Orchestrating Mailings Across Channels to Drive Results
Consumers view and interact with brands across multiple channels. Are you prepared?
Consumers view and interact with brands across multiple channels. Are you prepared?
While silos persist within almost every marketing organization, consumers view and interact with brands across multiple channels (email, social, offline), holistically. When consumers interact with a brand, online or offline, they expect to be recognized and viewed as the same consumer in accordance with their view of the brand as a cross-channel company. Delivering this consistent cross-channel experience requires marketers to not only leverage data, but orchestrate email and offline mailings to build a threaded dialog to drive customer action.
Delivering highly personalized messages requires that marketers leverage data for segmentation and produce messages that are completely dynamic. This complexity, which is common in personalized direct mail, is often too great for an email. Not every marketer needs such a sophisticated approach, but for those who do, they must embrace what is more akin to a direct mail production model. Synchronizing messages across channels, such as an email followed by a print piece followed by an email or a variation on the prescribed message string based on user response, is more effective than non-synchronized mailings.
A study that my firm did for Intelisent looked at marketers using segmentation and personalization. We then compared those marketers using an orchestrated lifecycle mailing approach across channels to those marketers who were mailing in a non-orchestrated manner. The study found that the orchestrated marketers were driving four times as much revenue and nearly a six-time improvement in ROI compared to their non-orchestrated peers. Marketers that use near real-time data to enhance the timeliness and relevance of their messages are clearly at an advantage.
Here are just a few tactics that are necessary to making cross-channel mailings work effectively.
Marketers using multiple channels in an orchestrated lifecycle approach have a competitive advantage. Currently only about 17 percent of marketers use multi-wave, lifecycle marketing across channels, indicating that there is plenty of opportunity for marketers to improve campaign results.
Until next time,
David