How to stop wasting money on personalization

Investment in martech to improve personalization is the core of many CX and digital transformation strategies. However, capturing the benefits of personalization for businesses and customers comes at a cost. 

Gartner’s 2025 CMO Spend Survey found that CMOs prioritizing personalization in marketing initiatives allocate more of their budget to marketing technology—25.4%, in contrast to 21.8% for those with a lower emphasis on personalization. To make matters worse, 70% of marketers acknowledged that “measuring ROI on marketing activities and campaigns” posed a moderate or significant challenge.

Journey orchestration likely enhances personalization’s value exponentially, growing with each customer interaction. However, its advocates often overlook or are unaware of the substantial costs involved. To address the cost-to-value dilemma effectively, journey orchestration must evolve from an art form to a systematic and industrialized discipline.

Understanding unit costs for optimization

Today’s high costs partially stem from the manual crafting of campaigns, which hinders growth. Marketers are already boosting campaign activity, with an average 30% increase in campaigns in 2024 compared to 2023. If this trend continues, by 2034, you’ll be managing 10 times as many campaigns at perilously higher labor and technology costs. These rising costs are a hidden risk to journey orchestration ambitions.

However, there’s a solution that many have overlooked: treating journey orchestration like a factory at an industrial scale.

Dig deeper: Half of ecommerce brands lack the support to scale personalization effectively

What does it cost to deliver one personalized email? Most organizations don’t capture the fully loaded costs of email marketing, often stopping at vendor contracts for messaging alone. Capturing the full cost of a multichannel marketing campaign requires breaking down the process steps and analyzing accrued technology, data, content and labor costs to determine all production costs. Economists call this activity-based costing.

Analyze each platform involved in a personalized campaign or journey, considering fees from contracted costs or pay-as-you-go models. Establishing unit costs for activities allows you to forecast monthly costs, adjusting for seasonal spikes or dips in expenses.

Map your process to the seven steps of multichannel marketing

To transform your campaign operations into a scalable production line, map your process to the seven steps of multichannel marketing, each with a specific output used by the next step.

• Develop strategy: Translate customer insights and business strategy into a plan for multichannel targeting and activation against a particular audience. Output: Briefs
• Create customer segments: Implement the targeting plan against customer data assets in a multichannel marketing hub or Customer Data Platform to define the campaign’s audience segment(s). Output: Audiences
• Configure channels and journeys: Use a multichannel marketing hub to establish the flow of single or multiple steps across selected channels, determining which offers, content and timing will govern the journey. Output: Channel and journey steps
• Align/create content: Select existing content units, build new assets or generate variations, aligning the content to the journey from a content repository like a digital asset management platform. Output: Assets created/selected
• Review and approve: Ensure content aligns with brand guidelines and customer expectations, performing compliance and configuration testing through previews or sandbox environments across the tech stack. Output: Approved assets/campaign
• Execute: Schedule campaign touches or activate triggers in production systems (MMH, CDP, Personalization Engine, Mobile Marketing Platform, Ad Tech Platform, etc.) to deliver the campaign across selected touchpoints. Output: Deliver the campaign in multiple channels
• Reporting and analytics: Collect multichannel campaign response data and synthesize it into reports, dashboards and insights to evolve marketing strategy and test hypotheses. Output: Dashboards and reports.

When martech teams examine ongoing costs, they typically focus on vendor costs—software licensing or consumption—overlooking the reality that time spent activating a campaign through software adds to its cost and inhibits scale. Therefore, at each step, capture the labor, technology, data and media costs to assess the price of an individual unit of delivery. 

Mastering cost management

This exercise might leave you breathless, but don’t despair. It’s best to start small, make assumptions where needed and get an initial v1. 

Based on technology benchmarks from prices paid by Gartner clients, a straightforward individual channel marketing campaign targeting 1.4 million customers had a unit cost of about $6,240. In contrast, a more complex multichannel campaign, including digital advertising activation, resulted in over $56,464.

Making certain assumptions about click rates, digital commerce conversion rates, and average order value, the campaign is projected to have a revenue impact of only $27,000. When accounting for costs, leaders are wise to question the campaign’s return on effort. At scale, spikes in organic activity or a few dazzling campaigns can further obscure the growing drag on martech ROI.

Dig deeper: Smart appliances are great for marketers, if they’re useful for consumers

To identify and combat these inefficiencies, address the primary driver of skyrocketing orchestration costs—labor—by creating a roadmap that emphasizes team upskilling, streamlines workflows with genAI and encourages more efficient working methods at each production stage. Incorporate journey cost optimization into your martech framework, alongside regular audits and roadmap updates, to continually assess the value of journey orchestration.

Brace for impact: Navigating the pricing shift

According to a recent Gartner survey, 34% of marketing teams encountered unexpected additional fees beyond what they believed was covered by their agreement. In an era of shrinking budgets, CMOs can’t afford such surprises.

Yet, vendors increasingly adopt consumption-based pricing models in agreements with marketers. This shifts cost away from a base license toward consumable units tied to the activities of — for example, the campaign factory. As martech tools transition to consumption-based pricing, the baseline cost drops significantly. However, every marketing activity—running predictions, requesting AI prompts, or building AI agents—will incur charges, often aggressively.

Dig deeper: Your 4-step guide to local marketing success

Understanding unit costs lets you manage expenses across technology stacks and vendor contracts, adapt to new pricing models and mitigate risks associated with consumption-based pricing. When judged collectively and with insight into the actual costs, much of the work of multichannel marketers may be unprofitable—get command of your unit economics before that happens to you.

Benjamin Bloom is a VP analyst in the Gartner Marketing Practice, specializing in martech stack optimization, personalization and customer data management. He presented live on this subject and others at the Gartner Marketing Symposium/Xpo, June 2-4, 2025, in Denver, CO.