Integrated marketing across multiple online channels or touch points isn’t some passing fad. In fact, it’s based on three of the most fundamental principles of direct marketing. First, repeated and reinforced messaging drives a higher propensity to buy. Marketers can significantly improve the effectiveness of their online activities through repeated messages, whether, for example, announcing new seasonal products or highlighting a holiday promotion. Second, landing your message near the time the purchase decision is made will drive higher buying behavior. Integrated marketing improves the odds that your message will be seen during the active purchase decision period. And, finally, direct marketers know that you need to offer your products where your buyers already are, whether that’s through a search engine, social network, website or mobile device.
For marketers determined to improve direct response effectiveness through integrated digital marketing across channels, here are five tips to keep in mind as you roll out or enhance an existing integrated marketing program.
1. Don’t manage interactive channels in silos
This advice speaks to how companies organisationally structure the teams working on these activities. For example, some organisations have sales or revenue owners manage the e-commerce store, while a CRM or customer service group manages email and the marketing team manages social media. This is especially true of social media, which many people think of as an activity to be managed independently of the website or other digital channels. This structure is suboptimal and it reminds me of the early days of the Web when brands built and managed their online websites and stores as separate businesses from their catalog or brick and mortar stores. Some even spun off or sold their dotcoms. Of course, in the end, common sense asserted itself – many of these brands reversed course and tightly integrated their online activities with the management of their brands in other channels. We are going through a similar phase with social media. It is new, important and high impact and, in many cases, managed separately. Over time, social media will be managed through inline work streams that are more tightly integrated with the online e-commerce business.
2. Do implement cross-channel tracking and reporting
When managing integrated marketing campaigns, it is essential to understand the interaction and impact of decisions made across channels. The level of activity, promotion and engagement in one channel can significantly impact campaigns in other channels. For example, I have seen the introduction of display advertising campaigns improve the performance of search marketing campaigns and studies show that social media fans are much more likely to recommend and buy online from brands they follow. Negative impacts on other channels are also possible. For example, exclusive discounts consistently offered in just one channel (e.g. social or mobile) train customers to seek out such offers to the detriment of other online vehicles. A sophisticated tracking and reporting system will include reporting for channel crossover, program attribution and cross-channel assists. By studying the impact of marketing initiatives through such reporting, marketers can gain insight into the cross-channel interaction taking place.
3. Do offer most promotions across channels; but also reserve exclusive offers for each channel
Most promotions should cross channels to leverage the multiple impression opportunities and other advantages gained by spreading your messages widely. If a brand is running a 48 hour sale on the website, there is no reason not to broadly communicate it through mobile, social, email and other channels. This can only help the message break through. On the other hand, channel specific discounts and sales are important and in many ways are becoming expected. Facebook fans and Twitter followers in particular embrace the exclusive offers that are targeted to them. Flash deals, combined with interactive techniques, such as requiring customers “like” an offer to see the discount are increasingly popular. Another example involves affiliate marketing where “coupon” affiliates require an exclusive discount for greater prominence on their website.
4. Do personalise each channel
Customers increasingly expect a personalised experience to varying degrees through each channel. This ranges from product recommendations, based on profile information to persistent login (or semi-login) on return visits. In addition to recommendation technology, marketers can use tools such as Facebook Connect to ease the registration and login process when visiting a site. Customers are choosing to share information about themselves to improve the overall quality of their online experience.
5. Do optimise user experiences against the total of all channels rather than each channel individually
Pursue strategies in each channel that specifically benefit the others. Share to social links in email or on product detail pages are an obvious example. But, you should also design strategies to collect email addresses through mobile or social media. Or pay affiliates on social and mobile sales in addition to traditional Web sales. There are many other examples, but it’s important to remember the best outcome is a happy, engaged customer, not the most email addresses, mobile numbers, fans and followers to the detriment of the overall goal of growing the customer base and sales.
Integrated marketing can play big dividends because it works with and not against basic direct response fundamentals. Combine the rules here with the right criteria for success and you will take your interactive marketing to a whole new level.
