Know your customers
Gather as much information as you can. Besides using standard segmentation information, leverage customer preference centers to: a) gather the products and information that they’re interested in; b) learn their preferred channels of communication, and c) incent them to use your lower cost channels. Monitor their responses by channel to help drive the optimal mix.
Strength in Streams
Triggered communications will continue to yield 5 to 10 times better performance than traditional one-off blasts or mailings. Making sure your messages continually get in front of your customer in a timely, choreographed manner will determine your success. Triggers can be based either on external business events or individual customer behavior. Think of a program you are running now. What are the events or customer behaviors you wish you could use to trigger a communication? What would your ideal stream of communications to that customer be? How would the messages be paced? Advanced companies have not only thought about these questions, they’ve implemented answers.
Channel Coordination and Consistency
Once you have your triggers and streams of communication in place, remember to ensure that your messages, offers and even graphics are consistent across channels. Having a given customer get different, or conflicting, offers across different channels is unacceptable. The strength of a Multichannel program hinges on a consistent and ongoing individual dialogue across media, and on the channels that work best for the customer. Some customers prefer and are responsive to email, some prefer direct mail, some prefer both coordinated, some prefer phone, etc… For your programs to perform best you need to do all. Be sure that you’re listening to your customers – their behavior and preferences should be driving what communication they get and where. Your job is to make sure it’s coordinated, consistent, and incrementally advances the dialogue across channels.
Relevancy Rules
E-mail is a powerful marketing tool in communicating one-to-one with your customers. However, most on-line marketers haven’t even begun to utilize the personalization capabilities that e-mail solutions offer, including utilizing dynamic content. And the same holds true for direct-mail where the broader adoption of digital printing and print on-demand is becoming a reality. Tailored messages, done consistently and efficiently across channels, will enhance relevance and separate the players from the pretenders. The more relevant your message is, including personalization, timeliness and even your offer, the higher your success rate will be.
Test, Test, and Test again
This is one of the most important parts of your program and usually the part that is most neglected or monitored. Once you have all the elements in place and you’re ready to roll, be sure to ‘close-the-loop’ on your efforts. Have a system set up that will continually monitor impact to help you determine what’s most effective and what needs to be changed. By doing so, you can leverage those findings in upcoming adjustments to the program for even better results.
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