Multichannel Campaign Management Platform

Multichannel campaign management is the process of executing marketing campaigns whereby businesses can define, orchestrate and communicate offers to customers across websites, mobile, social, direct mail, call centers and email. Digital marketing, which continues to be integrated with campaign management, includes addressable branding/advertising, contextual marketing and transactional marketing. Digital marketing extends the marketing process through channels such as the web, video, mobile and social applications, point-of-sale terminals, digital signage and kiosks.

In a world that is inundated with ads, someone is always trying to sell you something, no matter wherever you look. Your customers are used to this, and in a way, feel disconnected in this deluge. Which is why it may take more marketing touchpoints than normal to break through and really resonate with them. The best way to do that is by taking a multichannel approach. A multichannel strategy can help you reach your people where they are, keep all your marketing work conveniently in one place, and increase your ROI over time. Moreover, multichannel campaigns are not expensive and are easy to implement with all the free and paid technology available today.

The first step to organizing the organic information you have about the customer is to build a single view of the customer. Businesses with a single customer view can track customers and their communications and purchases across channels. This allows a company to determine a prospect’s preferences and enables a more personalized marketing experience. Maintaining a single view of the customer lets businesses be responsive by tracking customer data and their progress through the sales funnel over time.

Once you have identified your prospects' preferences, you need a way to implement those preferences quickly into your marketing campaign. Your business must be able to run a campaign on multiple channels all from a single place. Doing so gives you easy access to things like campaign management, advanced analytics, response attribution, and digital marketing. Adobe and Intercom are two platforms which allow users to market to prospects across multiple channels.

Your business should strive to produce a consistent experience across channels so that your prospects learn what to expect from your brand. A successful marketing campaign across multiple channels will deliver consistency in everything from color scheme to personalization.

In today's world, you need to be where your customers are. To execute successful multichannel campaign management, the following steps need to be taken:

1. Get your data together

The starting point for successful multi-channel campaign management is getting your customer data in working order. Accurate data is essential to delivering a superior customer experience, yet brands often buy expensive marketing technology before tidying up their databases.

You need to perform a thorough health check of your data first and foremost. Remove any customer details that are no longer useful and retain only the most business-relevant data points. These relate to customer buying behaviours such as repeat purchase rates, conversions and channel preferences. Make sure your data is clean enough to give you a clear and up-to-date view of who your customers are – and how you can engage with them efficiently.

The next step is to ensure that everyone across your company has access to that data. If any business-critical information is trapped in silos, your sales and marketing efforts will work against each other. Ideally, the marketing function should sit horizontally across the business. Everyone, regardless of actual role, needs to make sure that the company as a whole is delivering a top-notch customer experience.

2. Start profiling and segmenting

Customer segmentation helps you know your various audiences better, and target them more successfully. It divides your customer base into groups that share certain characteristics related to age or gender, buying habits and responsiveness. Segmentation captures behavioural indicators that determine various propensities, such as how likely a customer is to complete an online form or respond to an offer via email.

Once your database has been segmented, you can identify the different personas in your audience and work out who the best prospects are to engage with. That way you can focus your resources on targeting the most lucrative opportunities with relevant, personalised marketing communications.

3. Choose the right channels

Once you’ve completed profiling and segmenting your customers, you need to work out which marketing channels will target each group best. Successful multi channel campaign management doesn’t mean every channel. It’s about being where your customers are, and where it makes sense for your business to be.

Some channels simply won’t factor into your customer’s experience. WhatsApp, for example, may not be the best way to target an audience of people over the age of 65, whilst 18-25 year olds may prefer to communicate via this channel.

Given the rate at which new channels are launching, delivering a consistent message to the right people, at the right time, via the right channels can be a challenge. Some brands have responded by appointing a customer experience team who can oversee specific channels, such as email, mobile and social.

4. Seek out multi-channel campaign management technology

Choosing the right type of technology is crucial to support your multi-channel marketing campaigns. That said, there is a confusingly wide range of options to choose from. Don’t try and procure every possible piece of software that promises the earth – you’ll only succeed at depleting your marketing budget and delivering an inconsistent and disparate customer experience.

EngageBay’s multichannel campaign management software is a great fit for all growing businesses.