Bill Harriss
Consumer goods companies and retailers know that multichannel customers are more profitable, and often more loyal. Industry research shows that these shoppers spend 30 to 50 percent more than those who buy through a single channel. The challenge for marketers is ensuring top-notch customer experiences and availability of cross channel marketing analytics to help attract, retain and grow these high-value customers.
Consumers are going to interact with your brand in ways that fit their needs based on convenience, preferred communication methods and their comfort in dealing with your product or service. So, how do you regularly turn multichannel marketing challenges into profitable opportunities?
There are four key areas to focus on to ensure you attain the best possible multichannel results:
- Make sure social media is part of the consumer experience – We all recognize that many customers are embracing the speed and relevancy of digital media in all of its forms. It is well published that social media (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, etc.) are among the fastest growing forms of digital channel engagement with your consumers. It is key to understand which segments of your customers are active and engaged with social media and then create opportunities to share, engage and listen to your customers across all of the available Social channels that exist. Your customers have been having conversations for years, now you can actively participate!
- Deliver consistent experiences across touch points – Understand how your customers engage with your brand across retail, online, mobile, contact center, and available experiential and/or events, if applicable. Work to create a process to coordinate how this engagement data is captured and monitored for consistency and improvement. Often this means changing your existing ways of gathering information — but it is essential if you want to understand how to bring more value to each channel interaction.
- Use data and marketing analytics to create a more relevant multichannel experience – Once you understand what customer touch point data exists, you can begin to measure the impact of your marketing and communication efforts throughout each customer interaction. As you identify customers most likely to interact with you across multiple channels, you will be able to identify your brand “evangelists.”
- Build loyalty and grow revenues from high-value multichannel customers — You can foster your valuable “brand evangelists” and develop meaningful conversations and communication streams with your customers and prospects based on the insights you have about their channel interaction with your brand.
Understanding the data that is thrown off by all your consumers’ multichannel engagements, and beginning to find ways to bring that data together with your other marketing data assets – big steps, but critical to maximizing your revenues from multichannel customers.
About the Author:
Bill Harris is a Practice Leader in the Healthcare and Consumer Markets for SIGMA Marketing Group. Connect with Bill on , or follow him on .
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