New eClerx Research: 78% of Marketing Leaders Say Martech Investment Fails to Deliver ROI

The eClerx Marketing Report 2026 exposes the activation gap blocking martech spend from generating business results, and offers best practices to close it

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--eClerx Services Ltd (ECLERX.NS), a global leader in AI-powered analytics, digital operations, automation, and business process management, today announced the release of its eClerx Marketing Report 2026: Mind the Gap. Based on survey insights, the report reveals that despite significant investments in marketing technology, most organizations struggle to fully leverage their data.

The findings suggest that martech stacks are designed to produce insights, but not to use them. The real barrier to ROI is not the martech stack itself—nor will additional tools solve it—but rather the need to bridge the gap between intelligence and execution.

The eClerx Marketing Report 2026 captures insights from a survey of 366 U.S.-based marketing leaders, including CMOs, VPs, and heads of marketing operations, digital, brand, and growth. Participants represented organizations with annual revenues ranging from $500M to over $5B, spanning more than 15 industries. The findings highlight a key concept for effective martech utilization: the ‘activation gap’ between generating insights and having the capability to act on them.

“Stack maturity does not always translate to activation maturity,” said Scott Houchin, Chief Marketing Officer at eClerx. “AI has undoubtedly accelerated the pace of insight generation, yet many organizations struggle to embed those insights into workflows. Without the right architecture to connect data, analytics, and execution, even the best intelligence will not drive meaningful impact.”

Key findings of the eClerx Marketing Report 2026 include:

• 75% are making investment decisions based on partial data, while only 25% describe a fully data-driven environment.
• 47% are only moderately confident in their ability to measure true ROI across channels. The tools are there, but the trust is not.
• 24% use media mix modeling to reallocate budgets based on live performance data, while 86% navigate with last year’s map.

The report outlines practical steps marketing leaders can take to close their organization’s activation gap without additional martech investment. It also includes a Martech Maturity Scorecard, an assessment that helps organizations define the maturity of their activation architecture.

Download the eClerx 2026 Marketing Data Report: Mind the Gap here

About eClerx

eClerx provides AI-powered analytics, digital operations services, automation, and business process management to help clients unlock growth and drive business outcomes. eClerx partners with Fortune 500 enterprises across financial services, telecom, media & entertainment, luxury, retail & fashion, and manufacturing. A publicly listed company, eClerx operates across 17 countries with over 21,000 employees, serving clients globally across the Americas, APAC, and EMEA.