Tony Arnold, CMO and head of strategy, Unica, HCL discusses why cloud native platforms with open integration are crucial to a mobile-first strategy in 2021.
I think the biggest concern for brands this year is to focus on being the ‘first-to-market’ and ‘first-to-convert.’ And, that is very dependent on a solid mobile-enabled experience.
–Tony Arnold, CMO and head of strategy, Unica, HCL Software
Tony Arnold, CMO and head of strategy, Unica at HCL Software, explains how customer feedback and active customer beta teams drive their product roadmap. A solution for the CRM space, Unica, was designed to deliver precision marketing at scale. Since its acquisition in 2019, Arnold and his team made significant UI/UX updates, integrated various modules across the platform, and released four new modules including Journey, Deliver, Discover, and Link.
In this edition of MarTalk Buzz, Arnold discusses why it’s important more than ever now for e-retailers to go after a mobile-first strategy. He shares the 3 dos for ecommerce brands to improve the site’s UX. Arnold also highlights catalysts for an optimized web and mobile web experience and the features of robust digital experience analytics platforms.
I really look at problems and solutions from a very pragmatic practical perspective and what is the shortest patch to drive revenue.
We have become a mobile consuming economy. With all the expected ecommerce traffic this season, mobile will get hit harder than ever. If customers are planning a mobile-first strategy, there are some considerations.
There are a few primary routes to get to a mobile-friendly solution that include porting an existing site to an app, or to a separate mobile-optimized site. Another option is to look at a more comprehensive full site redesign around responsive or there may be some type of a hybrid design.
There are different advantages and disadvantages to each approach that businesses must consider. Porting an existing site to a dedicated mobile apps or dedicated mobile optimized site has the big advantages of speed-to-market. Many companies offer packages or add-on solutions to help e-tailers get to market fast. The potential downside to a dedicated app or optimized site usually is scaling, so there must be extra attention paid to the scaling requirements.
-Tony Arnold, CMO and head of strategy, Unica, HCL Software
Another path is purchasing a solution that is based on responsive web design. This allows the site to scale the content and experience to any size and format of device from laptop to mobile. There are scaling advantages and disadvantages to not support separate code bases. A disadvantage is that some research indicates that responsive sites convert lower than dedicated apps, so businesses need to test this to see how their customers respond.
Regardless of the strategy, I think the biggest concern for brands this year is to focus on being the ‘first-to- market’ and ‘first-to-convert.’ And that is very dependent on a solid mobile-enabled experience. Giving customers the ability to open, click, and convert all without leaving their couch with a mobile-first strategy will pay huge dividends immediately for businesses.
The change in speed of the conversion funnel is one of the biggest consumer behavior changes we have seen over the last five years. Regardless of your early adopter, event triggered shoppers, deal shoppers, and low engaged lagger buyers’ segments are moving to purchase funnel exponentially fast.
Now more than ever with better martech, commerce, and analytics, there is more push for the early adopters with optimized offer and channel personalization that keep them in the buying cycle of the next best thing. Event shoppers are getting automated promotions triggered before, during, and after triggered events, and the deal shoppers now have a variety of tools to deal hunt.
–Tony Arnold, CMO and head of strategy, Unica, HCL Software
What has changed is that marketers need to make changes to the customer journey in-flight and tune all aspects of offer, channel, personalization, and triggering in real-time to meet the marketing goals.
With digital experience (DX) analytics, the key is complete integration across the customer journey and a maturity over what companies had with a CMS or web experience management platform.
The DX across all the channels has become so complex and that complexity does not stop at the channels. There is a myriad of applications, data, systems all feeding DX, commerce, martech, support, and fulfillment systems.
Based on our customer feedback, beyond a mandate of having to integrate with Google Analytics, the big four are:
I know of no single customer that has a single source DX solution; everyone has a diverse stack of best-of- breed commerce, DX, analytics, DAM, and martech products. If you look at the number of solutions that make up the average enterprise’s digital experience of just the martech stack alone, it is mind boggling. This drives the need to assure whichever platform you select can be easily integrated.
First is selecting a platform that is open, scalable, and cloud native for integration and scalability. This will drastically reduce the total cost of ownership and increase the deployment speed.
-Tony Arnold, CMO and head of strategy, Unica, HCL Software
Second, select an implementation partner who has specific expertise in your chosen solution. The key is to get an implementation partner who also has specific expertise in your key systems, data, and applications.
I have seen, so many times customers choose a partner with no expertise in the specific platform or customer systems, simply because they already do business with them.
With COVID-19 disrupting every market, and so many shifts to ecommerce even on the B2B side, we are going to see a shift to companies looking at the technology behind the martech, analytics, customer experience management, and commerce. Everyone has a best-of-breed solution to some degree that drives an open integration requirement.
The biggest trend will be cloud-native based solutions that have open integration and are not tied to any cloud provider. In many organizations, IT and marketing are the only areas beyond staffing where big cost cuts can be made quickly and both departments will have to work together to get infrastructure, integration, and management costs down with growing DX capabilities.
About Tony Arnold:
Tony Arnold is the CMO for Unica & Head of Strategy for HCL Software with over 20 years of brand & marketing strategy experience working with global Fortune level enterprises and operating revenue lines as large as $10B. Over his career, Tony was an Inc Magazine Web Strategy Award Winner, launched the second e-commerce site in history, developed the largest retail CRM system processing 25B customer contacts yearly, and has developed, created, and managed technical marketing systems which have generated approximately $70B over his career. Tony has hands on expertise with creating the budgets, martech solutions and customer data best practices to drive more powerful branding, revenue, and customer loyalty.
About HCL Technologies:
HCL Technologies (HCL) empowers global enterprises with technology for the next decade today. HCL’s Mode 1-2-3 strategy, through its deep-domain industry expertise, customer-centricity, and entrepreneurial culture of ideapreneurship™ enables businesses to transform into next-gen enterprises.
HCL offers its services and products through three business units – IT and Business Services (ITBS), Engineering and R&D Services (ERS) and Products & Platforms (P&P). ITBS enables global enterprises to transform their businesses through offerings in areas of Applications, Infrastructure, Digital Process Operations, and next generational digital transformation solutions. HCL delivers holistic services in various industry verticals, categorized under Financial Services, Manufacturing, Technology & Services, Telecom & Media, Retail & CPG, Life Sciences & Healthcare and Public Services.
About MarTalk Buzz:
MarTalk Buzz is an interview series where marketing leaders and marketing technology companies that are making a difference, connect with us and share their stories. Join us as we talk to them about their product journeys, insights on the categories they serve, what works for them, and some bonus pro-tips.
Got a buzz story, you would like to share with us? Write to neha.pradhan@swzd.com
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