Just over two years ago Storyblok conducted an extensive research project into how medium-large ecommerce companies viewed the performance of their websites. We asked senior directors at businesses across Europe and the US a range of questions including how much they were spending on marketing tech, the time it took to maintain their website, estimations on any losses they think were occurring, and crucially, if they were proud or embarrassed of their site. The answers we received were both shocking and, at face value, very confusing. 

47% of businesses said they were embarrassed of their website despite spending an average of £325k on marketing technology. They estimated that they lost £47,000 in sales each year and spent 3.5 hours a week fixing website errors. Despite all of this, more than 90% said they were happy with their marketing solutions, with the vast majority believing it delivered good or great ROI. We quickly dubbed this phenomenon ‘webarrassment’ and set about trying to understand this clear disconnect between performance and satisfaction.

What became apparent to us is that there was a level of complacency and low expectations combined with a lack of knowledge about what modern marketing solutions can and could deliver. Put simply, business leaders were happy with the performance of their marketing solutions because they did not know they should do better. Losses due to poor website user experience were, in their view, par for the course. 

At the time we believed that as new marketing solutions came on to the market and gained traction, this culture of low expectations would naturally be solved. We were wrong. Last month, we conducted the survey again – and the results were not good. The level of embarrassment remained nearly identical – 46%. Marketing tech spend had grown to an average of $486k, losses due to poor website experience had climbed to £71,500, while website error fixing times had also soared to 4.3 hours per week – with 8% now stating that it took them 10 hours per week (up from 2% on our previous survey). At the same time, satisfaction with marketing tech performance and ROI had actually marginally increased. 

What makes these results all the more surprising is that the economic environment has become much more volatile since the last survey – squeezing the margins of many businesses and forcing many of them to focus on cost-cutting. You would have assumed that these conditions would have put legacy tech performance under a microscope and led to improvements. 

A new generation of composable architecture and solutions provides a much more cost and time-effective solution than inefficient legacy tech stacks that are increasingly unfit for their purpose. Nearly all the problems we uncovered in our research would be solved if these businesses embraced modern marketing technology. A significant minority of businesses are taking this journey, but many more remain steadfast in their commitment to outdated marketing tech solutions. Why is this the case? I believe there are a number of reasons at play. 

First, risk-aversion. A CMO is seldom fired for building a tech stack out of global tech brand names – even if they know deep down they aren’t the right fit and will cost much more than newer alternatives. 

Second, conservatism. A legacy tech stack might have served a business well for many years. However, none of them were built with the modern multi-channel marketing environment in mind. They have had to bolt-on new tools to existing solutions and generally bend to adapt. The result is that, on paper, they may seem to do everything a business needs, but, in reality, they don’t do many of these things well. The advent of AI tools is only accelerating this degradation. Businesses can be slow to realise that the root cause of the underperformance of their marketing function and customer experience is that the tech stack that used to support their operations is now dragging them down. 

Third, a lack of technical expertise at decision-making levels. Composable architecture means you can source a range of different solutions that are tailored exactly to your needs and join them together to create a new tech stack. This stack can be scaled or modified to meet a business’s changing needs. This is a far cry from signing one contract with a big legacy player. It requires a more in depth understanding of the solutions that are available and the real needs of a company. This level of technical knowledge married with in-depth operational and commercial insight is missing from a lot of companies. They stick with the tried and tested solutions because they do not know or do not understand that there are better, more appropriate, and far more cost-effective alternatives. 

Finally, transformation fatigue. It used to be that if you wanted to change your tech stack it was often an incredibly costly, time consuming and disruptive endeavor. Spending these substantial resources – including reskilling entire teams – was not something to be done without lengthy consideration and planning. It was also undertaken with the knowledge that the new solution might not actually be any better – or possibly even worse. This is no longer the case. Composable architecture is inherently adaptable and can work within most existing tech architectures. Many of the new generation of solutions and tools are also built with user accessibility in mind – they don’t require lengthy training to use. Importantly, most of these solution providers do not follow the legacy tech business model of lengthy, expensive contracts. The result is that businesses have much more freedom to adopt the latest innovations without the need for large scale transformation projects. 

If you are a business leader who looks at their website and wishes it could be better – the simple question you have to ask yourself is, ‘what is stopping you from improving it?’. I would happily bet that any reason you might come up with will fall into one or more of the categories I’ve outlined above. The reality is that you do not have to suffer with webarrassment – the medicine for it can be found in modern composable marketing solutions.

Photo by Francisco De Legarreta C. on Unsplash