Email Is Critical To Successful Cross-Channel Marketing

Deliv­er­ing rel­e­vant mes­sages to the right con­sumer at the right time is chal­leng­ing. Here’s why a suc­cess­ful cross-chan­nel strat­e­gy starts with email.

Lisa Lacy By Lisa Lacy. Join the discussion » 0 comments

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.

Lisa Lacy

Written by Lisa Lacy

Lisa is a senior features writer for Inked. She also previously covered digital marketing for Incisive Media. Her background includes editorial positions at Dow Jones, the Financial Times, the Huffington Post, AOL, Amazon, Hearst, Martha Stewart Living and the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund.

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