Cross-chan­nel mar­ket­ing has room for improve­ment. That’s accord­ing to a recent study from Exper­ian and For­rester, which also says mar­keters must have authen­tic con­ver­sa­tions with con­sumers and should turn to email mar­keters for guid­ance because they’re the ones hav­ing good con­ver­sa­tions with cus­tomers and tend to be more sophis­ti­cat­ed when it comes to data man­age­ment. What’s more, the study says mar­keters must become more pro­fi­cient with cross-chan­nel before tran­si­tion­ing into the next phase of marketing’s “evo­lu­tion,” which it says is con­tex­tu­al mar­ket­ing.

In its The Road to Cross-Chan­nel Matu­ri­ty study, Exper­ian Mar­ket­ing Ser­vices, which says it pro­vides “inte­grat­ed con­sumer insights and tar­get­ing, data qual­i­ty and cross-chan­nel mar­ket­ing,” com­mis­sioned For­rester Con­sult­ing to look at dig­i­tal mar­keters’ atti­tudes about, expe­ri­ences with, and chal­lenges relat­ed to cross-chan­nel mar­ket­ing, as well as the role email mar­ket­ing has and will have in cross-chan­nel inter­ac­tions.

As a result, the study says For­rester found mar­keters are aware of the ben­e­fits of a cross-chan­nel approach that “deliv­ers rel­e­vant mes­sages to the right con­sumer at the right time.”

How­ev­er, the study also found “matu­ri­ty” in this “new era” of mar­ket­ing is low in part because inte­gra­tion of data sources, adop­tion of data man­age­ment tech­nolo­gies, skill sets, and orga­ni­za­tion­al struc­tures con­ducive to cross-chan­nel suc­cess have “vast room for improve­ment.”

In oth­er words, per the study: Cross-chan­nel mar­ket­ing is still a work in progress.

In fact, what mar­keters con­sid­er cross-chan­nel mar­ket­ing today is actu­al­ly a “rudi­men­ta­ry ver­sion” in which tra­di­tion­al cam­paigns run on mul­ti­ple chan­nels. Instead, true cross-chan­nel mar­ket­ing is about inte­grat­ed chan­nels and reach­ing cus­tomers in con­text with the best con­tent on the right device at their moment of need, accord­ing to the study.

Nan­cy Shaver, prin­ci­pal con­sul­tant of cross-chan­nel mar­ket­ing at Exper­ian Mar­ket­ing Ser­vices, said cross-chan­nel mar­ket­ing is about hav­ing an authen­tic dia­log with a cus­tomer, which means mar­keters need to lis­ten as well as deliv­er a mes­sage. Mar­keters are get­ting bet­ter at syn­chro­niz­ing their mes­sag­ing, she said, but there’s still a lot of stalling through­out the dia­log in part because they aren’t ful­ly exer­cis­ing the capa­bil­i­ties of plat­forms that allow for man­ag­ing the flow of con­ver­sa­tions.

“No mat­ter how many chan­nels we have to play with, we’re still doing a lot of push mar­ket­ing,” Shaver said. This includes behav­ioral pieces like respond­ing to requests on web­sites or retar­get­ing or deal­ing with cart aban­don­ment, but it tends to be one-off cam­paigns instead of ongo­ing con­ver­sa­tions, she added.

“One of the things that today’s con­sumer can smell a mile away is inau­then­tic­i­ty or some­thing that’s off in terms of tim­ing,” Shaver said. She uses the exam­ple of a car she pur­chased, which was fol­lowed by a direct mail pro­mo­tion and then an email pro­mo­tion sug­gest­ing she test dri­ve a low­er-priced mod­el.

“Those are the kinds of things that can hap­pen over and over again with any trans­ac­tion that you might have made,” she said.

The real chal­lenge, Shaver said, is in exer­cis­ing chan­nels she calls “high veloc­i­ty.”

“Email is pri­ma­ry among them, but if you take a cou­ple of chan­nels and begin to cre­ate a plan around a dia­log and cap­ture con­ver­sa­tions and inter­ac­tions and real­ly make cer­tain what you’re doing in those chan­nels match­es what you would expect as a con­sumer, [you’ll end up with an] authen­tic dia­log with a client,” she added.

Fur­ther, Shaver said mar­keters have got­ten good at opti­miz­ing sin­gle chan­nels, but not opti­miz­ing around cus­tomers.

“You can’t boil the ocean,” she adds. “Let’s say you’re a CMO and you have mass adver­tis­ing and a whole bunch of dig­i­tal chan­nels and occa­sion­al­ly a non-dig­i­tal chan­nel. To get all of those work­ing in sync all at once, includ­ing all of the reac­tions of cus­tomers at all of those dif­fer­ent junc­tures is over­whelm­ing.”

As a result, Exper­ian rec­om­mends pick­ing a cou­ple of chan­nels that are high in speed, which is in part why the study touts email so high­ly. In fact, the study found email mar­keters have the skills to lead and have the expe­ri­ence and com­pe­ten­cies to improve cross-chan­nel mar­ket­ing per­for­mance.

That’s because email is easy to adjust and it’s a chan­nel vir­tu­al­ly every orga­ni­za­tion is pret­ty good at. It’s also low-cost and low-risk, Shaver said.

In addi­tion, email mar­keters are experts at near-term behav­ioral man­age­ment, which can result in rich, robust dialogs with cus­tomers.

In the study, For­rester says, “An email can pro­vide a con­sumer with infor­ma­tion or incen­tive to engage with oth­er chan­nels. As one of the most reli­able, con­sis­tent­ly used chan­nels, email has an oppor­tu­ni­ty to be more than anoth­er trans­ac­tion-dri­ving medium…with cues from email, mar­keters can bet­ter pro­vide inter­ac­tions in oth­er chan­nels and touch-points.”

Nowa­days, the cus­tomer must be at the cen­ter of mar­ket­ing, which forces mar­keters to think not about the mar­ket­ing action, but the cus­tomer need. There­fore, mar­keters are increas­ing­ly embrac­ing the cus­tomer life cycle. In fact, the study found 61 per­cent of mar­keters agree the life cycle is bet­ter for map­ping con­sumers’ atti­tudes toward brands.

In order to become a “cross-chan­nel guru,” the study says mar­keters should build the skills that set “sophis­ti­cat­ed mar­keters” apart, which include high­er adop­tion and appre­ci­a­tion of tools that enable cross-chan­nel exe­cu­tion. They should also build on email’s foun­da­tion to improve cross-chan­nel as the study found sophis­ti­cat­ed mar­keters have above aver­age inte­gra­tion between email and oth­er dig­i­tal chan­nels.

Addi­tion­al­ly, to become more pro­fi­cient with true cross-chan­nel, mar­keters should pri­or­i­tize chan­nel inte­gra­tion and start with email.

“Iden­ti­fy where email is most rel­e­vant and influ­en­tial in the customer’s path to pur­chase and then incor­po­rate addi­tion­al chan­nels along that path that tie all the com­mu­ni­ca­tions togeth­er,” accord­ing to the study.

For­rester sur­veyed near­ly 500 dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing exec­u­tives from var­i­ous indus­tries around the world.