Feb 12, 2024
Today’s marketers have more on their plate than ever — from reaching users across many channels to managing customer data, analyzing campaign results, reporting to stakeholders, collaborating with other teams, and much more.
Juggling all of these tasks successfully depends on having versatile, robust, and user-friendly tools. Fortunately, that’s exactly what unified marketing platforms are built for.
In this guide, you’ll learn everything you need to know about unified marketing platforms, including:
We’ll also show you how Insider — our unified marketing platform for mid-market and enterprise businesses — can help you reach customers on all channels (including your website, mobile app, email, SMS, and more), personalize their experience, automate campaigns, aggregate your customer data, run A/B tests, and much more.
What is a unified marketing platform?
The benefits of using a unified marketing platform (over point solutions)
Insider: The best unified marketing platform
Unify your marketing stack and maximize your budget with Insider
A unified marketing platform is a type of software that helps teams manage various marketing activities (like campaign creation, automation, and personalization) and different channels from one place.
These “all-in-one” platforms do that by bringing together different tools and customer data, which enables marketers to build, launch, automate, optimize, and analyze their efforts across all channels from a single place.
Unified platforms are different from traditional point solutions which are built to serve a specific channel or use case.
For example, a traditional email marketing solution like Mailchimp is primarily focused on building and automating email campaigns. In contrast, a unified platform like Insider can be used for the same purpose and for a ton of different channels and use cases, like website personalization, omnichannel marketing automation, WhatsApp marketing, and much more.
While point solutions are suitable for small businesses, unified marketing platforms are a much better option for large organizations. Specifically, unified platforms have five essential benefits over point solutions, especially for mid-market and enterprise teams:
Insider brings together essential capabilities for companies looking to unify their marketing technology stack — like broad channel support, advanced personalization, and AI-powered marketing automation and journey orchestration.
Over 1200 brands, including the likes of Adidas, Toyota, Coca-Cola, Gap, CNN, and Lexus, use Insider to personalize all their communications, build, manage, and analyze omnichannelmarketing campaigns, and nurture long-term customer relationships.
That’s why Insider has been ranked as the top omnichannel marketing platform by IDC.
As a versatile unified marketing platform, Insider also ranks as one of the top solutions in many other categories, including:
In the next sections, we’ll explore Insider’s key tools and functionalities that make it an ideal unified marketing platform for mid-market and enterprise teams in industries like retail, financial services, automotive, telecommunications, and more.
As we said, using a bunch of point solutions creates data silos. Customer data is stored in each system and if they’re not connected — e.g., via an API, custom integration, or a native connector — you won’t have a good view of the customer journey or reliable insights to power your campaigns.
Insider lets you overcome this problem by:
First, our Integration Hub offers native integrations for all sorts of tools, platforms, and solutions, including:
Plus, you can connect to all sorts of other systems, like data management platforms (DMP) or legacy solutions, using our flexible API. Put simply, Insider helps improve your marketing performance by ensuring crucial data is being shared in real-time across your martech stack.
Besides connecting to the rest of your solutions, Insider can also act as a central database for all your customer data. This is possible thanks to our enterprise CDP, which is built to unify data from all online and offline sources, like CRMs, CMSs, APIs, analytics tools, customer service software, automation platforms, and more.
This allows Insider to create detailed, 360-degree profiles of all your customers that contain key insights like:
In short, these profiles contain everything your brand needs to truly become customer-centric and create successful personalized campaigns. Plus, Insider’s CDP comes at no additional cost, so you don’t have to pay extra to consolidate your data and get a clear view of your customers’ journeys.
You also have plenty of advanced segmentation options that make it easier to find and target the right customers for your marketing efforts. These include:
The ability to aggregate your customer data and segment your audiences ensures your campaigns are always powered by reliable insights and targeted at the right customers.
Another key differentiator for Insider is our platform’s broad channel support. Instead, of focusing on a few channels, Insider lets you reach customers and build campaigns across 12+ touchpoints, including:
You can use just one or a combination of channels when working with Insider. For example, you can start with our platform’s website personalization and email marketing capabilities. Over time, you expand to other channels and use cases to bring more of your workflows under one platform.
In general, the more you can consolidate your stack, the less you’ll need to jump between different platforms which saves time and effort. And as we said, you’ll also bring down the TCO of your martech stack, as you won’t be paying for a bunch of different marketing tools.
When you can reach customers on a variety of channels, it becomes essential to maximize each interaction. That’s why Insider enables you to personalize your content, messaging, and product recommendations across all touchpoints, including:
You can see an example of Insider’s omnichannel capabilities in our case study with fashion brand NA-KD. They used Insider to ditch their old coupon-based marketing in favor of creating personalized experiences across:
This helped the brand achieve a 25% uplift in customer lifetime value (CLTV) and a 72x ROI in 12 months.
With so many channels, tools, and functionalities, it can be difficult to create personalized customer experiences across all touchpoints with your brand. Building and managing campaigns can also be very time-consuming for marketers, especially without the right marketing automation tools in place.
That’s why Insider offers Architect — a powerful customer journey builder and marketing automation solution that overcomes these challenges and helps you:
As you can see, the journey builder gives you full control of each journey — from the channels it takes place on to the wait times, conditions, and more.
For a real-life example, check out our case study with eCommerce sports brand Slazenger. They used Architect to orchestrate personalized journeys across their website, email, push notifications, and SMS, resulting in a 700% increase in customer acquisition and a 49x ROI in just eight weeks.
As an AI-powered solution, Architect can also do a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to campaign creation and optimization, including:
Insider lets you A/B test pretty much any element of your marketing strategy — from simple subject lines and images to channels (e.g., email vs SMS) and entire journey paths. You can set this up and analyze results directly inside Architect or in the dedicated A/B test analytics tab.
However, we also know that scaling A/B tests can get difficult, especially when you’re running hundreds of campaigns across a dozen channels.
That’s why we also offer A/B Test Winner Auto-Selection. This AI-powered feature automatically detects and guides users to the winning variant in each A/B test. All you have to do is:
That way, you’re saving tons of time and effort from having to manually revenue each test, interpret the results, and adjust your campaigns accordingly.Finally, Insider gives you plenty of ways to gather direct user feedback. For example, you can use our Survey Builder to create and embed different types of surveys directly into your website or mobile app.
You can also run surveys across different channels. One particularly powerful way to increase survey responses is by using AMP emails to allow customers to submit their answers inside the email, with no need to go to an external site or app.
If you want to learn how these and all other Insider capabilities work, visit our website’s Product Demo Hub. The hub lets you explore use cases across channels (e.g., website, email, SMS), industries (e.g., retail, finance, media), use cases (e.g., unifying customer data, personalizing experiences, analyzing results), and more.
While unified marketing platforms offer a ton of functionality, they can also be overwhelming. The sheer amount of features and channels can result in digital marketing teams spending months implementing and learning the platform before they start seeing any results from it.
This is something we’ve tried to eliminate with Insider.
First, our platform comes with a ton of templates for all channels and various use cases. You have templates for generating leads on your website, collecting survey answers via email, celebrating customer milestones, cross-selling complementary items to boost AOV, and much more.
Second, we’ve also invested heavily in building an experienced, global support team that can answer questions and resolve issues quickly.
This is an area where many large service providers fall short because they outsource their implementation and service functions to third-party agencies or system integrators. However, at Insider, everything is handled by internal support teams that:
Thanks to our focus on getting customers started as quickly as possible, Insider has constantly been ranked at the top of categories like ease of setup, ease of use, support quality, and time-to-value.
Insider is an ideal unified marketing platform for mid-market and enterprise companies looking to make the most out of their marketing efforts and budget.
It enables you to build personalized, automated, and highly effective campaigns across touchpoints — from websites and mobile apps to channels like email, push notifications, SMS, WhatsApp, and more.
Additionally, our enterprise marketing platform can:
Lastly, our easy channel integrations, experienced support team, and versatile templates will help you get started and see results as quickly as possible.
Schedule a demo with our team to learn how Insider can benefit your business specifically.
Written by
Katie Morley
Katie is an award-winning content marketer with over eight years of experience in content strategy, development, and copywriting. As Global Content Director at Insider, she currently oversees content strategy across 26 regions. Fun fact: Katie read 64 books last year (for which she owes a long commute and two week-long holidays where she spent approximately six hours a day with her nose in a book).