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A marketer’s guide to finding the gaps in your tech stack

7 minutes reading time

Jenna Paton

Young professional working at a laptop

78% of marketing leaders say their tech stack isn’t hitting their business goals, even after years of investment. 

There are over 15,000 marketing tools on the market, plus a growing number of AI copilots and agents jockeying for a place in your tech stack. On average, a marketing team will include 12-20 of them in their stack. That’s a lot of logins, dashboards, and data sources that all need to be in sync.

The problem isn’t usually having the wrong tools; it’s the gaps between them. 

When systems don’t share data, marketers miss opportunities they don’t always see. But you don’t need to completely overhaul your stack to improve results. Often, it’s the overlooked connections between the tools you already have that make the biggest difference. In this article, we’re going to look at where these gaps might be in your stack and where integrations could make the biggest difference. 

Goal 1: Driving revenue and sales from marketing

Timely, relevant marketing campaigns can deliver up to 7x ROI, but only when systems share data in real time.

An abandoned browse email needs website behavior to know which pages were viewed. Personalized product recommendations rely on order data. Every campaign becomes more relevant when your marketing platforms understand what drives your customers. 

Check for these commonly missed connections

If driving more revenue is your priority, start by checking these foundations:

  • Is your ecommerce platform or CRM connected to your marketing automation platform?
  • Are you set up to track website browsing behavior?
  • Is full order detail syncing, product, category, and value, not just a purchase flag?
  • Do returns and refunds sync with the customer profile?

If those are in place, dig a little deeper. This is often where marketers discover the connections that make campaigns more responsive.

  • How often is data being synced: real-time, hourly, or daily?
  • Can you trigger a send off a single browse or cart action?
  • Can you segment by product-level data, not just total spend or order count?
  • Can you attribute revenue back to the specific campaign or send that drove it?

The connections that matter most

To make campaigns respond in the moment customers act, these systems should be sharing data:

  • Your CRM or customer database
  • Your ecommerce platform, booking system, or wherever transactions happen
  • Your marketing automation platform
  • Any tool tracking on-site or app behavior
Young professional using martech stack to present revenue growth

Goal 2: Increasing customer retention and loyalty

On average, 80% of future revenue comes from 20% of your existing customers, so giving them a reason to come back is essential. And with 53% of consumers saying loyalty programs influence which brands they shop with, rewarding customers at the right time matters more than ever.

But when loyalty data sits outside your marketing platform, rewards, reminders, and review requests often run on fixed schedules rather than responding to real customer behavior. 

Check for these commonly missed connections

If customer retention is your goal, look for ways loyalty data isn’t automatically feeding into your marketing.

  • Is your loyalty program integrated with your marketing platform, or is the data exported manually?
  • Do reviews feed back into customer profiles, or sit in a separate dashboard?
  • Can something like a lapsing tier or changing point balance trigger a send on its own?

If the basics are covered, look at how your data is being used.

  • Can you segment by loyalty tier alongside behavior, not just points balance?
  • Are win-back campaigns based on each customer’s buying habits, or does everyone receive the same 60-day email?
  • Can a five-star review trigger a different journey than a two-star review?

The connections that matter most

To create loyalty campaigns that inspire repeat business, these systems should work together: 

Add-on loyalty tools are a great place to start, but every automated reward, review request, or win-back campaign depends on data moving between systems. Dotdigital Loyalty is built into Dotdigital Marketing, so loyalty data can trigger campaigns as soon as a customer’s points balance, tier, or activity changes, without waiting for another system to sync.

Shopper using loyalty rewards card in-store

Goal 3: Improving brand awareness

Building brand awareness isn’t about showing up once; it’s about showing up consistently wherever customers discover you.

Customers might click an ad, visit your website, hear about you from an influencer, walk into a store, and finally subscribe to your emails. Every interaction builds on the last, but only if your systems share data. When they don’t, every channel starts from scratch.

Check for these commonly missed connections

These are some of the most overlooked areas when marketers are trying to grow awareness and acquisition.

  • Do your retargeting ads use data from your marketing platform, so shoppers see the products they recently viewed?
  • Does influencer and referral activity feed back into your marketing platform, so you can automatically reward advocates and measure their impact?
  • Does your POS system sync in-store purchases to the same customer profile?
  • Do your marketing channels (email, SMS, WhatsApp, and web) share customer data so every interaction feels like one conversation instead of four disconnected ones?

The connections that matter most

To create a joined-up brand experience, these systems should work together:

Female consumer smile at brand she likes on phone

Goal 4: Making use of data and analytics for decision-making

Most teams aren’t short on data; they’re short on a fast way to turn data insights into a decision. Connecting your stack closes that gap. Insights and trends are easier to see, and reporting stops being a task that takes all day.

Check for these commonly missed connections

Start by looking at how data moves through your business today.

  • Is data flowing automatically, or is someone manually exporting and uploading?
  • If it is syncing, how often, in real time, hourly, or daily? 

Then look for gaps that could be slowing down decision-making.

  • Do you use an LLM? Is it connected to your marketing data, or are you exporting reports and uploading them every time you have a question?
  • Do you use analytics tools? Do they sync with data from other teams, such as sales or customer service, or only with marketing data?
  • When a customer contacts support, does that interaction feed back into the same profile your marketing decisions are based on?

The connections that matter most

To build a complete picture of your customers and your marketing performance, these systems should share data:

Getting these sources to talk to each other is what turns nine separate systems into one clear picture. Knowing how customers are responding to your marketing and what’s moving your numbers lets you make faster, data-backed decisions about your next campaign.

Young professional using tech stack to make data decisions

Bring it all together

Disconnected stacks rarely cause dramatic marketing fails. Instead, they create hundreds of missed opportunities because campaigns don’t trigger when you need them, and decisions are made on an incomplete picture of your customer. 

But you don’t need to rebuild your entire stack or get your hands on more tools to start seeing better results. Focus on the business goal you’re trying to achieve. Whether that’s growing revenue, improving retention, building awareness, or making faster decisions, look for the missing connections between your tools that might be holding you back. 

Once you’ve fixed the gaps that matter most, your stack starts to grow with your ambitions, not ahead of them.