Single-channel marketers struggle to find true customer engagement and understand real customer journeys, according to Nancy Shaver, Principal Consultant, Experian Marketing Services.
“Single-channel folks really are challenged to gain more intimate relationships with customers and have a very hard time on the customer value end of the spectrum,” Shaver told Loyalty360. “They tend to gravitate to and spend more of their budget in the channel of their heritage, regardless of its contribution to overall performance. For brick-and-mortar retailers, that channel might be direct mail or email.”
Consider this statistic contained in new research from Experian Marketing Services, a recognized leader in data-driven marketing: 90% of marketers struggle to move beyond single-channel marketing programs to optimize their marketing across channels or around the customer.
As a result, Experian recently announced an expansion of its strategic, cross-channel consulting offerings to address this need and help marketers increase the sophistication and effectiveness of their marketing programs.
The new program, which offers marketers strategic guidance around common marketing pain points, is designed to help them progress up Experian’s Marketing Sophistication CurveSM. The curve is a framework and road map that allows organizations to accurately assess the state of their marketing operations and identify the steps necessary for creating individualized marketing experiences around the customer.
Here are the four phases of Experian’s Marketing Sophistication Curve:
Phase I: Single-Channel Optimization — Brands at this stage seek new sources of data and analytical approaches to do more with existing programs and tools. They struggle to achieve a higher performance from data-driven campaigns.
Phase II: Multichannel Marketing — Organizations at this stage engage customers across multiple channels but seek greater consistency. They struggle to incorporate newer channels, like mobile, into their messaging strategies.
Phase III: Cross-Channel Marketing — The marketing organization at this stage implements cross-channel marketing programs but struggles to organize data and target campaign content around customers easily, consistently and in useful time frames.
Phase IV: Cross-Channel Optimization — This is the apex of modern marketing, where customer context, location and timing merge with every imaginable form of customer data to create a single, shared and immediate view of the customer across all channels.
Measurement of channel impact is a huge challenge for CMOs, Shaver said.
“They realize they have to be smarter about where they invest,” she explained. “It’s a real shift from thinking about campaign measurement and saying, ‘I want to measure the cumulative impact over a time period that drove a transaction.’ A lot of the work I’m doing has to do with the cultural shift that is required. Half of what it takes to get to cross-channel has to do with a shift in corporate mentality. What that means for people who take it seriously is that is going to change people’s incentives and, at the end of the day, it’s going to change bonuses.”
Disconnects exist in companies from CMOs down through the ranks.
“Let’s assume the CMO uses customer lifetime value,” Shaver explained. “It’s rare to see that translated into a campaign metric. People do what their bonus tells them to do. Often there is a disconnect between what a marketing manager is asked to do and the customer measure the CMO is looking for.”
To have a sophisticated marketing culture that permeates a company, “you have to love the data,” Shaver said. “None of this is easy. It’s also not quick. But it’s critical to begin to gain a competitive advantage. With data-driven success measures, you will optimize the customer experience and the bottom line. It’s about organizing marketing around the customer—finally. And building performance optimization that is ongoing.”
About the Author: Mark Johnson
Mark is CEO & CMO of Loyalty360. He has significant experience in selling, designing and administering prepaid, loyalty/CRM programs, as well as data-driven marketing communication programs.