Multichannel Engagement; 6 Requirements and 3 Takeaways

There’s an ever increasing range of media and channels with which to engage customers. And although companies know an integrated multichannel engagement strategy is a must, most still struggle with how to do this well - and how to integrate the data into a singular customer centric vision and process.

For starters, marketers need to understand that the world is shifting from forcing customers to sort through piles of spray and pray stuff to find useful communications, to a world where personalized, relevant multichannel communications find consumers based on their opt-in preferences.

The average U.S. consumer spends 60 hours a week consuming content across devices. Many channels are also delivered via multiple devices, making marketing and data collection increasingly more complex. With customers coming into companies from multiple directions, the challenge is to generate seamless, consistently high value, integrated customer experiences—no matter which medium a customer selects.

Multichannel strategies have to begin with an understanding of the requirements customers use to define “Engaging Customer Experiences”. Following are the 6 requirements that have emerged from over 10,000 hours of Voice of Customer research conducted by our firm, ERDM for clients such as MassMutual, IBM and QVC:

1. Improve the customer experience across every point of contact with your organization.

2. This applies to all elements of the media mix and all departments of your organization.

3. High quality experiences must be maintained throughout the relationship, not just when you are “selling.”

4. Customer experiences must be driven by the customer’s individual preferences regarding message, timing, frequency and media mix.

5. Preferences must drive high quality personalization of communications and experiences.

6. Absolute commitment to safeguarding privacy of preference information is essential.

A company that has used its multichannel insights to develop new marketing initiatives is Beyond the Rack, which uses customer data based on media usage to shape its future engagement strategies.

The company’s sales for mobile users skyrocketed from 10% of total revenue in mid-2012 to nearly one-third by 2014. Most recently, Beyond the Rack has revealed that their new focus centers around taking their mobile insights to set the standards for all interactions with customers.

Three Key Takeaways for you based on Beyond the Rack’s strategies:

1. Using its data to understand that 40-50% of their 12 million daily e-mails are opened on mobile devices, the company maximizes the impact of their mobile emails to make them more appealing on mobile devices. All marketers should identify and optimize the most active media channels to make them more engaging for customers.

2. Beyond the Rack continually engages with customers via contests such as its web-based model search. This gives customers an active opportunity to become a part of the brand through multiple media channels and not be just an impersonal buyer.

3. Yona Shtern, CEO of Beyond the Rack, stated that “Consumers have very different expectations of what they want you to be …. [at Beyond The Rack] we spent a lot of time figuring out who we needed to be.” Marketers need to build their media and marketing strategies around what customers want and where they spend their time.

The Sales Funnel is Dead

Article posted on September 17, 2013
on Direct Marketing News (DMNews.com)

The sales funnel is dead.
A circle of continuous engagement is born.

We all grew up with the sales funnel. You know, the one where the company was in control and pushed the prospect through the sales grinder. Well, it's dead.

The good news is that it's been buried by empowered customers who don't see the sale as a “close”, but as the beginning of deeper value and engagement.

According to voice of the customer research we conducted, ongoing value and engagement post-sale are critical for retaining today's empowered consumers. During the past 12 months we included the following question in many of our research efforts: Which has more impact on retention and repeat purchases: customer satisfaction or customer engagement/relationship?

The answer was consistent across our B2B and B2C research: Engagement/relationship strength has 12 times more influence on retention and repeat purchases than satisfaction. Basic satisfaction is now table stakes. Today's consumers expect that the sale is just the beginning of a journey of increasingly personalized and sustained engagement.

The Traditional Funnel

The traditional sales funnel was created to “drive a sale” to closure. It worked—until customers decided that they were empowered to exert their preferences regarding how, when, and where they wanted to engage pre and post-sale.

Circle of Continuous Engagement

Given the tough economic times, companies recognize that increasing retention and renewal rates is more important than ever. Therefore, ongoing engagement post-sale is critical. This has caused today's sales process to become a circle focused on driving engagement over time. This circle encompasses three key phases of the customer lifecycle:

Pre-Sale

• Focus on providing easy, hassle-free, personalized solutions.
• Learn customers' opt-in messaging and communication preferences.
• Engage customers across the multichannel mix.

Sale

• Don't “close.” Instead, think of the sale as the beginning of proactive, value-based relationship development.

Growth and Retention

• Develop a plan for ongoing proactive engagement, i.e. “How can we better serve you?”
• Provide an ongoing value –add, which justifies a price premium.
• Be relevant. Communications must be highly personalized, targeted, and delivered or accessed across the multichannel mix.

However, a note of caution: many companies are still not equipped to deliver this level of ongoing and multichannel engagement. In the 2013 benchmarking study by the Retail Systems Research (RSR) Institute, Retailing: Omni-Channel Approach Central to Strategies in 2013, 54% of respondents indicate that they do not have a view of customers across channels.

DHL Solves Problems to Grow

DHL is one company that has cultivated a commitment to being customer focused. It has developed processes that solve problems and create goodwill at every touchpoint—and and at every part of the shipping continuum. For example, it integrated formerly stand-alone business units to provide solutions and to support customers more effectively, and developed specific industry know-how and solution segments that specialize in providing niche service by industry to address specific customer concerns.  By adopting this customer-centric approach, the company increased profit from operating activities in the first half of 2013 by 7.8%.

The Key Takeaways

1. Shift from the obsolete sales funnel to a customer lifecycle view.
Focus on developing ever-deeper relationships with your customers across their ongoing customer experience with your company. 

2. Be actively engaged with prospects during their decision journey.
Provide easy-to-find information, access to reviews, etc., to enable prospects to evaluate your company, product, and services against others they're considering. Opinion influencers—such as product reviews, ratings, and testimonials—are critical. In addition, provide convenient contact resources, such as online chat that answers questions, while prospects are still on your website. This high-level of value and service sets an important tone at the beginning of the customer life cycle.

3. Understand your customer's journey from pre-sale to post-sale.
Understanding the factors that make customers want to purchase from you--and then stay with you after the sale—lets you highlight your company benefits and use these key selling points in your marketing. Put in place the means by which customers can easily access information and help along the way from pre- through post-sale phases.

4. Be easily accessible across channels.
Consumers are shopping via multiple channels and devices often at the same time. Don't create barriers by being unavailable or making it difficult to engage across the channels your customers prefer.

5. Don't forget about customers after you ring the register.
Keep customers actively engaged via preference-driven, personalized communications and experiences. Provide ongoing information to improve their lives, solicit feedback, and stimulate purchases of relevant new and add-on products. Make your customers feel as though they are a part of your company's community through a multichannel relationship-focused continuous cycle of engagement.

Burberry's Multichannel Innovation; 3 Tips

The Challenge: What can we learn from a 157-year-old fashion company that’s being called “the world’s most digitally competent luxury brand”? That a multichannel and personalized customer experience is becoming the expected standard among consumers.

Just as high fashion brands have been trendsetters in clothing, they are now trendsetters in multichannel marketing. Global fashion icon, Burberry, launched a program recently that upped the ante on multichannel marketing. Burberry’s Millennial-targeted “Runway Made to Order” campaign allowed viewers from around the world to live stream their Fall fashion show, and purchase and personalize items directly from the runway via a state-of-the-art interactive e-commerce platform.

Key Takeaways for Marketers:

1. Offer a Seamless Multichannel Experience
Burberry’s innovation is truly remarkable. The brand has taken the 2013 Autumn runway show -- traditionally an exclusive event, accessible only in-person -- and spread it across every conceivable digital medium: the show, streamed on Burberry.com and other sites, was the first in history to be broadcast live on Twitter; purchases through Runway Made to Order are accompanied by Smartphone-compatible product videos upon delivery; the live stream was accompanied by an Instagram feed showing close-ups of the products as they hit the runway, and a dozen digital cameras photographed handbags and shoes to be turned into an ‘accessories-only’ Facebook photo album.

Burberry has long been on the forefront of digital; but now, as marketers struggle to create a valuable customer experience across many seemingly disparate channels, Burberry shows us just how seamless it can all be.

2. Make it Personal
The ability to order products the moment they’re debuted is impressive enough; but, Burberry has added to this ability a highly-personalized touch.

Upon adding an item to an online shopping bag, customers are immediately informed that their purchase can be “customized with a bespoke nameplate and smart personalisation technology.” Orders are placed with the promise that a Burberry rep will soon reach out to the purchaser personally to ‘confirm requirements.’

3. Adapt Proven Tactics to the New Integrated Multichannel Mix
In a modern twist on product placement, Burberry, according to the recent New York Times article, supplies A-list celebs with key items in order to capitalize on the many active fashion bloggers and social media followers. By not limiting its presence to digital alone, Burberry applies the ‘influencer’ tactic to traditional media, using print and video advertisements featuring British actress, Gabriella Wilde.

The lesson: for maximum brand building, impact, and revenue, deploy a seamlessly integrated multichannel mix.