All marketers want to create long-lasting customer relationships that inspire loyalty. But as with any relationship, one key element is always necessary: trust. Customers who trust your brand have confidence in your company and feel assured that your products or services are of the highest quality — and they’ll keep choosing to do business with you for years to come.
As a marketer, you should have that same trust in your marketing technology vendor — an unwavering confidence that your partner is dedicated to and taking proactive steps to ensure you can always reach your goals. You need to believe they possess the know-how to handle big projects, the proper fail-safes in place to avoid outages, and an all-encompassing, high-performing platform.
What’s one way to know if a marketing partner deserves your trust? By understanding its scalability, resiliency, and performance.
Scalability: Rising to the Occasion
What’s your industry’s Super Bowl? While it’s important to choose a partner that performs throughout the regular season, it’s even more imperative to select one that features the computing power to deliver when spikes in activity occur.
Whether it’s Black Friday, Spring Break, or National Pizza Day, does your current marketing platform have the capability to react quickly to high volume? Just like a quarterback knows his star wide receiver is going to catch everything during a football game’s final two minutes, you should have confidence that your marketing partner will be able to scale at a moment’s notice.
Do you know if your partner is investing in the tools you need to scale and deliver emails, SMS notifications, push, and loyalty rewards? Will your account be in a multi-tenant environment potentially sharing resources with other customers? It’s important to understand the options based on your specific needs. Special events are predictable and therefore can be planned, but how will your technology partner react to those unpredictable moments?
Resiliency: High Availability and Automated Backup
In a world where reaching millions of people is as simple as clicking the send button, we sometimes forget that emergencies happen and technology can falter. The majority of the world takes electricity for granted, and yet millions of us rush to buy generators, bottled water, and non-perishable food as soon as high winds or extreme weather are in the forecast.
If something unexpected happens, your vendor should have its own backups — like automatic fail safes and disaster recovery plans — to ensure its platform always runs smoothly. Choose a vendor that actively monitors their systems and has safeguards in place so it won’t go down — especially when you need it most. After all, if you can’t access your platform, you can’t reach, or sell to, your customers.
Performance: Patience Doesn’t Need to Be a Virtue
We live in a world of immediacy. When a promotion, product, or experience is well received, it doesn’t just become popular — it goes viral. If a viral moment impacts your company, can your platform help you quickly respond in real time and get information in your customers’ hands? Or would it take hours to search, segment, and send a campaign that turns out being outdated?
It’s also important to choose a partner that is constantly improving their platform to make your everyday life easier with the goal of making you work faster, better, and smarter. Select a vendor with a high-performing platform in all aspects of data and API, as well as one who has the ability to instantaneously return segment counts across a wide and deep database.
When evaluating a new partner, you have to ask more than just the standard SLA uptime question. This is certainly important, but you should also ask about their strategies to support spikes in volume and capacity. Do they performance test? Do they capacity and load test? Is their software deployed in the cloud? What is their transactions per second (TPS)? A good partner will explain their strategies and provide benchmarks.
Trust isn’t given; it’s earned. Has your current marketing partner earned your trust by investing in the technology it takes to provide a scalable, resilient, and high-performing marketing platform that enables you to build lasting relationships with your customers? Or are you simply hoping that’s the case and putting blind faith in a partner who might not be worthy of your trust? At Marigold Engage+, we continually invest in these three aspects because we know they’re key in helping us build long-lasting relationships with our clients.
Contact us today if you’re interested in looking for a partner that will help your company build lasting connections with clients.
