MarTech Stack Consolidation for a Retail Group — From 14 Tools to 4, 40% Cost Reduction

"We had been adding tools to solve problems that better use of existing tools would have solved. The consolidation gave us a stack that actually works together and cost us significantly less."

— Chief Marketing Officer, Multi-Channel Retail Group

We had tools we had forgotten we were paying for. Literally — during the audit, we found two tools we were still paying annual licences for that nobody had logged into for eighteen months. The stack had been built by three different marketing directors with different philosophies and the only thing connecting the tools was manual exports.

Fourteen tools with overlapping capabilities, no unified customer identity, and a combined annual cost of £840K. The marketing team spent significant time managing tool integrations rather than running campaigns. Customer journey data was split across email, web analytics, paid media, and loyalty platforms with no way to connect a customer across touchpoints.

We mapped every tool against the capabilities it was actually being used for, not what it was licensed for. This produced a clear picture of redundancy. We then mapped the required capabilities to the Adobe Experience Cloud stack, which could replace 10 of the 14 tools while adding capabilities the team did not currently have.

We consolidated to four tools: Adobe Experience Cloud (replacing 10 tools), a specialist SEO platform, a customer data warehouse, and a loyalty platform. Adobe Real-Time CDP unified customer identity across all channels. The consolidation was phased over 12 weeks to avoid campaign disruption.

Annual MarTech spend reduced from £840K to £490K — a 42% saving. Customer identity unification enabled personalisation that had been impossible with the fragmented stack. Email revenue per send increased by 180% in the first quarter of unified operations.

Is this familiar?

Adobe Experience Cloud challenges in Manufacturing — what we see most often

Marketing technology stacks accumulate. A tool is bought to solve a problem, the problem is solved, and the tool stays on the invoice. Another tool is bought by a new marketing director, which overlaps with three existing tools. After six years, a medium-sized marketing team can be running 12 to 16 tools with significant redundancy.

The cost of this redundancy is not only financial. Fragmented data across multiple tools prevents the connected customer experiences that personalisation requires. You cannot build a single customer view when the data is split across six systems with no reliable identity linkage.

Celumai runs MarTech consolidation programmes that reduce tool count, reduce cost, and unify customer data. The starting point is always a capability audit — mapping what each tool is actually used for versus what it was licensed for.