September 30, 2021

The Top RFP Questions to Ask Your Martech Vendor

In their eBook, Cheetah Digital share the RFP questions you should be asking your MarTech vendor.

In this day and age, creating meaningful relationships between brands and consumers is more important than ever. Consumers have high expectations for brands – one misstep or bad experience and they will go elsewhere. Marketers struggle to meet the needs of consumers and their various demands with a series of strategies and tactics. To market to an individual with authenticity, relevance, and accuracy, it requires these new approaches:

1. Treat me as an individual. Consumers expect digital interactions that are immediate and highly relevant to them. They have real-time expectations and they expect you to “know them and show them” how well you understand them. And they want a relationship, not just a product-pushing exercise. It requires a single view of the customer… a real one, with preferences and insights that can be used for decisioning in the moment to drive engaging experiences anywhere your customer interacts with you, even before you know the customer’s name.

2. Protect my data. The data you need to market to individuals with the right level of relevance and privacy doesn’t come easily. Acquisition of this type preference data requires a strategy to incentivise consumers to tell you about themselves willingly, with the permissions to use that data.

3. Act like one brand. Consumers expect to engage with you on different devices. Today, consumers use an average of nearly six touchpoints, with half of them regularly using more than four when engaging with a brand. Chances are, you have systems that support your different channels, but they don’t necessarily talk to one another or have rules in place to orchestrate between them. This makes it nearly impossible to use the data that you have about a customer in the moment to offer them the most relevant experience you can in the channels they prefer. Customers expect you to look and act like one brand — more like a friend than a vendor — each and every time they engage with you, and doing this has massive implications on technology.

4. Develop a relationship with me. Consumers expect more than just communications today. They’re expecting brands to create experiences for them and relationships with them. They want to engage and interact. The reward is great for brands that can achieve this. Well-executed interactions across channels help the customers feel a connection, and so they reciprocate with purchases and, eventually, loyalty to your brand.

5. Inspire me. And when customers want to participate in your loyalty programme, it needs to be more than just inciting transactions – you want to reward behaviours as well. Loyalty programme management is needed to keep customers coming back for more.

When you know individuals and can market to them with personalised experiences that they welcome, not because you snooped on them, then magical things happen. Recent market research shows that 44 per cent of consumers will likely become repeat buyers, and 32 per cent will likely leave a positive review.

Enterprise customer engagement strategies are hard to execute on, and involve a significant amount of people, process, and technology to get right. Marketers and brands alike are looking for guidance and actionable steps to help them progress their strategies from crawl, to walk, to run, and optimise their programmes over time.

According to Gartner, nearly 77 per cent of respondents in their recent Marketing Organization Survey reported that their organisation had an intermediate maturity level or below.

While marketing maturity is relatively low across many organisations, 80 per cent of marketing leaders surveyed in Gartner’s 2020 CMO Spend Survey now own or share profit and loss responsibility. With CMOs increasingly being held accountable for business results, the importance of aligning resources to programmes that maximise growth has magnified.

To address these challenges, Cheetah Digital has assembled the most important questions you should be asking your MarTech vendor that will help you plan and deliver a world class customer engagement programme. At the end of the eBook we have aggregated them together in a sample RFP template you can use to activate your engagement strategies across the entire customer lifecycle.

Download the full eBook here.