Why data is the key to cross-channel success

Interactions between today’s consumer and their favoured brands have undergone a significant shift. Whereas once an equilibrium between customer expectations and brand fulfilment existed, the balance of power has tipped to the extent that customer expectations outweigh what most businesses can deliver.

Consumers rarely distinguish a brand in terms of channel, demanding a seamless experience regardless of how they interact. Meanwhile, brands have struggled to keep pace with these ever-changing interactions, creating a gulf between the demands of the customer and a brand’s marketing capabilities.

Over the last decade, the advent of social media, the proliferation of smartphones, tablets and new devices, and access to limitless data regardless of location have led to the always-on, connected consumer. These consumers hold huge power in the brand relationships and expect brands to meet their demands and needs on a constant basis with consistency and reliability. Successful marketers know that they must put their customers at the heart of everything they do – but how many of today’s marketers truly achieve this?

The progression from multi-channel marketing
So many of the tools and organisational structures that we’ve used for years to connect with consumers have focused on individual channels – whether it’s email, mobile, catalogue or web. This has always been a big challenge for marketers, ensuring a presence across all of these touch points and aiming to make a seamless experience for the consumer. To a certain extent, multi-channel marketing aimed to address the issue of communicating across different channels by producing targeted strands of campaigns that suited the individual circumstance – whether that is the device or the environment.

Most brands understand that they need to have a presence across multiple channels but very few have the sophistication to link these consistently and get their channel experts to collaborate and execute campaigns effectively across channels– and it’s here where we begin to see the need for a new level of marketing; cross-channel marketing.

Cross-channel to no channel – marketing with a consumer mindset
What consumers really want is something like this: A brand serves a tailored ad on a social network to a customer with its latest offers on product X, something the brand knows to be of interest through preferences and past purchase history; the customer emails the brand to find out if the nearest store has availability; the store in question responds with information of stock levels and the customer calls to reserve; a purchase is made in-store and electronic point of sale (EPOS) data collected triggers an outbound email thanking the customer for shopping and offering deals on related products.

For a brand, this covers a wide range of customer touch points across channels. But for consumers this is just one buying interaction and a consistent voice across channels is what makes this a great experience with potential for a repeat purchase. Little irritates customers more than being offered products they have already refused or being contacted when they have specifically opted out of communications. An Experian Marketing Services surveyconducted in April 2012 found that 84% of consumers would walk away from a company that didn’t link up, understand and respond to their engagements across channels.

Creating a single customer view
The social explosion in today’s digital age means that consumers are readily sharing information about themselves in unprecedented volumes. Cross-channel marketing is underpinned by such data, and is the next stage in offering a seamless experience.The challenge for marketers is that having such huge volumes of data can often be overwhelming, especially how to take this array of disparate data and tie it back to the same customer. At the heart of this data linkage is a coherent and consistent single customer view – to enable true cross-channel marketing, brands must be able to bring together all of the identities of customers across multiple channels. With effective cross-channel marketing techniques and tools, the ability to manage all interactions through a single platform to gain a new level of knowledge and insight around who your customers are and how they interact with your brand across multiple channels is what brands should aspire to.

Only then can brands claim to have a 360 degree view of the consumer and truly understand their intentions behind purchasing habits, web visits and social interactions.

By DMA guest blogger Colin Grieves, General Manager, Experian Digital Media Services and DMA Data Council member