Typically integrated within the larger technology stack, a point solution is a tool, product or service which aims to deliver on one, singular value proposition for the marketing organization such as triggered emails or A/B tests.
Often, these tools can be deployed at reasonably low costs, driving strong uplift and ROI for smaller businesses or folks with lower budgets. However, while point solutions can excel at solving specific siloed challenges, their utility begins to break down when looking at the holistic onsite experience.
Since enterprise-grade personalization involves several moving parts, the number of point solutions in the marketing stack can quickly balloon, presenting a serious data challenge. As marketers bring on additional point solutions, essential data on user behavior gets stuck in silos and becomes less and less actionable.
Not only does patching together a set of point solutions for personalization greatly hamper a team’s experience velocity and ability to act in real-time, managing vendor bloat has a massive utility cost.
A Unified Approach to Marketing Technology
With a unified technology stack, data flows freely and machine learning algorithms can serve personalized experiences, recommendations and targeted messaging based on all available consumer data, ultimately making a business more money.
Not just reliant on a sliver of data from a mere blip in the customer journey, with more data sources, a brand can better succeed in predicting the desired outcome for each user across channels and devices. This type of deployment is near impossible with point solutions as it would require connecting data silos from multiple programs but can be easily accomplished with a unified platform.
With the cohesive data set that a unified personalization technology platform provides, you can increase revenue, lower total cost of ownership and boost your team’s ability to deliver a superior experience to your customers.
For more on the point solution vs. unified platform debate, read this in-depth article.
