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- Outdated code — 12%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.