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The increased relevance of omnichannel consumer engagement has an influence across the entire corporate stack. Greater composability clarifies relevant service boundaries, allowing businesses to appropriately size their investments in practically every domain. In these regards, outbound marketing has arguably advanced the least.
Outbound marketing, as it is now understood as campaign and communications management technology, is a laggard in the larger evolutionary trend. However, suppliers are not immune to structural changes that are occurring in — and this element of your stack may become the least identifiable by the end of this decade.
Today’s outbound marketing technology
Marketers have traditionally loved outbound marketing because it provides proactive messaging that promises immediacy, actionability, measurement, and flow that traditional advertising does not. Email marketing supplanted direct mail and telemarketing in the digital era. As a result, it’s no surprise that email is at the heart of the majority of significant outbound marketing systems today.
Almost soon, email marketing platforms developed campaign-creation palettes that let you to send sequenced emails, including branching based on consumer responses. These campaign subsystems have enabled marketers to trigger communications via various channels such as SMS, in-app or outbound telephone, and even on-demand print mailers during the last decade. This enables vendors to brag about their “omnichannel” capabilities, despite the fact that they only coordinate multichannel outgoing communications.
Typical platforms today divide into two camps:
- Mass-market B2C email services providers (ESPs).
- B2B and high-end / high-touch B2C marketing automation platforms (MAPs).
Some MAPs have grown to include additional capabilities such as account-based marketing, inbound customisation, CRM connection, and more complex reporting. In short, they have evolved into a tiny stack-in-a-box, particularly for mid-sized B2B or considered-purchase B2C enterprises where a salesman is involved.
However, the world is changing, particularly at the enterprise level.
The great decoupling
A new architectural pattern arose in the late 2010s that detached shared, basic enterprise services from specific customer engagement channels. It all started with client data platforms (CDPs), which consolidate customer data into a single business repository, freeing up customer-facing systems from the burden of managing complex data in the future.
This new pattern is referred to as “legless,” and the overall strategy is expanding beyond data to incorporate enterprise content and personalization services. What is driving the move to legless architecture?
As we emerge from the pandemic, a new grammar of customer experience emerges, in which the person on the other side of the screen becomes the subject of the engagement rather than the object.
The most significant change for this topic is that heavyweight, service-rich outbound marketing platforms are becoming increasingly obsolete in a world where organizations expect critical services to run omnichannel. Let’s look at it from the standpoint of a decoupled, composable, “legless” stack.
Decoupling data, content and decisioning
Enterprises benefit greatly from decoupling data administration from campaign management. They are no longer need to employ their ESPs as quasi-CDPs (a role for which they are ill-suited) and may instead concentrate on campaign optimization. This will result in operational changes when more segments and individual message triggers are defined at the enterprise level. However, this is the only way to progress.
The increase of CDP use in major B2B companies places significant strain on legacy MAPs, which have typically relied (if reluctantly) on Salesforce or other CRM platforms as the single source of truth for customer data. It is more difficult for them to integrate with CDPs. In general, as stacks decompose, so does the necessity for an omnibus platform. Legacy, higher-end MAPs will be phased out by the late-middle 2020s, if not sooner.
Decoupling content management from outbound marketing platforms is also becoming more popular among businesses. Again, most ESPs and MAPs are actually terrible at content management. But, more crucially, they perform poorly in component block management, a critical prerequisite for the more tailored messaging that all of you desire.
To be fair, not every DAM or CMS will seamlessly interface with an outbound marketing platform. However, proper omnichannel content platforms (OCPs) have excelled at this.
Finally, some businesses are starting to isolate decisioning (for example, enterprise campaigns) from messaging platforms. Because simple message-sending is now a commodity, this has the potential to completely upset the business.
This trend began in the last decade, when many organizations separated transactional messaging from their outbound campaign platforms, simplifying their architectures and saving a lot of money in the process.
Today, we see enterprise initiatives to improve omnichannel orchestration logic (such as “next best action” decisioning) as the hub that drives greater consumer interaction, including campaigns. Finally, the sometimes pressing need to better combine media ad expenditure with campaigns on owned channels necessitates a reconsideration of which technologies create which messages.
A new model
This last trend has the potential to be the most significant. Some of our forward-thinking clients handle journeys and campaigns at a lower level of their stack. In terms of communications, they use low-cost, high-performance programmatic (API-based) senders for delivery and metric collection. Firms adopting this currently are more likely to be born-digital enterprises, but it will become more widespread in a few years.
This legless technique presents numerous difficulties. However, automation and scalability necessitate it. Businesses will run fewer ad hoc campaigns, with more always-on listening and better response.
The majority of businesses will choose to govern and execute AI-powered messaging at the enterprise level rather than at the edge. More consolidated marketing operations are likely to result in better client experiences. You will get better outbound and inbound engagement with lesser volumes of more tailored messaging.
It will take some time, but you can get started. Along the way, you may want to reevaluate your outbound marketing platform selection.
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