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.

6 Multichannel Takeaways from Best Buy’s Marketing

Challenge: Marketers are having a tough time maintaining engagement with today’s multichannel, multi-device consumers.

According to ShopperTrack, which uses a network of 60,000 shopper-counting devices to track visits at malls and large retailers across the country, retailers got only about half the holiday traffic in 2013 as they did just three years earlier. However, online sales increased by more than double the rate of brick-and-mortar sales this holiday season. According to the study, while shoppers visited an average five stores per mall trip in 2007, today they only visit three.

One company that understands this is Best Buy. While the company’s online sales of $1.32 billion for this past holiday season were up 23.5% from a year earlier, it was not enough to pull out a win overall due to lower in store sales. Chief Financial Officer Sharon McCollam noted in a conference call with analysts that expanding the company’s online presence will be a top priority in 2014.

The company has also made great strides in moving into the mobile space.  Amy Halford, senior digital brand manager of interactive marketing and emerging media at Best Buy noted in an interview, “we have the opportunity to better connect and be relevant to customers whenever, wherever they might seek us.“

6 Takeaways:

Here are 6 lessons Best Buy learned by listening to their multichannel customers. These can help you as well:

1. Keep customers’ rapidly changing needs and behaviors at the forefront of your strategies.

2. Provide the capability to easily research products and connect with you. This is critically important to customers. Many want to do more than simply transact.

3. Customers expect a consistent experience regardless of which entry point they access, be it online, phone, or store. 

4. Test frequently, learn quickly, and scale appropriately.

5. Reinforce all marketing efforts across media channels, including those conducted for specific audiences, such as Spanish language campaigns.

6. It’s critical to focus on meeting customer needs from a multichannel perspective, and not focus solely on growing a particular channel.

4 Tips That Transform Holiday Shoppers Into Loyal Customers

Challenge: Tis the season for customers to think “sale.” However, while customers are concentrating on transactions, companies need to think beyond the holidays. We hope the following 4 tips will help you move beyond “quickie transactions” for the 2013 holiday season to creating relationships for 2014 and beyond.

1. Understand the journey customers take with your company, from prospect to loyal customer. Know what each customer segment requires and deliver on your brand promise at every stage of their customer journey. See our previous article DM News Spotlight Article, The Sales Funnel is Dead.

2. Be a Holiday Shopping Resource.
Consumers will be receiving hundreds, if not thousands, of sales offers. By asking them to tell you about their needs and then helping with personalized solutions, you will cut through the clutter and create a competitively differentiating shopping experience.

3. Be Multi Channel.

Showrooming is not a threat, it is a reality. Showrooming occurs when shoppers are at a retail location and use their mobile devices to research prices or terms at competitive online merchants. More than three quarters of shoppers have examined merchandise in a brick-and-mortar store and ultimately purchased that merchandise at a lower price, online, according to new data from CFI Group’s Holiday Retail Spending Survey. 

Additionally, a recent survey conducted by Deloitte found that two-thirds of smartphone owners planned to use their phones during holiday shopping, to find store locations, compare prices and look for product information.

Therefore, make it easy for customers to interact with your company effortlessly, via the media of their choice.

4. Be consistent across channels.
During holiday shopping season customers and prospects are doing a lot of research. Make sure you are providing a consistent multichannel experience, not multichannel frustration. A frictionless experience is key for customers who will give up on your company when information is different across media, or difficult to find;

» Walmart is partnering with online resources such as Google to enable shoppers to not only search for a product, but also find out if it is available in their local store. Stephen F. Quinn, chief marketing officer at Walmart explained, “Google will tell you if your local Walmart has Weber grills in stock, and it will tell you that store’s location.” Walmart started experimenting with this process earlier this year and has increased its efforts for the holidays.

» And, most retailers are taking to Facebook for ads and Pinterest to setup online showrooms. Target and many other retailers, are using Pinterest, which Casey Carl, president of multichannel at Target says they are using for holiday-party-planning boards for their Red Card holders. Pinterest itself is starting a new “Holiday Gift” category that will not only offer shoppers gift ideas but will give retailers another display window for their items.

Twitter: Taking Multichannel Marketing To New Levels

The Challenge: During Ad Week, Twitter VP Joel Lunenfeld drew a staggering correlation between a user’s activity on Twitter and their television watching habits. What could this mean for multichannel customer engagement?

During his IAB Mixx presentation at Ad Week, Joel Lunenfeld, Twitter’s global brand strategy VP, shared data that Twitter had gathered about users’ brand relationships. According to Lunenfeld, 9 out of 10 users follow at least one brand on Twitter.

While most users followed brands for the sake of receiving promotional news, 87% followed brands for entertainment purposes and 80% did so for access to exclusive content.

More interesting, however, was the correlation found between Twitter usage and TV watching habits. “Twitter is the EKG of action for television,” said Lunenfeld, citing data that showed 50% of Twitter users do so while watching TV. This provides massive opportunities for multi-channel engagement, and brands are capitalizing on this by turning their Twitter conversations into ad campaigns.

Audi, for example, noted that a fan posted a tweet with the hashtag “#IWantAnR8”. In response, they brought the fan an R8 to test-drive, and turned the entire experience into a commercial. Instances like this demonstrate that the barrier between advertising channels is blurring every day, and that content is quickly becoming more important than ever.

American Express is also taking advantage of the Twitter multichannel phenomenon with their Sync program, which transforms special Twitter #hashtags into savings for card members. If a U.S. card member is eligible, they can sync their AmEx Card with Twitter, and when they tweet using special offer hashtags, savings are automatically loaded onto the synced Cards, with no coupons or printouts required. In this game-changing example, AmEx is turning Twitter content into commerce by connecting card members directly to merchants and delivering value to both.

Key Takeaways for Marketers
1. Engagement on multiple channels is essential.
Consumers have come to expect a multichannel experience from their marketing. Twitter may not be the first to attempt multichannel marketing, but it’s quickly becoming a bastion for companies that want preference-driven, engagement-rich campaigns.

2. Give people reasons and ways to share.
Giving customers the tools and incentive to share across multiple channels is the perfect way to engage them and enrich their experience. AmEx exemplifies this, giving their customers both value and the means to share that value with others via Twitter.

3. Blur the lines between conversation and marketing.
As we saw in the Audi example, social media marketing can be enhanced by crossing channels and bringing conversations to life for users. It generates positive press, gets people talking, and creates a genuine level of trust between you and your customers.

Have You Forgotten About the Value of Direct Mail?

The Challenge: All businesses want to engage in sophisticated multichannel marketing, but many are forgetting about the power of direct mail as a vital element of their media mix.

Multichannel Integration: Online And Off
As we reported earlier this year, a recent Direct Marketing Association study found that 93% of marketers using multiple channels indicated they have attempted to integrate their messaging, but only 27.4% of these said their efforts are ‘effective’...”

Experienced marketers know that relevance means sending the right message to the right person at the right time. But they neglect a key aspect: that message must be delivered per that individual's media preferences.

According to a recent Epsilon study, "Consumers use and trust certain communications channels more than others”. While the general point may not be surprising, at least one detail will be a surprise to a number of marketers: 50% of U.S. consumers prefer direct mail to email.

Out With The Old?
Data-driven marketers shouldn’t ignore the evidence: consumers want direct mail to be part of their multichannel mix. Many common objections to this channel among “digital-only” marketers are at odds with the evidence:

Consumers Prefer Mail
Epsilon's study found that, "despite direct mail's reputation for being 'old school' or expensive, it is the top choice of U.S. and Canadian consumers for the receipt of brand communications in almost every category, ranging from 'health to household products, to household services, insurance and financial services.'"

Young Consumers Prefer Mail
Nor is this true only for technophobes: Epsilon found that "the preference for direct mail also extends to the 18-24 year old demographic."

KEY TAKEAWAYS FOR MARKETERS

→ Deliver Content Per Consumers' Media Preferences
Search and social media allow us to send the right message to the right person at the right time, but the right channel isn't always online.

→ Email is not Always the Most Cost-Effective Channel
Extensive testing for clients by our company determined that while the Cost per Piece is clearly much higher for Direct Mail than Email, the yield from direct mail efforts are often far greater, i.e., sales per 1000 names. Therefore, total sales from direct mail are often significantly higher than email.

→ Seriously Consider Direct Mail As Part of Your Multichannel Mix
Forward-thinking marketers should evaluate the potential value of direct mail as a component of their multichannel mix. It may not be effective for all businesses, but it just might be right for yours.