To build a more holistic picture of customers from multiple channels, brands need customer data. This means they need stronger “owned” channels, from email to social and a great website presence. <\/p>\n
There are two major reasons for creating stronger owned channels.<\/strong><\/p>\n Before you start collecting customer data (or continue to), you need to know what you want to get out of that data, and ensure there are processes in place to ensure its usability. It\u2019s particularly essential that your data strategy<\/a> is understood and practised across teams, so that the data feeding your execution is actually useful, usable, and valuable.<\/p>\n Quality data trumps big data. Ask for hyper-relevant data<\/strong>, not just generic demographic data. For example, instead of asking for annual income, ask for average spend on your product or service \u2013 an answer which you\u2019re far more likely to obtain, and be able to act more usefully. <\/p>\n Collecting and deploying data according to a solid strategy will also establish trust with your customers, because they will be able to sense when you use their data wisely (and for their benefit, not just yours). Here are a few interesting examples<\/a> of how good data use boosts engagement with mobile push notifications, as well as some examples to avoid – complete with customer reactions on social media.<\/p>\n There are great cost savings in sharing data, breaking down silos and using data for more than one purpose. For example, consumer promotions are often run traditionally to just drive sales. However, brands are now getting more out of the attention these promotions capture by building their subscriber base too.<\/p>\n Once that subscriber base is established, brands can then use their new “owned” channel to incrementally capture more data about their customers, and better engage customers with insights from that data. Using promotions to achieve their customer acquisition targets also improves the ROI of each promotion.<\/p>\n The total data captured over time from multiple channels is a good start to the dream of a single customer view<\/em> but certainly does build an integrated customer profile<\/em>. This is used to help brands prioritize future marketing activities. If you expand this thinking to your entire marketing effort, there are far more wins to be had. <\/p>\n As Scott Brinker of Chief Martec says<\/a>: \u201cMarketing is increasingly about designing and delivering customer experiences, and software is the digital clay we use to sculpt them.\u201d<\/em> If software is simply the digital clay, make sure that first and foremost, you have the design (the strategy) and the ability to deliver (the technical execution skills). There is a reason that ongoing services matter in the hunt for an ESP<\/a>. <\/p>\n Once you have a firm idea of what you want to achieve, and a rough idea of what channels are most important to you, a natural \u201cshopping list\u201d of features will flow from that, so you can pick the platform with strengths that match your strategic focus areas. Looking long term though you may also want to consider where the platform can take you in future<\/a>, because with multi-channel platforms, it\u2019s less easy to make a simple switch than a single-channel platform.<\/p>\n These questions cannot be left unanswered when you are seriously looking to choose a multi-channel marketing platform:<\/p>\n\n
<\/span>2. Establish a solid data strategy, not just data sets<\/span><\/h2>\n
![\"data_collected\"](\"https:\/\/www.emailvendorselection.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/11\/data_collected.png\")
<\/p>\n<\/span>3. Involve more marketing channels<\/span><\/h2>\n
![\"multi-channel\"](\"https:\/\/www.emailvendorselection.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/11\/multi-channel.png\")
<\/p>\n<\/span>4. Pick your platform strategically<\/span><\/h2>\n
<\/span>Checklist: Choosing the right multi-channel marketing platform<\/span><\/h2>\n
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<\/span>5. Use contextual messaging<\/span><\/h2>\n