• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, September 9, 2021

Email marketing has become top of mind for executives during the COVID-19 pandemic, judging by the number of companies that are replacing their tools.

Email distribution solutions were changed by 23% of companies -- second only to marketing automation platforms, which were swapped by 24%, according to the Martech Replacement Survey 2021, a recent study by Martech.

Email was tied with CRM. In contrast, only 6% of firms replaced email in 2019. 

Overall, 67% of the brands polled changed applications in the past year.

But it isn’t clear how much of an impact COVID-19 had — 48% said it was a factor in their decision to replace solutions in general. The remaining 52% did not. 

That makes it probably that some investments in new capabilities were planned prior to the pandemic. 

Other solution changes included:

• Attribution/business intelligence — 19%
• Analytics/business Intelligence — 17%
• CMS — 17%
• SEO tools — 16%
• Virtual events/Webinar platform — 16%
• Data management platform/customer data platform — 15%
• Work and project management — 15%
• Digital asset management — 12%
• Ecommerce — 11%
• Multi-function marketing suite — 10%
• Customer journey orchestration/analytic — 9%
• ABM — 5%
• Identity resolution — 4%

Why did they want to change? Here’s why they sought to upgrade homegrown applications:

• Better features from SaaS software — 53%
• Too expensive to maintain — 16%
• Management decided we’re not a software company — 12%
• Outdated code — 12%
• Other — 7%

Here are the results for those that replaced commercial applications:

• Better features — 51%
• Reduce expenses — 23%
• Better/easier integration — 19%
• Other — 8%

The reasons for changing commercial offerings were somewhat different in 2019:

• Better features — 32%
• Better/easier integration — 32%
• Reduce expenses — 32%
• Other — 5%

Drilling down, the study determined that data capabilities lead the reasons for switching:

• Data centralization/data capabilities — 51%
• Improved customer/digital experience — 42%
• Integration capabilities/open API — 41%
• Cost — 41%
• Ability to actively measure ROI — 34%
• Support — 31%
• Security — 29%
• Compliance — 23%

This year, upgrades were by marketing management in 39% of the cases, and by executive management in 30%. Only 12% were led by marketing operations, 11% by marketing staff, 8% by IT and 1% by sales. 

In 2019, 43% of the changes were driven by marketing management, 25% by executive management, 18% by marketing operations, 7% by IT and 6% by marketing staff.

How long did it take? The changes were under consideration for:

• Less than a month — 7%
• Two to three months — 36%
• Three to six months — 33%
• Six to 12 months — 18%
• More than 12 months — 6%

These stats reflect a definite acceleration. In 2019, the upgrades were considered for:

• Less than a month — 5%
• Two to three months — 29%
• Three to six months — 43%  
• Six to 12 months — 19%
• More than 12 months — 4%

Martech surveyed 374 marketers in April and May of this year.