How do you leverage all your marketing channels – achieving the greatest efficiency without compromising customer satisfaction?

Many companies struggle with their cross-channel marketing strategy: specifically, how to align direct marketing with online marketing.

For example, one of our clients is a leading travel company. They began as a direct-mail cataloger more than 30 years ago and still use catalogs today. But, like many businesses, they’ve also expanded into online channels, like email, online advertising and web marketing, as well as, print advertising and partnerships.

Online transactions are increasingly preferred by the majority of consumers. So, companies must have a strategy to increase revenue from online transactions, as well as, increase customer loyalty and satisfaction.

Here are some of the tactics you can use to develop a unified marketing strategy.

Align marketing objectives
Your first step is to align direct marketing and online marketing with a unified strategy that leverages outbound campaigns and inbound activity. You’ll need to manage every inbound customer interaction with an appropriate personalized marketing message. And, ensure that every outbound direct marketing campaign is part of an overall customer segmentation and targeting strategy. Your strategy should, of course, align with your organization’s overall retention, acquisition and other objectives.

Ability to enhance offline data with online data
The second step is to understand and consolidate all available data (online and offline) to determine your customer’s true interests. Then, you can seamlessly use those advanced insights in all online and offline interaction efforts. Your data strategy should combine offline data with online web analytics to provide a complete holistic view of your customer.

Another client of ours, a leading interactive media and entertainment company, recently invested in this approach. The company was able to differentiate its media offerings from the competition; increase audience/customer value; and demonstrate greater value to advertisers with dramatically improved visitor behavior segmentation and click-through data. The project not only paid for itself, but has also generated incremental revenue, expected to grow over time.

Like this client, you’ll need to evaluate your data availability and richness – and also understand how to match and merge your offline data sources and online transactional data. Consider investing in a web analytic platform like Omniture Site Catalyst to streamline your ability to gather online data.

Developing the analytics
With a consolidated customer view in hand, you’ll be able to develop predictive analytic models and segmentation schemes. A customer value model can provide a very valuable means to vary messaging and communication. Your segmentation scheme and analytics models – in conjunction with the strategy – are key to providing relevant messages and maximizing revenue across all channels.

Enabling infrastructure & execution
Developing an infrastructure that allows you to execute on your analytics and strategy is paramount. You’ll want an integrated application suite that facilitates cross-channel program planning and execution, supports contact optimization, and simplifies measurement. This infrastructure must share interactions across all channels and also provide you with the ability to...

• Implement outbound campaigns across different channels, including email
• Test treatment strategies
• Execute on inbound channels like call center and web
• Track and measure responses
• Report on the campaign performance and other marketing ROI metrics
  

A solution such as Omniture Discover can be leveraged as a BI tool, allowing you and your organization to report on marketing metrics based on segmentations developed, as well as, performance metrics on the strategies you’ve deployed.

The application of real-time analytics is typically a journey. So, continual testing to identify additional areas to improve over time is important.  As you enhance your treatment strategies and analytics, your relevant messaging will increase and customer experience will improve. The results? A win-win! Ongoing incremental revenue and more satisfied customers. 

For more insight from our experts, visit our blog InsightIQ.