Managing an effective multi-channel marketing strategy

How businesses manage their marketing communications can have a significant impact on their growth prospects. Communication tools act as the eyes and ears of the business, helping it gain and share intelligence with existing and potential customers; something that is particularly important for companies hoping to increase market share.

A common problem for businesses is that as they grow and adapt to their customers’ needs, they adopt short term fixes that end up turning into long term problems. This is painfully true when managing marketing communications across different channels. From physical post to email and social media, how consumers want to be communicated with has steadily evolved over the last few decades. Some may want to be contacted through traditional means, while others may prefer the immediacy of digital correspondence and everything else in between. Indeed, recent research conducted by Royal Mail reveal that consumers often prefer to be reached via email for news and updates, confirmation messages and notification of services, but would choose direct mail for brochures, catalogues and statements. This diversity can become a headache for marketing teams as they endeavour to meet all of their new and potential customers’ needs. Ultimately, how this process is managed, ensuring marketing communications are received and delivered seamlessly across all channels, while also tracked and stored in the most efficient fashion, can hugely affect a company’s ability to grow in such a competitive environment.

A lot of the challenges that businesses face when trying to manage this process arise from their failure to integrate new and existing technologies successfully. While many realise the benefits of sending marketing collateral digitally – it’s more efficient and cheaper than sending paper counterparts – they often end up grabbing new technologies without stopping to think about how they will work alongside existing processes. This can result in a mishmash of solutions, requiring vastly different processes depending on which communication channel is chosen and ends up negating all of the benefits a multi-channel marketing strategy can bring.

Mismanaging multi-channel marketing

Taking an ad hoc approach to communications and applying quick fixes to serve existing or potential customers can result in marketing departments spending large amounts of time on menial tasks, which can have a knock-on effect on business growth. For example, if items are being received and sent in multiple formats, it’s not uncommon for a document, such as a brochure, to be created and modified in one system, before being reproduced in another format for sending. If the right tools and processes aren’t in place, the time taken to manually make changes over and over again can prevent marketing teams from focusing on other business critical activities.

Businesses that rely on manual processes for customer communications also increase the risk of errors that could result in sending marketing material to a customer that has opted out. While this can impact customer relations, organisations are often unaware that it can also result in substantial penalties. Indeed, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has the power to issue fines of up to £500,000 if a company has broken a privacy data law. At a time of increasing customer intolerance to receiving unsolicited marketing materials, firms shouldn’t be burdening their marketing departments with the responsibility of manually screening large volumes of data.

Syncing channels

A multi-channel communication marketing strategy not only provides the opportunity to test different combinations to ascertain which channel gets the best leads or results. Furthermore, asking customers what they would prefer can help organisations direct their efforts. To ensure this is successfully implemented, businesses must have processes in place that automatically manage each channel so that they are all in sync. Keeping records of all communications, whether digital or physical, should also be of high importance. In the case of an investigation by a regulator, such as the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), it is essential that marketers can demonstrate that they were acting compliantly.

By implementing tools that automate the preparation and sending of materials, firms remove the need for manual interaction and, subsequently, the opportunity for human error. Furthermore, as companies increasingly adopt multi-channel communication strategies, it’s imperative that digital and physical channels are managed effectively, not only to avoid customers receiving unwanted marketing material across multiple channels, but also to ensure a more productive marketing team.

Undoubtedly, digital communication will continue to play a prominent role in how marketers reach their intended audience, however it’s important that they don’t overlook the benefits of a strategy that still utilises traditional marketing channels. Only by taking a well thought out approach that ensures all channels are managed in line with each other, with no repetition, will businesses be able to benefit from a strong marketing strategy.