marketing sophistication curve assessment

Experian’s Marketing Sophistication CurveSM

An Experian Marketing Services white paper

The journey from channel execution to customer optimization

Customer optimization

Channel execution


Experian’s Marketing Sophistication CurveSM: a guide for customer-centric marketers ............................................................................1

Time for the marketer’s journey ..........................................................................................2

Progressing up the curve .....................................................................................................3

Understanding the curve .....................................................................................................4Phase I: Single-channel optimization ...............................................................................................5

Phase II: Multichannel marketing .....................................................................................................5

Phase III: Cross-channel marketing .................................................................................................5

Phase IV: Cross-channel optimization .............................................................................................5

Five principal steps within Experian’s Marketing Sophistication Curve .....................6Step 1: Data management ..................................................................................................................6

Step 2: Insights and targeting ............................................................................................................6

Step 3: Strategy and planning ............................................................................................................6

Step 4: Execution ...................................................................................................................................6

Step 5: Measurement ...........................................................................................................................6

Stage 1: Single-channel optimization ..............................................................................13

Moving up to multichannel marketing ............................................................................14

Stage 2: Multichannel marketing ......................................................................................15

Moving up to cross-channel marketing ...........................................................................16

Stage 3: Cross-channel marketing ...................................................................................18

Moving up to cross-channel optimization .......................................................................20

Stage 4: Cross-channel optimization ...............................................................................21

Conclusion ............................................................................................................................23


An Experian Marketing Services white paper | Page 1

Today’s consumers are exploring and adopting new media channels at an unprecedented rate. New platforms and devices have emerged quickly, becoming an integral part of consumers’ daily lives. With the opportunity of connecting directly with readily available consumers, creating strong customer experiences is beyond a marketing priority, it’s a business imperative.

Marketing organizations must work toward building a consistent, coordinated and optimized cross-channel experience for their customers in order to achieve a profitable return. They must be prepared to both generate demand through planned outbound messages and capture in-market demand via real-time offer management and trigger-based campaigns — all with a consistent and engaging message across any channel.

This guide is intended for marketers who recognize that amid the challenges of engaging today’s always-on, hyperconnected, empowered and vocal consumer lies the opportunity to increase efficiencies; improve performance; and intelligently interact with customers in extremely meaningful, timely and relevant ways. However, recognizing the need to change and knowing how to make it happen are two entirely different things. Marketers need more than just the will, they need the way — specifically, a framework and road map through which they can accurately assess the state of their existing marketing operations while also looking ahead to the steps necessary for creating a fully optimized, cross-channel marketing experience that is aligned around the customer.

Experian’s Marketing Sophistication CurveSM: a guide for customer-centric marketersExperian Marketing Services has created its Marketing Sophistication CurveSM, a progressive and detailed guide that helps marketers carefully and purposefully map their journey through today’s increasingly interconnected, real-time, multichannel marketing landscape.

Leveraging decades of experience in data management, analytics and multichannel delivery, Experian’s Marketing Sophistication Curve connects an organization’s current marketing programs with a tangible and actionable road map for cross-channel marketing success.


Page 2 | Experian’s Marketing Sophistication CurveSM: The journey from channel execution to customer optimization

Time for the marketer’s journeyExperian’s Marketing Sophistication Curve serves as a prescription for a progression from the one-to-many, channel-centric marketing of old to the one-to-one, customer-centric, cross-channel optimized marketing that is the inevitable conclusion to change inspired by technology and customers.

Your own marketer’s journey begins with self-assessment. This is where you will discover precisely where your organization falls on the curve.

If you have not already taken the online assessment, you can do so at www.experian.com/marketing-services/marketing-sophistication-curve

Understanding your organization’s starting point on the curve is the first critical step in the process, as your road map to customer optimization will be determined by your current state. Strategies and tactics for increasing marketing sophistication also should be aligned with your starting point.

Channel execution

CustomerOptimization

Cross-channel optimization

Cross-channel marketing

Multichannel marketing

Single-channel optimization

Industry Benchmark

www.experian.com/marketing-services/marketing-sophistication-curve.html



For good reasons, most of today’s marketing operations sit at or near the start of this curve. First, customers enjoyed a rather significant head start in claiming control of the brand-customer dynamic. Additionally, devices, channels and customer expectations all proliferated at a pace no brand could have hoped to anticipate let alone match. Lastly, many enterprises made the understandable mistake, of believing they could simply add new channels to their marketing operations using existing single-channel practices.

Fortunately, the very same channels and devices adopted by those customers also are generating enormous volumes and varieties of data from which valuable new forms of marketing intelligence can be gleaned. In turn, this intelligence can be used to influence every step of the buying journey. It is precisely a company’s ability to intelligently collect, integrate, analyze and optimize that data to arrive at meaningful, actionable customer insights that is central to Experian’s Marketing Sophistication Curve framework for cross-channel marketing success.

Progressing up the curveMarketers should recognize that the curve is named for a specific reason: The farther a brand progresses, the greater the required degree of sophistication. Your technology, data analytics practices, organizational structure and overall marketing mindset will change, in some cases dramatically.

Consequently, brands should not expect to leapfrog from one phase of the curve to another. As we shall see, to “graduate” to the next phase requires brands to demonstrate tangible proficiencies in a number of areas, including data integration, targeting, planning, execution and measurement.

As with any continuum, it is unlikely that your organization fits neatly into one specific section of the curve. Instead, your marketing program probably exists in a state of flux, with some aspects of your marketing operations already venturing into more sophisticated waters. So while our formula may place your brand squarely at one distinct stage of the curve, it does so only because it most closely reflects the overall status of your current marketing efforts.

Also, benchmarks can and do vary by industry, so this should not be construed as a marketing scorecard or an indication that any marketing organization falls short of its business objectives. While there are an immense number of benefits associated with reaching cross-channel optimization, brands should recognize that the assessment is necessary in order to utilize the framework for reaching cross-channel goals. In other words, you are here precisely because you have acknowledged that you are not yet there. The goal of this document is to help you plan and execute that journey.



Understanding the curveThere are four stages of Experian’s Marketing Sophistication Curve, each representing a distinct collection of strategies, tactics, technologies and goals that must be firmly in place before a brand can be said to have mastered that particular stage.

This section offers a brief snapshot of each phase of the curve and then a short explanation of the five core areas marketers can use to move up from one stage to the next.

Channel execution






Seeks a system (inclusive of tool, process, and service) that enables execution against vision

Struggles with adopting an operational approach to devising message strategies at the customer, versus campaign level

Seeks ways to easily and consistently target campaign content at the individual level

Struggles with organizing data around a customer in useful time frames

Seeks brand and promotion consistency across channels through offer replication

Struggles with incorporating new channels, like mobile, into messaging strategy

Seeks new sources of consumer data and analytical approaches to doing more with existing programs and tools

Struggles with obtaining higher performance out of insight driven campaigns



Phase I: Single-channel optimization

Marketing organizations at this stage are the metaphorical equivalent of single-channel black belts in a multichannel world. These brands are optimizing for specific channel performance rather than for overall customer experience and engagement. They constantly seek more customer and prospect data to squeeze performance out of each of those preferred channels individually.

Phase II: Multichannel marketing

Marketing organizations at this stage recognize the need to engage customers across multiple channels with consistent messaging. However, while these companies have worked hard to venture into new areas such as social or mobile, they are struggling to extend their core campaign capabilities and to integrate customer data across those channels.

Phase III: Cross-channel marketing

Companies at this stage have made a quantum leap forward in their marketing sophistication, most notably because the customer now takes center stage. While these organizations “get it,” they still struggle with organizing data around customers in useful time frames and seek ways to easily and consistently target campaign content at the individual level.

Phase IV: Cross-channel optimization

This is the apex of modern marketing, where customer context, location and timing merge with every imaginable form of customer data to create a single, shared and immediate view of the customer across all channels. While brands at this stage can initiate or respond with personalized messaging and offers in real- time, they still may struggle with adopting an operational approach to message strategies at the customer level instead of the campaign level.



Five principal steps within Experian’s Marketing Sophistication CurveWith a basic understanding of each stage of the curve, you must now be aware of the five principal steps marketing organizations must take to run any marketing program. Within Experian’s Marketing Sophistication Curve framework, these five common, and necessary, steps also can be used as levers to increase overall marketing sophistication.

Step 1: Data management

Data is the cornerstone of all advanced marketing programs. Here, brands can measure the degree to which their marketing organization is capable of capturing, collecting, linking, organizing, analyzing, modeling and optimizing data to create an increasingly robust and current view of a customer across channel and time.

Step 2: Insights and targeting

Of course, data alone is not enough. A brand also must have the means to extract actionable business intelligence from that data. Here a brand can assess its ability to transform all of its data into actionable customer insights, build audience and drive enhanced results.

Step 3: Strategy and planning

Technology and tools are largely worthless in the absence of a strategy for properly deploying them. In this step, brands can measure the extent to which their marketing organization can programmatically develop and plan out customer engagement dialogues across channels.

Step 4: Execution

With data, analytics-driven insights and a strategic plan in place, brands next can evaluate the degree to which they can identify customers across channels and, by extension, deliver an optimized content experience, regardless of channel.

Step 5: Measurement

In carpentry, it’s known as “cut once, measure twice.” In modern marketing, the adage boils down to this: measure, always. Brands can calculate the overall effectiveness of a marketing organization’s willingness and capacity to constantly measure results and use that information to improve systems and processes.

In essence, every marketing organization should utilize the five key components above for any type of marketing program. However, the degree of sophistication within those steps can vary dramatically from phase to phase of the curve.



By breaking each stage of the curve into these five key steps, we’re able to get a more detailed view of each stage. We’ll take a deep dive into each stage, but at a high level, the following matrix serves as an easy reference.

Capturing, organizing and integrating all possible sources of customer interaction data

Translating data into actionable insights and addressable audiences

Establishing engagement strategy, media mix and budgets

Delivering tailored individual content seamlessly across channels

Data management

Insights and targeting

1 2 Strategyand planning3

Execution4

Measurement5

Measuring for continuous improvement across the steps and monetizing to communicate marketing performance in terms relevant to the business

Each step can be individually measured




Common questions marketers in this stage of the curve will ask themselves

• What are my value-based customer segments?

• What kind of customer behaviors should I be creating triggers for?

• What return can I get from this channel?

• What is my optimal blend of offer and content by segment?

Data management

• May use address validation to ensure individual channel data is clean and accurate

• File-based list processing

• Incorporates in-store and online transaction data


• Profiling and segmentation designed to drive list performance and individual campaign response

• Uses traditional RFM (recency, frequency, monetary value) models and basic scoring

• Descriptive modeling used to identify look-alikes within a channel

• Very limited recognition of the individual customer

• Seeks data-driven insight to improve channel performance

Strategy and planning

• Focused on revenue maximization from individual channels

• Predetermines campaigns, messaging, offers and segments

• Outbound messaging (one-off campaign) focused with reliance on subscription and rental lists

• Advertising targeted at broad demographics, geographies and/or keyword optimization

• Optimization of the channel with focus on transaction conversion

• Message volume based on tactical business goals without regard for customer context

• Engaged with some level of triggered life-cycle (e.g., welcome) or high-value engagement (e.g., abandon cart) campaigns

Execution

• Messaging is not reactive or dynamic to customer behavior

• A/B and multivariate testing for optimization of single-channel performance

• Batch and blast programs increase in frequency to meet financial objectives

Measurement

• Single-channel, campaign-based measurement

• Siloed channels fight for attribution; attribution may be biased/flawed, skewing toward whatever channel has been favored historically

• Campaign-based key performance indicators (KPIs)

• Connecting same channel campaign performance to single-channel sales (e.g., email to ecommerce checkouts)





• What channels can I utilize to meet my program objectives?

• What efficiencies/economies can I gain across channels?

• How can I create a consistent brand message across channels?

• Did my program (versus campaign) meet the objective?

Data management

• Simultaneously manages multiple platforms and databases with limited connectivity between them

• Struggles to link customers from one channel to the next (siloed data sets)

• Branches into mobile response and location data

• Starts to explore unstructured social sentiment


• Multiple profiles, multiple segmentation schemes and multiple customer models (no single customer view)

• Seeks insight into how one channel affects other channels

• Some recognition of the individual customer

• Syndicated tools used to bridge siloed profiles and segmentation schemes

• Descriptive modeling to identify look-alikes across channels

• Liberal use of behavioral data to create segments for targeted communication


• Strategy set at program level and is outbound messaging focused

• Strategy may be set across channels, but organization is still siloed by channel

• Recognition of need for coordination of channels for efficiency and operational consistency

• Aim for consistent branding/messaging and offers

• Calendar- or trigger-based campaign planning

• Product and promotion driven

• Rule-based spend allocation across channels

• Cadence and messaging based on historical customer performance and may include customer preference

Execution

• Cadence, offer and messaging are manually replicated across channels

• Can publish scheduled social updates in sequence with other channel deployments

• Ability to deliver individually addressed messages across channels (e.g., email, SMS, push and dynamic print, etc.)

Measurement

• Performance measurement is channel-based

• Overall program performance across channels often is measured with rule-based credit (i.e., double and triple counting of revenue, first touch, last touch)





• How does this customer engage with my brand across all channels?

• How can I most efficiently allocate marketing spend?

Data management

• Use of data linkage to achieve a single customer view (cross-channel identity resolution)

• Universal access across the organization to customer data (shared view across channels)

• Some data ingested on a real-time record-at-a-time basis, but linkage is still done in batch


• Multidimensional profiles used for universal segmentation across all channels

• Recognition of the individual customer based on customer value with shared profiling across the organization

• Use of integrated first-party and third-party data to deliver actionable insights

• Both predictive and descriptive modeling used to optimize media mix and coordinate contact strategy across channels

• Behavioral data utilized across all channels (i.e., device recognition, opens and location, etc.)


• Customer-centric strategy utilizing a single customer view

• Strategy is set across channels and organization is aligned with outcomes

• Customer life-cycle-driven dialogue (long-term relationship marketing)

• Complex business rules created up front

• Uncertain message volumes, as volumes are often based on customer behavior

• Channel-agnostic approach to deliver optimal business outcome

Execution

• Use of a common content repository that deploys shared content seamlessly across channels.

• Ability to push messages at scale individually, one at a time

• Ability to deliver personalized, individually addressed messages across channels (e.g., email, SMS, push and dynamic print, etc.)

• Can frequency cap on an individual basis

Measurement

• Overarching attribution and performance metrics

• Identification of engagement and advocacy at the customer level

• Sophisticated attribution models built around business outcomes and customer profitability

• Tying of response to omnichannel sales data





• How do I structure my marketing around a customer’s daily needs versus my campaign production calendar?

• What portion of my budget do I allocate to each scenario?

• What signals are most predictive of transaction?

• What is the optimal message or offer I can deliver to the customer?

• How do I maximize return on investment from each customer?

Data management• Continual and always-active listening: captures data via every point of interaction at the individual level

• All data, including individual linked views, can be ingested in real-time


• Heavy use of analytics and automation to optimize business results

• Predictive analytics for programs like next best product, conversion optimization and overall brand experience

• Recognition of individual customer based on context and location combined with customer value, demographic, psychographic and behavioral insights to understand customer life-cycle needs and purchase journey stage

• Targeting models used to identify in-market triggers to initiate customer life-cycle engagement


• Focus on an immersive brand experience

• Heavy scenario building with budget driven by scenarios, rather than channels

• Cadence and messaging based on context and convenience

• Use of customer experience design

• Content strategy moves beyond sales transaction focus to support customer life-cycle experience

Execution

• Ability to deliver audience-level characteristics to external ad platforms for acquisition programs

• Situational — messaging factors in context and location

• Given a number of candidate messages, will select only the most appropriate for the recipient

Measurement

• Data-driven engagement measurement at the microsegment level

• Impression attribution

• Engagement metrics are tracked and used for prediction of transaction

• Single-customer profit and loss

• Measurement of engagement, in addition to sales

| Experian’s Marketing Sophistication CurveSM: The journey from channel execution to customer optimization

A deep dive into the four stages of Experian’s Marketing Sophistication Curve



Stage 1Single-channel optimization

Many companies at this stage have enjoyed success with — and remain faithful to — a favorite marketing channel. Marketing practices, budgets, personnel decisions, goals, internal reward systems and customer strategies, etc., have been erected around this preferred channel.

A peek inside these brands shows optimization strategies and tactics geared toward specific channels versus toward the customer. Channel-specific goals are focused on customer acquisition, retention, cross-sell, up-sell and otherwise ensuring the preferred channel is kept fed and humming at maximum capacity. The ultimate goal is to use more advanced targeting, segmentation and response/behavior analytics to identify high-value customers.

Marketers at this stage are starting to use data-driven insights for determining to whom and when to send their messaging. Triggered campaigns may be utilized in response to customer activities, such as online behavior or recent purchases, but usually are limited to these few activities.

Customer analysis at this stage is focused on response reporting and customer profiling within the channel. Advanced segmentation and modeling provide solid customer insights and improved targeting, but again only through the rubric of a single channel. They fall far short of today’s need for a 360-degree online/offline view of the customer. Lifetime value/return on investment (ROI) analyses and models may exist, but these are limited by their inability to integrate all relevant information.

Channel execution








Channel-centric contact management strategies at this stage can be fairly sophisticated and communication efforts typically are ROI-driven, but once again the lack of integration and siloed operations can lead to interdepartmental competition for resources and squabbles over response attribution. Success at this stage is largely measured by channel revenue versus customer lifetime value.

In short, the organizations that operate at the high end of this stage’s spectrum are experts at squeezing as much productivity as possible out of their favorite channels, and often they have implemented some automation around triggered messaging. Due to their inherent limitations, however, these brands are forced to focus more on individual, calendar- or transaction history–based campaigns.

Moving up to multichannel marketing Multichannel marketing equates to more opportunities for customer engagement, but only if the brand is fully present and prepared to engage at every step of that customer’s journey. Given that most research suggests that multichannel customers are far more lucrative to a brand than their single-channel counterparts, the need to adopt a multichannel marketing program is obvious.

Getting there, however, requires more than simply adding new channels to an existing marketing mix. Multichannel marketing is all about capitalizing on the inherent efficiencies of making multiple brand channels available to customers and presenting unified brand messaging.

Brands preparing to move to the next stage of the curve (multichannel marketing) should begin focusing on:

• Channel preferences — Determine where your best customers are (what Websites they visit, mobile devices they own and competitors they shop, etc.) and how best to engage them as you expand into other channels.

• Modeling to identify look-alikes across channels — Once you know who your best customers are, additional customer insights can help identify where (and in what channels) you can find more of these customers, as well as how to best engage them once you are there. This should serve as a foundation for your strategy as you expand into additional channels.

• Aligning strategy to business goals — While your organization may still be focused on channel optimization, there must be an overarching business strategy and organizational alignment to support multichannel marketing.

• Integrated coordinated messaging in all channels — Deliver consistent messaging and offers across all marketing channels so in the event that message timing is not coordinated, the customer experience still is improved.



Stage 2Multichannel marketing

Companies at this stage recognize that modern customers are knocking at different doors and that it is incumbent on them to answer. These companies are willing to engage in new channels because they know that the expanded reach, responsiveness and data will lead to improved efficiencies and results in the long term.

Ventures into multichannel marketing usually get their start in the latter stages of the single-channel optimization stage, perhaps through the combination of email and direct mail, for example. However, these brands are now expanding those efforts into other channels, like social and mobile, with the principal goal of expanding reach and increasing customer engagement.

Although brands at this stage are still very focused on products and channels rather than individual customers, by tracking stages of engagement, social response and behavior, channel and communication preferences, etc., they may begin to experience the benefits of expanding their reach, reducing waste and improving efficiencies.

Planning usually continues to emphasize reach rather than customer value, but attention is paid to the multichannel nature of customer contacts (e.g., thought is given to microsites, landing pages and multiple response mechanisms).

Channel execution








Most multichannel marketing operations, however, are built with a favorite-channel culture still in place, meaning that their skill sets, processes, resource allocations and reward systems, etc., still are modeled along single-channel practices. So while there may be consistency in a company’s outbound branding, messaging and offers, its siloed internal operations severely limit its ability to recognize and respond to individual customers across channels. Thus, despite the label, brands at this stage may leverage at least two channels for interacting with customers, yet customer data is not shared across channels. This usually occurs because multiple data management and execution systems are utilized. In these instances, customer data integration efforts may be used to create a more comprehensive view of the customer, but such profiles rarely extend from online to offline or vice versa.

Many companies at this point are working to coordinate offers and define business rules for response attribution. They will recognize the need to move to a single database — at least for all customer contacts. Those organizations that utilize a single contact database usually will integrate it with multiple campaign management and execution platforms, enabling each channel to offer a clear voice for the customer (while also perpetuating channel silos).

Reporting is often independent, but efforts and techniques to integrate information and better understand the customer are often deployed. The good news is that the focus at this stage starts to shift from channel-centric performance to a broader, more customer-centric view. Lifetime value metrics also may be increasingly embraced and utilized.

Moving up to cross-channel marketingRisks, costs and inefficiencies associated with siloed, multichannel-marketing operations ultimately require brands to make the critically important — and enterprise-rattling — leap toward a true cross-channel marketing effort. While multichannel brands have expanded their reach and become more accessible and convenient to their customers, the measure of that convenience largely is still limited to outbound (e.g., brand-centric versus customer-centric) activities.

To move up requires a brand to put data at center stage. Multiple channels will remain the delivery vehicles, of course, but cross-channel tactics and strategies must be employed to create a consistent view of customers irrespective of the channel(s) they use.



How to get there:

• Nailing down cross-channel identity resolution — Continue to consolidate channel-generated customer data using cross-channel identity resolution systems to ensure that a customer can be identified accurately at every touch-point. This will help create a richer view of your multichannel customers and enable you to create more effective contact strategies.

• Understand marketing performance — Consolidate reporting into a business intelligence view. This iterative process entails gathering and reviewing information on your cross-channel marketing programs and performance to develop benchmarks that will aid in budget planning and contact strategies.

• Understanding channel performance — Use response attribution analysis to associate channel-specific responses to specific marketing activities in order to understand the true value of each campaign and appropriately allocate budget, as well as improve targeting for each channel. Response attribution can help identify high-performing channels when customers engage with multiple contact points and give insight into the ways different channels impact and influence each other.

• Refine audience creation — Conduct analysis to determine customer engagement and channel preference to dynamically profile and segment customers more effectively, creating targeted audiences for consistent messaging across channels. Establish a customer intelligence platform — an integrated, cross-channel database that can leverage all available data sources; integrate the information; deliver actionable intelligence; and drive timely, relevant customer interactions.

• Infrastructure assessment/investment — Extend and expand your cross-channel marketing capabilities by conducting assessments of people, processes and technology and then prioritize initiatives to best enable seamless cross-channel customer interactions.



Stage 3Cross-channel marketing

This is the stage at which an organization’s marketing IQ takes a giant leap forward — where customer data and, more specifically, the relationship among that data become the centerpiece of a brand’s marketing operations.

Where multichannel marketing expanded a brand’s reach by providing customers with many more points of engagement, cross-channel marketing uses integrated marketing practices, platforms and philosophies to stitch together all of that data into a more fully formed picture of individual customers. Viewed another way, where multichannel marketing provided brands with greater volumes and varieties of data, cross-channel marketing enables brands to identify the value of each customer within all that data. This creates an entirely new (and improved) way of planning for and measuring success.

As its name suggests, cross-channel marketing is the point where channel-centric silos (and the cultural commitment to them) are toppled and their once-segregated teams (and resources) are aligned to create a shared view of customer data across the organization. The customer has demanded channel-agnostic convenience, and the brand is now capable of delivering it.

Channel preferences at this stage are either stated or learned, and retargeting and triggered campaigns are constructed using far richer and more complex integrated data sources (e.g., Web, point of sale, call center, clicks and repurchases).

Channel execution








The cross-channel marketing team is now focused solely on business outcomes rather than on campaigns, products and events, and modeling is based on the value of individual customer relationships. Far more sophisticated attribution models are built around business outcomes and customer profitability, effectively eliminating the traditional “favorite channel” and “last-touch” claims on budget and other resources.

The bar also has been raised with customers. There is now a more natural, authentic quality to marketing communications/customer dialogues. Brand marketing has been replaced by real-time listening and response. There is now a presumption (by the brand) of a more intimate, meaningful customer relationship. While there is little to no room for error in such a program, if executed properly there is also a virtually unlimited upside.

The marketing automation characteristic of this stage is fueled by customer data, and it is at this stage that marketers must learn to trust what the data tells them. Intuition and experience are still important, but these are sophisticated new areas that require equally sophisticated analytics.

At this stage, there is a fine balance between demand-generation campaigns (typically outbound campaigns that generate awareness and interest) and demand-capture efforts (those that intelligently react to customer behaviors at the most optimal time). Offers often are highly correlated across channels and are personalized based on the customer profile, as well as on the context of the interaction.

Data integration provides clear knowledge of how to identify and interact with customers in each channel. Customer feedback and preferences are captured and utilized. Cross-channel optimizers understand that customers drive interactions with the brand when and where they please and are better equipped to identify customers and manage the data for the development of consistent messaging with real-time campaigns.

Reporting is ROI-based and highly coordinated. Analysis of customer behavior spans channels, and understanding the true path to purchase becomes critical. Customer potential and lifetime value metrics dominate and drive decision making.

In the cross-channel marketing stage, coordination of messaging, imagery and communication across channels is enabled and becomes key to supporting and extending the brand. As such, planning activities transition from short-term, campaign-focused initiatives to broader, more long-term program management.

Communication focus shifts from proactive segmentations and selections for outbound campaigns that target specific customers to inbound interaction management whenever and wherever customers dictate.



Moving up to cross-channel optimizationIn much the same way even a high-performance engine requires fine-tuning before its full potential can be reached, there also is room in a cross-channel marketing program for further optimization around the customer. As the brand-customer dynamic continues to evolve, brands should consider the following:

• Extending customer centricity across all facets of your organization — Prioritize customers in all corporate decisions. It is no longer just marketing that must adopt this approach; all functional and strategic aspects of your business must revolve around customer needs and feedback. Integrate online and offline activities and insights, including all point-of-sale, customer retention/engagement and demand generation touch-points.

• Prepare for the unknown — While we do not yet know the next set of channels that will change the face of our business, we do know they will arrive quickly. Much as social and mobile have forever shifted the way brands interact with customers, so too will next-generation advances. Know that changes are coming and seek to capitalize on new opportunities. By putting the customer at the center of your marketing efforts and employing technology and strategies that support this, adding channels to your program can be as simple as just modifying existing business rules.



Stage 4Cross-channel optimization

For brand marketers, this is the end game of marketing sophistication. This is where a brand’s data-fueled marketing automation practice creates a consistent, fully formed, hyperpersonalized understanding of every customer, regardless of how, when or where their respective paths might cross. Indeed, this is the stage where it might be said the journeys of both customer and marketer at last align.

Brands at this stage can be likened to multichannel sentinels, always present, always listening, always learning. Data is captured at every point of individual customer engagement. This data — linked with customer information, consumer insights and further flavored by context and location — enables brands to develop an intimate understanding of a customer’s unique needs, preferences and even anticipated desires.

This in-depth customer knowledge allows for in-market targeting models that deliver personalized communications to initiate engagement and, over time, to lead toward a fully immersive, long-term brand experience.

Channel execution








Cadence and messaging at this stage are situational, triggered by customer context, location and response. They always are focused on convenience. Messages and offers are based on scenario-derived responses using predictive analytics (i.e., Customer X is more likely to respond to Message B at T time). Brands at this stage are using sophisticated algorithms to identify patterns and expressions of interest.

Performance results at this stage also are gauged at the individual level, with what could be considered a single customer’s profit and loss. Measurement criteria is based on a customer’s perceived lifetime value to the brand — just as much as revenue or sales. In other words, rather than optimizing for channel performance, campaign performance or offer performance, the marketing organization will be focused on maximizing return and optimizing programs per each unique customer.



ConclusionThe path toward customer optimization can seem daunting. Understanding where to begin, what to focus on and what steps to take to get to where you ultimately want to go can seem equally challenging. Regardless of the state of your current marketing program, a strategic road map can be built utilizing Experian’s Marketing Sophistication Curve as the underlying framework.

Keys to success:

• Self-assessment — Take an approach of “self-discovery” to accurately identify a base line of where your organization currently is on the curve. To do this effectively, organizations must be honest with themselves and understand that their starting point on the curve is not a negative reflection on their ability to meet historical business objectives. Most brands will begin at the lower end of the curve.

• Five principles of the curve — Take a deep dive into your current program by dissecting it into five key areas: data management, insights and targeting, strategy and planning, execution and measurement.

• Organizational commitment — In order to travel up the curve, brands must recognize and fully commit not only to the end goal, but also to the process and journey within the curve’s framework.

• Walk, don’t jump — Walking the entire path to customer optimization is necessary. This path has been specifically designed to achieve success and obtain maximum results; skipping stages is not recommended.

• Precise focus — Once you have identified the key areas to take you to the next stage, begin crafting your road map with precise focus. It’s easy to get distracted, but the curve will aid you in narrowing down the many possibilities to more tangible areas of focus where you will get the most return for your efforts.

• Know when to ask for help — You may not yet be a black belt in mastering all elements of the curve, so don’t be afraid to call in the experts when needed. Experian Marketing Services’ strategic consultants have decades of experience in creating client-specific, actionable road maps and programs to drive the most optimal outcome. They can give you the extra help you need to take you to the next step of the curve and beyond.

To learn more about utilizing Experian’s Marketing Sophistication Curve to propel your marketing program, please call 1 866 626 6479 or visit us online at www.experian.com/marketingservices.

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