Marketing teams face growing demands to deliver personalized, data-driven experiences across channels, but fragmented data and legacy tools can limit visibility and agility to deliver unified customer journeys. Zeta Marketing Platform can enable organizations to deepen customer insights, enhance campaign performance, and streamline execution through a full-service, data-driven approach. Zeta leverages artificial intelligence to streamline customer acquisition, growth, and retention. Organizations across industries seeking to modernize their marketing technology stacks and scale acquisition through personalized customer experiences should consider Zeta’s full-service solution.

Zeta Global commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study and examine the potential return on investment (ROI) enterprises may realize by deploying Zeta Marketing Platform.¹ The purpose of this study is to provide readers with a framework to evaluate the potential financial impact of Zeta Marketing Platform on their organizations.

To better understand the benefits, costs, and risks associated with this investment, Forrester interviewed four decision-makers with experience using Zeta Marketing Platform. For the purposes of this study, Forrester aggregated the experiences of the interviewees and combined the results into a single composite organization, which is a global organization with revenue of $15 billion per year.

Interviewees said that prior to using Zeta Marketing Platform, their organizations relied on fragmented data and legacy tools that lacked integration and scalability. Data was often inconsistent or duplicated across platforms, limiting visibility into customer behavior and making it difficult to execute personalized campaigns. Prior solutions yielded limited success, leaving them with siloed marketing efforts and low return on ad spend. These limitations led to difficulties understanding customer behavior, ineffective targeting, and manual campaign processes.

After investing in Zeta Marketing Platform, the interviewees consolidated their marketing technology stack and added new acquisition channels beyond brand-owned touchpoints. Key results from the investment include performance lift in return on ad spend and conversion rates, automated and personalized email campaigns, and new audience reach.

Quantified benefits. Three-year, risk-adjusted present value (PV) quantified benefits for the composite organization include:

• Increased return on ad spend to 6x. The composite organization reports a 3x improvement in return on ad spend after adopting Zeta, with performance rising from 2x to 6x or higher. The composite reports the ability to target high-intent audiences using enriched customer data and real-time behavioral signals across channels.

• Reduced time spent on campaigns and email journey creation by 50%. Teams within the composite reduce campaign setup and email journey creation time by half using Zeta’s dashboards, AI-powered automation, and natural language query tools. What previously took the composite hours now takes minutes, freeing up resources for strategic work and accelerating speed to market.

• Avoided legacy system costs by consolidated tech stack. By consolidating multiple legacy platforms into Zeta’s unified platform, the composite avoids significant annual costs. Savings include overages, licensing fees, and support contracts, recovering $1.5M+ annually through decommissioning.

Unquantified benefits. Benefits that provide value for the composite organization but are not quantified for this study include:

• Improved customer experience. Zeta enables unified customer profiles and real-time data access, enabling the composite organization to deliver personalized, targeted communications and service across channels.

• Deeper strategic insights. The composite organization makes faster, data-driven decisions using Zeta’s identity graph to reveal customer behaviors and market opportunities.

• Increased confidence in regulatory compliance. Zeta Marketing Platform provides the composite with built-in compliance knowledge and data privacy to support secure data handling and compliance with industry regulations.

Costs. Three-year, risk-adjusted PV costs for the composite organization include:

• Implementation fees. The composite organization incurs an implementation fee to set up the platform.

• License and platform fees. Zeta Marketing Platform has annual license fees to use the solution and access Zeta white-glove service.

The financial analysis that is based on the interviews found that a composite organization experiences benefits of $28.7M over three years versus costs of $7.3M, adding up to a net present value (NPV) of $21.4M and an ROI of 295%.