What It TakesTo Support Multi-Channel Marketing

It is broadly accepted that successful multi-channel marketing requires a blend of technology, analytic and marketing skills combined with highly reliable operational support.  Essential to any multi-channel marketing solution is the right data: the currency of today’s multi-channel marketing activities.

Supporting technology capabilities come in a wide range of forms including multi-channel marketing automation, database development and management, application support, and data processing to name a few.  There are many different technology components available in the market, but the most essential function is to consolidate and assemble customer data in a way that enables a closed loop approach to managing multi-channel marketing programs and customer interactions that truly deliver a differentiated and relevant customer experience. 

However, these services alone don’t create the customer insights and marketing  programs and strategies that drive results.  Rich analytic driven insights such as customer value modeling, segmentation and predictive modeling that support a well defined customer strategy, communication strategy and marketing plan are critical to achieving sustainable results over time.  If all of these capabilities are present, then the fundamental essentials for multi-channel marketing execution are in place.  However, if these capabilities are not connected together through a structured and extendable solution framework with solid operational support in place, often times an efficient and timely closed loop system that allows marketers to rapidly adapt to changing conditions remains an elusive goal.

Core Disciplines Required For Multi-Channel Marketing

Customer Data:  At the core of an effective delivery model is a multi-channel data model that accommodates customer and/or prospect data, including multi-channel contact and response history, web behavioral data, transaction history, and demographics, derived data (model scores), etc.  Data is typically sourced from internal client systems as well as external sources and includes data specific to the marketer, data specific to the customer, and data specific to a customer interaction with the marketer. The data environment may blend customer and prospect data.

Technology: Includes tools, infrastructure and associated technical services for: 1) customer data loading, cleansing, and integration; 2) customer data management and updates; 3) customer data analysis, visualization and scoring; 4) campaign design, execution and measurement; and 5) instrumenting and measuring customer-facing websites. 

After data has been processed, it is made available for the next stage of multi-channel campaigns. In some cases this simply means exporting data to an external entity. In others cases it means feeding data elements into campaign segmentation activities or into complex analytical models.  Processed data can be made available to multiple areas including the marketing database; modeling, scoring and decisioning processes; analytic environments; and reporting applications.

Analytics: Services for analyzing, scoring and segmenting customer data are required to successfully support multi-channel marketing programs.  There are several inputs that factor into multi-channel models. These include:

• Campaign specific goals and objectives for the marketer
• Historical response rates and performance achieved by channels individually
• Historical response rates and performance achieved by channels in coordination
• Data specific to the marketer, the customer, and the interaction between the marketer and customer
• Customer preferences with regard to desired contact channels, frequencies, and timing
• Additional data attributes resulting from data processing (e.g., enhancement, scoring, modeling, campaign / channel attribution)

Marketing: Involves services for defining marketing plans, customer strategy and communications strategy in support of multi-channel marketing programs.  Marketing strategy capabilities must support the critical shift from isolated point in time single channel campaigns to longitudinal, multi-channel, multi-wave campaigns that quickly incorporate response and interaction data into learnings that improve the next marketing communication.  Capabilities such as strategy and program definition, program design, program analysis, and marketing process optimization are important to multi-channel success. 

Operations: Addresses the execution of multi-channel marketing campaigns. These efforts need to support various marketing activities from pre-defined business logic for triggered campaigns, to one-off campaigns based on simple segmentation, across multiple disparate channels.  The operations component of the environment is where the creation, coordination and automation of multi-channel campaigns occur. Activities that occur in this area include campaign definition, campaign testing, coordinating marketing communications by channel, audit trail, monitoring and reporting. Another activity to include in the operations component of the multi-channel environment is the incorporation of performance results for multi-channel campaigns back into the centrally maintained data repository for the iterative evaluation, learning, and optimization of future marketing efforts.