Multichannel Marketing

Metrics and Methods for On and Offline Success

Akin Arikan

• Publisher: Sybex
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9780470239599
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781118059531
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Computer Science General
• Index: Computer Science

No longer can the offline remain separate from the online. Integrated, customer-centric, cross-channel marketing campaigns persuade customers to act, provide greater ROI, and ultimately improve your organization's bottom line. This must-have guide synthesizes the successful methods and metrics that online, direct, and brand marketers have employed for years so that you can develop, implement, and measure successful cross-channel campaigns. Multichannel marketing expert Akin Arikan takes you from customer acquisition to customer relationship management with strategic advice, effective case studies, and proven metrics.

Part I

Building Blocks for Multichannel Metrics

Online, direct, and brand marketers have been facing multichannel measurement challenges and crafting solutions for years. Unfortunately, many of these solutions haven’t been shared across marketing disciplines. The online has remained separate from the offline.

Let the sharing begin now! In Part I, we will explore today’s marketing landscape and discuss the importance of multichannel metrics. Then we’ll look over the shoulders of web analysts, direct marketers, and brand advertisers as they solve multichannel measurements and metrics problems within their own confines to discover many building blocks for bridging marketing metrics across online and offline.

Chapter 1: With Great Opportunity Come Great Challenges

Chapter 2: The Web Analyst Tackles Multichannel Metrics Online

Chapter 3: The Offline Marketer’s Bag of Tricks

Chapter 4: The Direct Marketer Digs Into Multichannel Analytics

Chapter 5: The Brand Advertiser’s Take on Multichannel Analytics

Chapter 1

With Great Opportunity Come Great Challenges

Has marketing become more challenging today or is it easier than ever? Both! On the one hand, there is formidable competition for the attention of today’s over-messaged, out-of-time, and in-control buyers. On the other hand, new channels for connecting with buyers are springing up left and right. The marketer who is able to ride on the coattails of the multichannel revolution has the opportunity to connect with always-on consumers anywhere, any time. Doing so, however, requires a new set of know-how. Let’s picture the opportunities for the marketer who can acknowledge and overcome the challenges ahead.

Chapter Contents

• Multichannel, Schmultichannel!
• Just What Kind of Trouble Are Marketers In?
• Chicken Soup for the Troubled Marketer
• Multichannel Metrics, the Missing Puzzle Piece

Multichannel, Schmultichannel!

Mobile devices are in every hand. Television and the Internet are converging. The online and the offline are fusing into two sides of the same coin. When marketers take stock of all the channels through which they are interacting with their customers today, the count quickly reaches 10 to 15 different avenues. So, most marketers feel like multichannel artists already. What is there left to talk about?

Well, it is one thing to interact through multiple channels in parallel. It is quite another to fuse those activities together in an intelligent way to maximize response and conversion rates. That is the mark of multichannel marketing as a science, and few marketers claim to have embraced it to date.

The channels in question include the traditional brand advertising outlets, as shown in Table 1-1. What the traditional outlets have in common is that they are nonaddressable—i.e., the message is delivered to whoever happens to be listening or watching, and those individuals are not identifiable. Marketers align their advertisements on these media based on their target audiences’ affinities and passions, say around soccer.

Table 1-1: Overview of Brand Advertising and Direct Response Channels

Brand Advertising Channels(Not Addressable)	Direct Response Channels(Addressable)
TV/radio/print	Store (purchases)
Out-of-home	Call center
Marketing events	Direct mail
Product placement	Sales and service teams
In-store displays	Mobile devices
	E-mail
	Web display ads
	Search engines
	Website

In contrast, the addressable channels speak to individual prospects. Therefore, they have the opportunity to tailor the message to each individual, prompt for a purchase or inquiry, and measure the response. Typical direct response channels are listed in Table 1-1 also.

As online and offline converge, more and more channels are becoming addressable. For example, display ads on the Internet used to be nonaddressable but now they can be targeted to individuals, as we will review in later chapters.

Technological advances are making it easier to measure marketing success within individual channels. Yet, the proliferation of channels is making it harder to gauge the real picture of success because any marketing impulse has repercussions across multiple response channels. The complete business results attributable to a marketing initiative need to be added across all the online and offline channels where activity increased. At the same time, the marketing initiative can cause activity to decrease on some channels due to “cannibalization,” i.e. buyers switching to other channels; that needs to be taken into account as well.

Not by coincidence, this channel fragmentation has been taking place in conjunction with two other tidal shifts in marketing. Namely, consumers are increasingly in charge of the dialog with companies. As a consequence, marketers are working to change from a product centric to a customer centric way of running their businesses. Let’s examine the implications with which marketers wrestle.

Just What Kind of Trouble Are Marketers In?

Let’s use a recent first-hand experience that my family and I lived through to illustrate the kinds of trouble that today’s marketers face when reaching their audience. It all began after we changed houses. Moving is one of those major life events that attentive marketers rightfully watch out for as an opportunity to capitalize.

Interruption Marketers, Not Welcome Anymore!

It barely took 24 hours at our new home before we were abruptly stopped in our tracks and reminded why this is the right time for this book. Namely, the telemarketing squadrons began attacking our new phone number with no less than ten calls a day. A side effect of the U.S. National Do-Not-Call Registry (www.donotcall.gov) is apparently that unregistered phone numbers receive maybe ten times the volume of telemarketing calls that we had deemed annoying a few years ago.

Have those marketers ever heard of a customer-centric approach to marketing? Yes, to a certain degree, actually. You might be surprised. Their databases flagged our family as having moved recently and predicted correctly that we would be making a plethora of purchases for setting up our new home. So, some of them prioritized us for phone offers for lower credit interest rates and called us multiple times per day to deliver the offers. Not a bad bet, if you put yourself in that marketer’s shoes. Some recipients should find this interruption to be a valuable service. But for the rest, what a nuisance!

Yet, we can assume that the person allocating the marketing budget did their Return On Investment (ROI) analysis and concluded that they would get their money’s worth of orders. However, had they used a balanced-scorecard approach for evaluating their campaign ROI instead of just looking at the monetary results, surely they would have noticed that they would be in the red in terms of being cursed out many times by annoyed prospects!

Equipped with caller ID and a short temper, my family became very fast at swatting out the unwelcome phone offers. It is not that telemarketers are unpleasant people; they tend to be very friendly actually. However, our willingness to spend our precious time on a telemarketer’s inquiry has been greatly diminished for many reasons. Every day we see more advertising messages than we can possibly act on. Estimates frequently range from a couple hundred to a couple thousand messages per day for the average person in the U.S. The Internet has given us confidence that we can find almost anything we want, whenever we want. We also know we can find independent reviews and peer recommendations whose advice we have come to trust more than a vendor’s pitch. Finally, for most of us, our past experiences with telemarketing do not instill us with hope that we’ll be surprised with a particularly relevant offer.

The plight of the telemarketer is singled out here as an obvious telltale for the increasing challenges that interruption marketing is facing in all its forms. What a comic battle between marketers and prospective buyers! Whenever marketers find a new avenue for interrupting buyers to shove ads down their throats, buyers gear up and find a new way around them. In just the minute or two that it may have taken you to read the previous paragraphs, your e-mail filters probably stopped another batch of spam from reaching your inbox. DVRs (digital video recorders) such as TiVo enable us to dodge the umpteenth repetition of the same commercial interruption. Satellite radio and iPods enable commercial-free listening. The only difficult thing about filtering untargeted direct mail offers from your mail box is not the minute that it takes every day, but the bad feeling that you get about all that wasted paper and energy.

Note: Although rumors of interruption marketing’s death have been greatly exaggerated, it is clearly suffering from increasing inefficiencies.

Competition among companies has become less about competition between products and more about competition between marketing communications seeking buyers’ attention, writes Prof. Manfred Bruhn in the German-language book Guide to Integrated Communication (Leitfaden Integrierte Kommunikation), published in 2006 by Marketing Börse (www.marketing-boerse.de). This point of view places an enormous amount of responsibility on the marketer’s shoulders. Namely, the marketer’s role is seen to grow beyond creating a market for their products toward becoming more of a part of the offering itself. Likewise, under this view, a business’s failure cannot be blamed on the product’s competitiveness alone; the marketer’s competitiveness is also part of the equation.

Buyers Want to Be in Charge

Funny though, our family really did make a plethora of purchases within two weeks of moving into our new home! Yet, in our case, the telemarketers missed out on the opportunity. As soon as our Internet connection became live, we went researching online to make our buying decisions. At that point, the dialog was in our hands and any ads that we saw, if we noticed them at all, were relevant to our search. Earlier we were swatting out the telemarketers as “too much info.” However, during our research, no amount of information seemed to be enough to satisfy our appetites. After all, we wanted to make good decisions. This was true especially when it came to the biggest buying decision that we had to make, namely the car. We happily clicked on all sorts of relevant advertising messages. Ironically for the telemarketers, we even thoroughly studied offers for financing with low interest rates.

As long as we believed that it was our own idea to do so, we were highly motivated to examine financing options. Earlier, when the marketers were interrupting us and asking us to check on the same idea we were stubborn.

Note: Although buyers are not listening when you talk, paradoxically they have b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Advance Praise
• Title Page
• Credits
• Copyright
• Publisher's Note
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part I: Building Blocks for Multichannel Metrics
• Part II: Measurement and Metrics
• Part III: Multichannel Marketing Methods
• Index