Constantly reinventing your brand’s digital experiences is an essential part of realising business growth in today’s competitive landscape. Finding efficiencies around engagement is equally important if organisations are to improve marketing ROI and bottom-line performance in the face of ongoing volatile economic market conditions. Yet the hard line being taken by businesses on profitable growth right now is feeding a worrying trend of short termism. And it’s commonly dictating digital experience investments as a result.

In Sitecore’s latest DX Vision report, which canvassed more than 600 marketers across the US, UK and Australia, marketing leaders were seeing efficiency and effectiveness as contradictory priorities when it comes to their digital experience programs. Nearly half (46%) cite cost savings as the catalyst for the emphasis on streamlining operations and improving digital efficiency to maintain profitability in a competitive market. On the other hand, 47% cite revenue and growth targets as drivers of digital experience mandates as their organisations strive to meet financial goals and expand market share.

But even with the majority of brands prioritising digital investment, Sitecore’s report shows a whopping 53% gap in excellence versus the digital experience aspirations marketing and digital leaders hold. More than eight in 10 marketing leaders (86 per cent) say their organisation has not reached full digital experience maturity, with legacy and disconnected technology and strategic alignment the most acute problems being faced.

The good news is AI innovation brings an array of capabilities to rethink operational processes as well as drive efficiencies in the way you manage, deliver and scale digitally. AI won’t, however, be an effective tool if you don’t have your back-of-house in order, or a customer North Star to corral the business behind.

Building standout digital experiences requires overcoming what remains a persistent lack of cross-functional alignment, connecting the dots on technology, realising customer journeys across channels to improve agility, harnessing more data-driven insights, and rethinking the content supply chain. In other words, overhauling the engine of the plane while you’re still flying it – all while meeting the expectations of customers sitting in the cabin.

As part of a two-part series of roundtables across Melbourne and Sydney, Mi3, along with main partner, Sitecore, and supporting Sydney partner, AKQA, brought together marketing, customer and digital experience leaders to talk about how they strike the balance between efficiency and effectiveness in digital experience delivery, as well as what business imperatives and challenges are feeding into how they progress their vision.

Relentless focus on profitable growth

Profitable growth was the through line in both Melbourne and Sydney roundtables discussions, with those in private equity owned and ASX-listed businesses especially striving to deliver more effectiveness using an efficiency and profitability lens. For example, one Australian beauty FMCG brand has shifted from ‘fast growth at all costs’ to a distinctly different mentality prioritising profitability. This shift is occurring while negotiating a growing mix direct-to-consumer, retail and social commerce channels.

With other marketing and digital leaders, diversifying product lines and building more robust member loyalty programs are key to improve the bottom line through more customer stickiness.

Commonly hindering these experience and effectiveness improvements, however, is the fact almost every organisation is going through rapid business transformation. Acquisitions and restructuring are common, triggering substantial operational changes marketers often don’t have much control over. Consolidation, team restructures, changing reporting lines, ways of working, shifting marketing and digital capability ownership and drawn-out digital transformation are all repercussions. This makes it incredibly difficult for marketing and digital teams to keep an eye on the digital experience prize – efficiency, effective or otherwise.

One CMO of an online trading business has survived three restructures in 18 months, then 10 per cent headcount reduction. She now faces a situation where paid media runs out of Singapore and the UK while marketing automation is based in Europe. Budget consolidation, prioritisation of complex trader customer cohorts – all while market conditions crunch post-Covid – make it harder to acquire people than ever. Squeezing every ounce out of the budget to make numbers is critical, the CMO said.

Such short-term need to prove ROI quickly often takes precedence over strategic, non-working Capex investment. For many attendees, getting to an efficiency metric, along with TCO and ROI expectations set in weeks or months, not years, dictates decision making. This is despite recognition that making bigger bets upfront is what earns both efficiency and effectiveness in the long term.

Take the CMO of a telco, who is desperately trying to ensure his team can measure its contribution to revenue. With eight acquisitions in six-and-a-half years, systems are disconnected and the ability to demonstrate marketing’s contribution has turned into a very inefficient combination of data sources manually.

“We had to deal with different entries and create our own sales cut so we could start driving our metrics and see what returns we were getting on our campaigns. Without that, it was hard to gain investment, prove the worth of a campaign, whether it was demand gen, awareness or influence. We had to get in front of the finance team, utilise those results coming out of those separate entities and build something that would feed our marketing cue for measurement,” the telco CMO said.

As another attendee pointed out, there is no straight customer or growth ROI a marketer can put to such investment. But how else can a marketer prove revenue return? “It’s a straight cost you need but they’ll go, ‘really, do you?’” the second CMO admitted.

Tech debt, capability gaps and the integration problem

Legacy tech and data integration remains an enormous burden inside companies, and it’s hurting digital innovation and experience progression. With scant exceptions, attendees lacked fully connected systems, a single view of customers across channels, or a unified data and execution layer to optimise customer interactions across the lifecycle. Nor could many prove engagement impact through the experience lifecycle as customers move through different lifestages or touchpoints.

The marketing director of a travel operator said it had invested in the “Lamborghini” of marketing and digital technology stacks. But a lack of capability plus connected systems stop the team from lifting effectiveness, and team efficiency suffers as a result. While the martech stack is being used for email marketing, the travel operator is yet to deploy audiences for paid media. Most significantly, there’s no way of measuring how activity orchestrated is performing through to bookings. Archaic systems and luxury next-gen martech are coexisting as islands.

The CMO of a B2B financial services company is also navigating hefty tech debt as a result of growth through acquisition. Systems don’t speak to each other, websites were siloed, and culturally segregated business units persisted. Her big win over recent months has been a rebrand that enabled the business to consolidate 30 disparate websites across 16 regional jurisdictions previously operating in isolation.

“We’ve given them one digital presence. To actually onboard those and go yes, we’ll create content, do personalisation, regionalisation for audiences might sound like a simple project to someone who is new with no legacy, but it was so hard for us,” the fin services B2B CMO said.

As Sitecore’s DX report identified, there are 15 drivers of digital experience. These group into five main categories: Strategy, including strategic alignment, digital delivery and your team; technology, incorporating technical performance, your digital experience stack, and technical compliance; content, including processes, your Web presence and your omnichannel muscle; intelligence, or the quality of your data and analytics, personalisation and AI; and optimisation across marketing, commercial and digital innovation. According to the report, strategy and technology are the biggest gaps across organisations right now.

Stuart O’Neill, Sitecore’s Area VP for ANZ, emphasised the importance of driving institutional change while “keeping the plane in the air.”

“There’s a lot to navigate, and the market conditions are undeniably tough,” he shared, reflecting on the efficiency-driven themes dominating recent discussions. “The key questions remain: How do we achieve more with less? How do we deliver personalisation at scale while balancing economies and demonstrating clear TCO and ROI outcomes? Integration and the role of AI are also top of mind—how can we do it all more efficiently and effectively?”

Winning over the tech team

There was clear recognition CMOs have to understand the priorities of their IT counterparts if they’re to find a way to progress the digital experience agenda.

“CMOs need to be best friends with the CTO / CIO and agree on prioritisation projects when you’re going to the c-suite,” the CMO of an Australian apparel manufacturer commented. “It’s all politics. Ask them: What’s problematic about our tech stack for you, and how do we plan a business case out together? What is the choice I make and how would that be detrimental for you? What challenges does it create – budget, limitations? How do I show you how this investment delivers against business outcomes, so we can go in together to secure budget? It’s these upfront conversations to touch on shared goals that we need to have.”

O’Neill also highlighted how risk remains a critical priority for IT leaders. “CIOs and CTOs are juggling multiple challenges. One is ensuring they have enough resources to tackle the lengthy priority lists they face—like building a house where there’s always more to do. But their other key concern is mitigating risk,” he explained.

“For IT leaders, success is about keeping systems live, minimising risk, and delivering services back to the business. As marketers, your goals centre on driving revenue, customer engagement, and growth. Bridging these conversations—aligning the operational goals of IT with the business outcomes marketing aims to achieve—is crucial,” O’Neill added.

One attendee who designed and is now deploying a mobile app-led loyalty proposition for a large retailer said his challenge is lacking the data to validate, disprove or prove anything.

“For finance, they can’t wrap their heads around it – they need a number to put into a cell so everyone is happy,” he said. “The biggest challenge is these programs are a reinvestment – that’s where the give and take is and the sacrifice… If that mentality is something we can drive, that we’re investing versus the cost of it, the whole runway opens up. But as long as the loyalty program is seen as a cost, the first thing people will do is cut it.

“Once they start cutting, the behaviour you designed for with the proposition changes,” – and not for the better, he warned.

Regulation imperatives

Then there’s regulatory burden to contend with. It’s obvious in financial services, but certainly regulation in other industries such as gambling and betting, retail and services face is also a driver of transformation. They’re rethinking tech purchases, data policies and how to personalisation to life in customer interactions and touchpoints as a result.

At one hotel and entertainment operator, it’s absolutely critical to deliver technology solutions that enable teams to share functional information and improve experiences onsite and digitally, while managing reputation and heightened regulatory requirements. It’s created a governance structure where IT and marketing both participate, and which manages a list of IT projects, scoping out costs, when jobs will happen and what the priorities are based on business need.

“It does mean we have a piecemeal solution in the back end… and it does mean we sometimes have to hold back things in the business… We see that as opportunity for the business and will be the ones to say, let’s find a way to help, but it means you sacrifice some things you want,” the hotel and entertainment operator’s marketing leader said.

Personalisation at scale

Marketers agree big strides can be made in digital experience through personalisation at scale. But again, the ability to make this a reality varies wildly across the organisations represented at the Mi3 roundtables.

One pure-play pet retailer was further advanced thanks to a unified view firstly on what digital metrics matter, and secondly, how they ladder up into its vision to be like the local corner store of old for customers. That North Star of knowing what a person wants and helping them find it, efficiently, an org-wide priority.

“Then you find congruency in the way you are all thinking and developing, whether it’s marketing campaigns or product,” the pet retailer’s CMO said. “In my world, those are intimately interlinked. It then comes to data, piping that in. We want to get to one-to-one personalisation and knowing exactly your pet and their needs.”

Building a tool to change the breed of pet in its imagery based on a customer’s pet led to a 5X improvement in engagement. “We know personalisation works, we just have to figure out how to scale it; that’s the hard bit,” said the CMO.

Customer service is part of this picture too, and a trial of AI service bots is even starting to challenge mindsets inside the pure-play pet retailer.  “We used to have a product pet plan, then used macros to send you a very personalised nutrition plan and so on. We’re now using AI for that and some of the algorithms are better than we are,” the CMO said.

The pure-play pet retailer is now attempting to shift metrics from campaign results to cohorts, monthly not weekly results, and placing more emphasis on “cohort health” – what most of us would recognise as a more profitable customer and lifetime value approach.

“Most believe will agree customer-first important – if they believe it, surely you’d see cohort health is an important and right metric, not how effective your campaign is,” the CMO said. “If you follow that through, you start to win that fight and debate that don’t just chase revenue, chase cohort health.”

It’s a loft goal. Measurement is something most marketers are struggling with. “Where I think we all lose a bit of credibility as marketers with the CFO is when we say we had these digital metrics, and they drove this sort of thing, and these impressions, and there are thousands of ways to prove the case for green,” an insurance group marketing and customer chief said. “You have to have a whole-of-system view.

“We spent the last year really getting clear on three objectives. There are hundreds of ways we could cut our metrics. I had to stand in front of investors, a tough audience, as they want to know how you spend the money and what we do as a cost centre. I had to be able to articulate big brand goals, being relevant for the next generation in sales. We spent a lot of time to get there – it’s not perfect. But it’s a framework to say ok, when we are in-person and it feels like a heavier lift, the efficiency is not there, this is what we get, and this is the cumulative effect of the things we are doing. It’s not so much trading off, it’s the mix.”

Where digital versus humans fit

Of course it’s not all about digital interactions. An omni-channel experience play was critical for roundtable attendees, and fighting to ensure digital efficiency doesn’t dictate experience decisions is crucial.

Digitisation versus human interaction is a live debate inside one insurance provider. “The business of insurance is quite a rational purchase, and you don’t really think about it until you need it. Then it moves into being a very emotional experience. When you’re in that environment, which can possibly be the worst day of your life, and you’re wanting to speak to claims consultant to understand impact and support you might get if floods hit or your house burnt down, do you want that to be a digital experience or human experience?” the CMO asked.

“Striking the balance from a customer experience perspective is so challenging and it’s critical to get right.”

The B2B financial services CMO said the blanket statement digital is more effective “make sense when you compare it to manual processes”. In reality, any kind of personalisation means significant investment in getting the ecosystem of systems talking to each other, an ability to surface and execute against data. That upfront investment again.

“We are building a universe of APIs. It’s a digital initiative that will, down the track, enable me to build personalisation and an ROI, plus efficiency. But right now we have to invest millions to build the APIs. That’s a hard sell to the board and your CFO,” the CMO said. “It’s my role to justify that. People who say we’re the colouring in department? Frankly, we’re trying to think about very big picture things that tech people think about. In the end, our solution was to commercialise it. We opened up APIs to ourselves so we could build product, but we also sold this to our clients to allow them to build their own customised apps. That was the only way to get that business case across the line.”

In discussing experience projects with CMOs, AKQA chief strategy officer, Iona Macgregor, said it’s realised the role they play in the company increasingly involves ensuring functions across the business speak the same language.

“CMOs have to be mindful of overcoming complexity when talking about tech solutions or campaign orchestration.  That means being really disciplined in avoiding jargon and making sure we have a cohesive framework to ensure accountability across the whole business,” Macgregor said. “We are partnering more closely than ever to support CMOs on their internal challenges. Designing solutions is part of it, of course. The other part is making sure everyone is along for the ride and shaping the narrative that will get there.”