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4 Steps to Implementing
Multi-Channel Marketing
Table of Contents
A Brief Introduction to Multi-Channel Marketing ............................... 4
Why Should You Use Multi-Channel Marketing .................................. 5
4 Steps to Multi-Channel Marketing .........................................................7
Understanding Your Audience ...................................................................7
Plan to Reach the Right Customers at the Right Moment.............. 8
Adding Digital Channels to Print Campaigns .....................................10
Implement Your Multi-Channel Campaign........................................... 12
The Expected Results of Multi-Channel Marketing........................... 13
Mini Case Study: An Agency Provides Increased Engagement ..14
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“AccuData helps our customers grow
a profitable customer base by
creating consistent customer
experiences across a multi-channel
marketing platform. With our vast
insights into consumer and B2B data
and analytics, AccuData can assist
in maximizing marketing dollars.”
Karen Blanchard,
VP of Marketing
A Brief Introduction to
Multi-Channel Marketing
Have you ever noticed a brand following you around? One day,
you look at a nice new set of bath towels at Macy’s while you’re
browsing the web. The next day you see those bath towels in an
ad in your Facebook Newsfeed. Then, you get an email with
those same towels shown right up top. The next thing you know,
you’ve even received a set of Macy’s coupons in the mail.
This is called multi-channel marketing, and more than anything, it
reminds you of how much you want to make that purchase.
Multi-channel marketing is when companies interact with
potential customers through more than one channel, both direct
and indirect. Mail, like the Macy’s coupon, is an example of a
direct marketing channel. Posting images of bath towels on
Facebook is an example of indirect marketing.
By combining these core tactics into one campaign, each of the
channels you use ensures a higher response rate and better
results for either your own marketing or your clients’ offers.
When you combine direct digital channels with your direct mail
marketing, it creates increased engagement from your target
audience and provides you with additional opportunities for
increasing revenue.
Direct Marketing Channels
Indirect Marketing Channels
Direct marketing channels establish a
direct line of communication with your
desired audience.
Indirect marketing channels are used for
building awareness and rapport with
current and prospective customers.
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Digital Display Advertising
Direct Mail
Email Advertising
Social Advertising
Telemarketing and more!
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Blogs
Mass Media
Newsletters
Social Pages and Posts
Trade Shows and more!
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Why Should You Use
Multi-Channel Marketing?
We see ads everywhere we go, all day long. By some estimates,
people today see 5,000 or more ad messages daily. In other
studies, message and brand exposures can range from 3,000 to
20,000 daily. No matter the study, the conclusion is really the
same: people are exposed to more advertising today than ever
before and if you want to get a response, your marketing needs
to meet this challenge.
On the path to purchasing, the buyer journey is complex and
studies show it may take 7 to 13 touches just to create awareness.
When you use a multi-channel marketing strategy, you increase
the number of messages you send so that it’s more likely to stick.
You also have the opportunity to reach people in the right place,
with the channel they prefer.
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Customers expect more from the brands they
choose to interact with today than they did
even yesterday. People expect to open an
email and find relevant content, and they are
more positive about receiving emails
including products they have previously
looked at online.
The only way to keep your prospect’s limited
attention span is by creating an experience
for them that is personalized and delivered on
the platforms they want. A multi-channel
marketing approach gives you additional
opportunities to make an impression and
allows you to deliver your message in a more
sophisticated way that meets the rising
expectations of your audience.
Perhaps the best part of the multi-channel
approach is that when you’ve already got a
direct mail marketing plan in place, adding a
variety of digital channels to employ a full
multi-channel campaign is simple.
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4 Steps to Using Multi-Channel
Marketing
1. Understanding Your Audience
Knowing who you want to target is crucial for any marketing
plan. While using a traditional approach with a prospect list or
in-house database is not a bad idea, if you really want to know
that you’re going to get the best results possible, it’s time to turn
to analytics. If you or a client has an existing database, there are
ways to use this information to your advantage.
Descriptive analytics, such as AccuData’s SnapShot, creates a
basic profile of your best current customers. With this
information at your fingertips, you can more accurately target
prospects who are similar and get more ideal customers.
Predictive analytics offers an even more sophisticated approach,
allowing you to go beyond profiling. A predictive model such as
AccuModel Response allows you to identify the key
characteristics of your best customers and then use those factors
to find more prospects that are most likely to respond to your
offers, make purchases, renew subscriptions, or take another
desired action. If you want to dive even deeper, a model like
AccuModel Predict uses advanced techniques to uncover the
probability that prospective customers will respond or make
purchases. Last, if you want to truly understand your customers,
a custom predictive model can be made to help target a specific,
desired behavior.
With the data you have or that your clients can provide, you can
drive better results for every marketing campaign (regardless of
the channels you’re using) by finding the right group of
prospects who are most likely to respond.
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2. Plan to Reach Your Customers at the Right
Moment
Once you know who you are targeting in your campaign, it’s
important to determine how your customers journey through the
buying process. Customer buying cycles are different, so knowing
where and how you’re approaching is nearly as important as
ensuring you have a good audience for your offers.
Let’s go back to Macy’s for a minute, but this time let’s talk about
buying a pair of black pants. One woman shopping in Macy’s already
has decided she needs a new pair of black pants for work, so when a
salesperson approaches she is grateful for the help to quickly locate
what she wants to find. The additional information that there is a
store-wide sale going on is also welcomed, since she fully plans to
buy the pants today.
Another woman at Macy’s is just browsing, since she doesn’t have
any particular need in mind, and when the salesperson interrupts her
it isn’t welcomed. She’s in a completely different part of the
customer journey, the “awareness” stage, while the woman in the
previous example is ready to buy.
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Understanding where your customers are in their journey is a
great way to get a better response. When you take the time
to map out journeys like these, you can provide the best offer
for each person right where they are in the cycle. For the
second woman, providing information about adding classic
pieces that work well with a variety of outfits might help
move her into a purchasing mind-frame, while giving the first
woman discount information might help ensure she buys her
new pants at Macy’s and not another store.
Taking the time to map out customer journeys helps you truly
understand the best way to engage your customers or your
clients’ customers. Multi-channel marketing gives you the
ability to interact with prospects in any way that is most
convenient for them, helping you catch their attention and
move them toward a purchase in the moments that these
decisions are getting made.
80% of the buying process
takes place before the
consumer’s first
interaction with the
brand*
According to a CMO
Council survey, 43% of
marketers said
personalization led to
more conversions
59% of adults agree it’s
worth sharing information
about themselves when it
makes their shopping
experience easy*
*Harvard Business Review; Adobe Get Personal Report
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3. Adding Digital Channels to Print Campaigns
Now that you’ve selected an engaged audience and mapped out
the customer journey so you can send the best offer possible, it’s
time to talk about the options you have for adding new digital
solutions to direct mail marketing. Digital channels allow you to
create multi-channel marketing campaigns without sacrificing
revenue you make on more traditional methods, like direct mail.
These new channels will simply enhance what you’re doing,
giving you or your clients better ROI for marketing initiatives.
Along with the increased engagement and response rates, digital
channels provide new revenue streams for businesses who work
with clients.
If you typically begin your marketing campaigns with a print
focus, adding digital is easy! Once you have postal addresses
available, there are many different options for including one or
more digital channels.
According to the Direct
Marketing Association, it
takes 7 - 13 touches to
create a conversion
Combining print with
digital is shown to
increase response rates
by up to 35%*
Users that are retarged
with digital channels are
70% more likely to
convert*
*2016 Litmus Design Conference
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Email Marketing
With an available database of postal addresses from you or your clients,
email addresses can be added to allow you to reach out this way as well.
With AccuData’s email appends, this is a simple process. Alternatively, when
you’ve used analytics to put together a great, responsive prospect list, you
can use AccuData’s Match and Deploy service. With the postal addresses
from the list of prospective customers, AccuData will match emails from our
opt-in email database, ensuring that you and your clients will meet with
CAN-SPAM compliance. From there, AccuData will send out the email to the
valid email addresses we’ve matched.
Digital Display Advertising
Digital retargeting is when, as in the first example about the bath towels, you
look at a product and then start seeing it in ads on other websites. You can
do this by using your complete database list or by selecting only people who
opened your email or previously visited your website. It’s a great way to
keep a product or service top of mind for an audience. Another way to use
digital display ads to target an audience is with IP targeting. These display
ads are shown only to people who live in a home or work at a business
you’ve selected, allowing you to follow your direct mail with digital ads that
these individuals will see as they browse the web. This is another great tactic
for following up an offer you or your clients have sent through the mail.
Social Media Advertising
Social media advertising is aneffective way to capture interest and integrate
an additional channel into your campaign. The average Facebook user
spends about 50 minutes per day interacting with the platform, including in
Messenger or on Instagram, and checks their Newsfeed 14 times a day.
AccuData provides Facebook and Instagram Direct Response Advertising
including setting up and managing an advertising campaign for you. Our
digital experts will monitor your campaign and optimize it throughout the
time it is running, getting you or your clients the best results possible.
Creative Services
The design and messaging throughout a multi-channel campaign is
extremely important. Overall, the look and feel of what you’re doing needs to
be consistent, so that if someone saw your email and your mail offer
side-by-side they would know that it was part of the same campaign, sent by
the company or on behalf of the same company. AccuData’s digital experts
are able to help you create emails based on a mail offer and ensure the
consistency you need across platforms as you implement digital channels for
your business or a client. We’ll also make sure that your email is optimized
for viewing on a mobile device, since most emails are now opened on
smartphones.
4. Implement Your Multi-Channel
Campaign
After you’ve selected the digital channels you
wish to add to the direct marketing mix, you’re
ready for your first multi-channel marketing
campaign! If you’ve followed the process, you
should have a great list of prospective
customers who will want to engage with your
marketing efforts, the right plan for what to
offer based on a customer’s journey, and a
good selection of channels that will help you
to reach these prospects most effectively.
All that you need to do now is send out your
multi-channel campaign to boost your ROI or
improve the results you’re getting for your
clients. Remember, if you need help with
implementing your multi-channel campaign,
AccuData’s experts are available to assist you
with creating prospect lists, enhancing your
efforts with analytics or adding digital
channels to your print campaign.
There are so many great reasons to employ a
multi-channel approach, including increasing
the response rates for a marketing offer and
adding new revenue streams for your business
when you offer your clients a multi-channel
approach.
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The Expected Results of
Multi-Channel Marketing
With more touch points, you’ll soon be able to capture the
interest of new prospective customers, ultimately increasing the
likelihood of a sale. Multi-channel marketing gives new and
existing customers multiple ways to engage and convert, giving
them the flexibility to decide when and where they will interact
with the offer. As marketing has grown more sophisticated,
customers have come to expect that they’ll be able to decide
how and where they are engaging, and that companies will meet
this demand.
In addition to capturing interest from potential new and existing
customers, multi-channel marketing can boost a brand’s
reputation. Consistent branding across platforms makes it easy
for customers of your business or your clients’ to recognize
where a communication is coming from at a glance. These
customized communications are also more personal, giving the
feeling that they were designed with just one customer in mind.
When you want assurance that your marketing campaign will get
the best response possible for you or your clients, turn to a
multi-channel approach.
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Mini Case Study: Agency Provides
Increased Engagement
The Challenge
A regional appliance cooperative wanted to drive traffic to its
stores and increase revenue with holiday promotions deployed
throughout the year.
The Solution
The client’s marketing agency, Main Street Media, worked with
AccuData to deploy a multi-channel campaign with direct mail,
email, and social media components. “AccuData stepped in and
offered suggestions that turned into individualized business plans
for my clients,” said Daniel Lehner, owner of Main Street Media.
AccuData developed action plans with timelines to provide the
appliance cooperative with all of the creative assets and
data-driven marketing solutions needed to deploy the
multi-channel campaign. This included custom email creatives
and matching digital ads that were developed for 60 individual
stores to complement their existing postal pieces.
The Outcome
Up to 50,000 emails were deployed for each store with social
media ads running concurrently beginning just before the email
deployments and running for up to two weeks after. AccuData’s
digital team developed and deployed the campaigns,
consistently monitoring response rates and engagement.
On average, each store experienced between 300 and 1,000 new
website visitors and Facebook engagement saw a huge spike
with 4.1 million ad impressions served. One store experienced
weekly total page views of over 540% - from 14,000 people to
more than 95,000. “The solutions were successful campaigns
executed as partners with AccuData’s very professional client
satisfaction team,” Lehner said. “Every campaign to date resulted
in better than average results for my clients”
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About
AccuData Integrated Marketing
AccuData Integrated Marketing helps our
clients to acquire, retain and grow a
profitable customer base using strategic
marketing intelligence and data solutions.
For more than 25 years, AccuData has
remained dedicated to addressing our
partners’ challenges through innovation
and service. We are a leading data
solutions provider helping our clients
succeed with a full suite of data-driven
marketing solutions. AccuData propels
marketing success for thousands of
companies through our strategic data
partnerships, powerful technologies and
scalable data solutions to meet the needs
of small to mid-size businesses and large
national brands.
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AccuData Integrated Marketing
5220 Summerlin Commons Boulevard, Suite 200
Fort Myers, Florida 33907
800-732-3440