Creating a Multi-Channel Strategy: Increase Your Email Performance by Integrating Other Channels

Improving your performance of email marketing often involves incorporating other online and offline marketing strategies to achieve overall success. As customers become more savvy shoppers, so does the need for companies to communicate in a personalized, relevant and coordinated manner. The most successful campaigns target your customers across multiple channels while following the customer throughout the customer management life cycle. In today’s environment, the customer ex-pects you to be smart enough to recognize them, no matter which channel is used for communication. Failure to link communication channels and customer experiences leads to frustration and potentially lost customers.
By harnessing the power of multiple, integrated marketing channels, organizations can produce a more personalized communication plan that also effectively builds brand awareness. In addition, customers that interact with your company over multiple channels are often more loyal that those that respond to single-channel only. It’s essential that you understand your customers as well as their pref-erences in order to communicate with them effectively. The key reasons to implement a multi-channel strategy include:
- Multi-channel value proposition for customer
- Greater convenience for the customer
- More targeted and actionable information
Your Customer Data
The most important part of any campaign is acquiring and maintaining valuable prospect and customer databases. Organizations should be proactively building a data management system that allows them to seamlessly and effectively market to customers using customer preferences, purchase history, and demographics. This data can help target your customer by segmenting the audience that will receive specific messages. It can also assist you in determining the best channel or channels a customer responds to.
Email Marketing
Opt-in email campaigns have proven to be a very effective vehicle for communicating with customers. The cost of implementing email marketing within your organization is low compared to other channels, and it often lends better trackability for campaign performance. Permission-based emails trend a 6 to 8 percent response rate as opposed to a 1 percent response on direct mail. In addition, email campaigns can be executed quickly and see a faster return.
So why not just focus on email marketing? Campaigns that span more than one channel see a much greater return than the average one-channel email campaign. In addition, you may not have permis-sion for email communication with your entire customer and prospect target base. Respect for per-mission use of email addresses is an essential aspect of trust between the consumer and marketer. Consumers regard a breach of email privacy as much serious than with other forms of communication. Acknowledge and respect their email preferences within your overall communications plan.
Print and Direct Mail
Direct mail is a very powerful marketing tool if used properly. Hitting your customer with the right message at the right time is still extremely important in determining your direct mail performance. To optimize your direct mail performance, begin offering other means of purchase opportunities. Perhaps you drive your customers to an online landing experience that drives conversion or you offer a specific telephone number to request more information. You will see a greater return if you are able to uplift the entire campaign by offering your customer a variety of response methods. As long as one ensures that all response methods contribute to the common database, you will have the information needed to drive relevant, customized experiences.
Online Marketing
Online marketing channels continue to gain importance with multi-channel marketing efforts. Online marketing may include blogging, paid search, organic search, banner ads or even social media. You should already include online marketing into your marketing mix if you haven’t already. According to a recent study conducted by Jupiter Research, 67 percent of the online search population have been driven to search by offline channels, while 39 percent of online searchers who are influenced by offline channels have ultimately made a purchase.
Now that you’ve learned the basics of a multi-channel campaign, what’s next?
Strategies for Ensuring Multi-Channel Marketing Success
1. Think Customer Relationship: Don’t blindly send out a large campaign and hope for a small return. Instead, create a campaign that targets your customer in the medium that they prefer to shop, wheth-er that be email, catalog, or online. Customers will find your offer more compelling and you will see a greater return.
2. Relevant Communications: Ensure the communication you are sending is targeting your customer at the right time with the right message. Actively use that prospect and customer database to deliver the message that recipient will consider relevant. Too many marketers assume they know what cus-tomers want. But why guess when you have that information in their past actions?
3. Consistency Across Channels: Use the opportunity to build your brand and increase the trust value throughout all your channels. If you reinforce what your organization offers the customer time and time again, they will begin to take notice.