. It ensures that A/B testing drives meaningful impact and achieves strategic goals.

3.  Product Adoption tools

What do they do?

Product adoption tools encourage adoption by helping you enhance the user experience. They provide notifications, recommendations, guides, microsurveys, announcements, and other features that assist users in navigating and understanding digital products.

This is particularly valuable during the initial stages of user interaction, which is when users may feel confused or uncertain about how to use the product effectively. By providing targeted contextual guidance, product adoption tools help reduce friction and improve the overall user experience.

Product marketers, lifecycle marketers, and growth marketers—especially those focused on Product-Led Growth (PLG)—find these tools beneficial. They can now work collaboratively with the product team to create a seamless transition from marketing to the product itself, aiming to increase user retention and promote feature adoption.

Examples: Appcues, WalkMe, Chameleon

How does behavioral analytics make them more efficient?

Adding in behavioral analytics explodes the effectiveness of your product adoption tools. Behavioral analytics helps identify optimal triggers for these tools to engage users at just the right time, with the most relevant content. Now you can:

• Determine who needs specific in-app notifications 

• Guide users toward desired actions

• Introduce them to new features at optimal moments for adoption

• Deliver targeted notifications, announcements, surveys, and guides

• Base communication on their specific actions (or inactions) within the product.

Without behavioral analytics, it’s much harder to achieve these goals effectively. 

The insights gained from user behavior enable growth marketers, especially those focused on Product-Led Growth (PLG), to facilitate user onboarding and guide users to their "a-ha" moments without leaning heavily on the sales team.

We all have problems with our stacks

We know. Marketing stacks are complex beasts.

But there is a better way. With this deep understanding of your ideal prospects, you can easily optimize your marketing efforts to cater to their specific desires. Behavioral analytics also lets you draw an arrow from marketing activity to business revenue.

To learn more about what digital insights can do for your business, feel free to contact us. Or give Heap a try! It’s free, and you can start getting insights immediately.