The True Cross Channel Experience

Cross chan­nel mar­ket­ing is the evo­lu­tion of mar­ket­ing sophis­ti­ca­tion dri­ven by access to more and more data every sec­ond of every day com­ing from the pro­lif­er­a­tion of means to access and chan­nels through which we can touch the customer.

This sophis­ti­ca­tion is borne out of the abil­i­ty to har­ness that data and gain per­son­al insights into what cus­tomer are doing as well as what they might do in the future. It’s a real-time and pre­dic­tive cycle that requires you to know where the cus­tomer is at any point in time and where he/she might be going … i.e. what means of access and what chan­nels should be in your cross chan­nel strategy.

The rapid­ly grow­ing num­bers of chan­nels can be daunt­ing in mak­ing the true cross chan­nel expe­ri­ence seem unreach­able. Throw the mobile and Smart­phone means of access into the mix and the sophis­ti­ca­tion lev­els jumps anoth­er lev­el. But, think about it. You’ve been doing it in incre­men­tal phas­es since the day you start­ed mar­ket­ing. Cross chan­nel is just the next phase. There will be others.

Exper­ian pro­vides a nice visu­al of what we are talk­ing about.

http://www.experian.com/assets/marketing-services/images/email-without-star.png

The biggest issue you face is chang­ing from opti­miz­ing 15 sep­a­rate chan­nels indi­vid­u­al­ly in mul­ti-chan­nel to account­ing for the inter­play between those 15 chan­nels in omni-chan­nel. It’s the inter­play between chan­nels and the intro­duc­tion of new means of access, mobile and Smart­phone, which forces changes to how you plan your cam­paign. Now, your con­tent must be con­sis­tent across chan­nels as well as pre­sent­ed in ways that are mobile and Smart­phone friend­ly. Smart­phone con­sid­er­a­tions have tak­en on new impor­tance in light of Google’s algo­rithm change of April 21, 2015. Google will penal­ize your site for not being mobile friend­ly if the cus­tomer is search­ing for con­tent that rel­e­vant to your brand. You will be list­ed much low­er in SERP rank­ings result­ing in the cus­tomer nev­er see­ing your content.

The Smart­phone sta­tis­tics for the UK demon­strates the fol­ly of not pay­ing atten­tion to being mobile friendly.

Three fun­da­men­tal­ly sound cam­paign best prac­tices are a com­mon core to every cam­paign you orga­nize be it sin­gle chan­nel, mul­ti-chan­nel, or omni-channel:

1. Know Your Objective

Have you real­ly con­sid­ered what your desired out­come is with this cam­paign? Do you want the con­sumer to buy some­thing, maybe edu­cate the con­sumer on some key points, or just down­load a white paper? Yeah, it seems log­i­cal but do you actu­al­ly do it. It’s fun­da­men­tal stuff. Sim­ply put, if you know where you’re going, it’s much eas­i­er to get there. Hav­ing a clear objec­tive in mind allows you to pick the right key per­for­mance indi­ca­tors (KPIs) to mea­sure your progress. If you know the right KPI’s, the met­rics and asso­ci­at­ed data you need to gath­er is crys­tal clear.

2. Tar­get your Audi­ence in every Channel

The strat­e­gy for most mar­keters is to expose the cam­paign to the widest audi­ence pos­si­ble. Hey, it’s eas­i­er. I get it. How­ev­er, your return on ad spend (ROAS) will be abysmal which in turn reduces your ROI. Be smart about your mar­ket­ing. Have you iden­ti­fied the high val­ue 20% of your cus­tomer base that will gen­er­ate most of your ad spend? Have you iden­ti­fied that next tier of cus­tomers with the incre­men­tal spend poten­tial that feeds your met­rics and KPI’s? It’s fun­da­men­tal. It’s the dif­fer­ence between hav­ing a mil­lion impres­sions on your dis­play ad with a 1% con­ver­sion rate and get­ting 500,000 impres­sions on that same dis­play ad with an 8% con­ver­sion rate. Your ROAS is up, ROI is up, and the cost per con­ver­sion (CPC) is down. That’s all good news to the C‑suite.

3. Mobile First, Cus­tomer First

If the num­bers on the Sta­tista chart weren’t enough to con­vince you, read the tealeaves, smell the ros­es, or do what­ev­er you have to do to moti­vate your com­pa­ny to adopt a mobile first, cus­tomer first mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy. Your mobile friend­ly land­ing page has to be engag­ing and tar­get­ed specif­i­cal­ly at the objec­tive of the cam­paign. Cre­ative has to be tuned in, ana­lyt­ics has to be focused, and most of all, the call to action has to be com­pelling. Be pre­pared for the mobile customer.