steps to cross-channel marketing nirvana€¦ · wearable computing 44% 39% 6% 15% 11% 41% 4 steps...

Steps to cross-channel

marketing4nirvana

MAP YOUR CUSTOMER’S JOURNEY ACROSSCHANNELS1

PEDAL TO THE METAL WITHPREDICTIVE ANALYTICS2

TURBOCHARGE WITH TARGETING, TRIGGERINGAND PERSONALIZING3

GET MORE MILEAGE FROM ATTRIBUTION ANDMEASUREMENT PROTOCOLS4

4 steps to cross-channel marketing nirvana

CROSS-CHANNEL MARKETING CHALLENGES

Today, the ability to achieve seamless multi-channel operations can make or break a retailer. The simple truth is that shoppers see a retailer, regardless of how many channels the business may operate, as a single brand. With that perception, the customer expects a cohe-sive brand experience, where channels inter-mingle and complement each other, as direct extensions of the brand offering.

Since many traditional retailers have evolved from a single channel (e.g., physical stores) to a multi-channel environment (e.g., ecom-merce, mobile, social), the organization and its supporting technologies have evolved by addi-tion, not transformational evolution. For instance, as the retailer added an ecommerce site, the digital departmental silo was intro-duced, with its portfolio of IT solutions, such as the digital catalog, shopping cart, ecommerce payments and more. Further exacerbating the disconnect across departments within the retail organization was the introduction of incentive plans that reward growth in any given channel. As a result, the individual depart-ments were motivated to operate within their own vehicles, with little desire to collaborate with other areas of the organization.

Meanwhile, the customer, fueled by technolo-gies in the digital realm such as social and mobile are interacting with all channels of the retailer, and in most cases for a single purchase. Technology has given the new age customer the freedom to check out products, read product reviews, ask for a friend’s recommendation on social media and purchase the product, all on the go with a simple click on the mouse or touch-screen. No longer constrained to physical retail offer-ings within miles of their home, consumers now have access to an unlimited assortment of products that are available at deep discounts and shipped overnight. While some choose to have it delivered at their doorsteps, others prefer to pick up the product from the store after researching it online.

By voting with their dollars, shoppers have made it clear: omni-channel capabilities are in high demand.

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Important Omnichannel RetailCapabilities According to USDigital Shoppers% of respondents

Ability to check availability of a product prior tovisiting the store

Ability to buy or reserve a product online or viasmartphone and pick up in-store

Option to receive a receipt via email froma retailer

Stored profile information available across allchannels for easy access

Receipt of a consistency personalized shoppingexperience from one channel to the next

Sophisticated mobile site accessible atmy convenience

Usage of social media for access acrossthe channels I visit

82%

57%

51%

50%

47%

43%

24%

Note: most/somewhat importantSource: the e-tailing group.

CROSS-CHANNEL MARKETINGCHALLENGES


Adding further complexity to the existing sce-nario, shoppers may vote with their dollars, but the dollars only indicate the channel of purchase, not the multiple channels that influ-enced the purchase. For instance, according to Trends on Mobile Use This Holiday Season" conducted by Harris Poll, while 14% of US smartphone owners planned to make a purchase via their mobile device, anywhere between 25% and 50% intended to use their devices to conduct pre-purchase activities, including checking inventory availability, searching for products, trolling for coupons and promotional offers or sharing product information with their friends and family.

The elusive multi-channel shopper is also demanding relevancy. The smart retailer may have the ability to provide personalization on a single channel (i.e., email offers) may be doing more harm than good. Unfortunately, retailers who cannot track consumer behavior across all touch-points, analyze behavior to predict preferences and responses, and personalize every engagement, will have to deal with higher customer attrition and decreasing prof-its.

The key to success lies within analytics and personalization. Retailers must use their accumulated wisdom from years of serving customers to micro-segment their consumer base and engage with them using targeted, personalized messages on the web, social and mobile platforms.

In this whitepaper, we explore how retailers can reinforce themselves as strong players by employing a multi-channel approach to retail-ing. It all begins with obtaining a bird’s eye view of consumers by aggregating custom-ers’ data from multiple sources, analyzing it to gain actionable insights, predicting behavior at an individual level and finally targeting them with personalized offers and promotions.

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Technologies in which US CEOscurrently investing for BusinessGrowth% of respondents

Business analytics

Socially enabled business processes

Mobile customer engagement

Cybersecurity

On-demand business and technology services

Sensors

Robotics

39%

25%

20%

15%

Note: n=162Source: PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC)

Battery and power technologies

3D printing

Wearable computing

44%

39%

6%

15%

11%

41%


MAP YOUR CUSTOMER’S JOURNEYACROSS CHANNELS

Once the retailer has a single view of the customer, the retailer must understand the shopper in con-text. This is where understanding the customer journey comes into play. As mentioned in this whitepaper’s introduction, the shopper operates in a multi-channel environment and may rely on differ-ent channels to support different stages in the over-all path-to-purchase. Again, analytics serves up a viable solution to understanding the multi-channel

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The value of analytics is recognized even in the “C- suite”. "Analytics is critical to unlocking business opportunities, and in fact outranks any other tech-nology considered by CEOs today".

However, the answer isn’t as simple as “analytics”. In their race for the multi-channel customer, organi-zations have acquired many point solutions that serve specific marketing needs which create silos of customer information.

Analytics must be used to deliver a unified view of the customer across channel. The data from appli-cation silos must be brought together to develop this comprehensive, singular view. In order to achieve this, retailers must integrate data in varied formats and from a variety of sources such as transaction data, click stream data, location signals from mobile apps, beacons installed within stores and social media interaction data.

consumer. Mckinsey agrees, "Journey Analytics is the solution that helps you understand and trans-form your journeys, at scale." It can boost sales conversion by 35% and increase digital activities by 25%.

https://www.mckinsey.com/solutions/journey-an-alytics

PEDAL TO THE METAL WITHPREDICTIVE ANALYTICS

Shoppers may grow more sophisticated in the use of technology to aid them in the purchase process, but so can retailers. In the past, business intelli-gence (BI) and analytics solutions were clunky applications built for the IT users. The IT depart-ment then created reports for different business users. As information volumes increased and busi-ness users felt the need to rely on data to drive decisions, the IT organization became flooded with reporting requests. BI and analytics vendors have responded in the past few years with business-friendly analytics applications to support data discovery and self-service insights. Largely, these solutions have provided insights that provide an indication on past business performance (i.e., aver-age transaction size, last transaction date, etc.), but have not provided these business users with a lens to the future.

Predictive analytics and advanced statistical model-ing in large part has been reserved for highly skilled data scientists. This has prevented everyday busi-ness users, like those in the marketing department, to access revealing customer metrics like attrition risk, product affinity and customer lifetime value.

To succeed, leading marketers must have access to predictive algorithms to influence customer purchase decisions, improve stickiness and gener-ate traffic. Marketers can use advanced predictive algorithms to predict each customer’s propensity to buy, likely promotional response and potential com-petitor defection. Then, the marketer can target customers with relevant promotions to salvage the buyer relationship.

Marketers, who fail to recognize the purchase intent early or predict the customer’s propensity to buy, will be unable to connect with customers when they are most amenable and will rapidly lose influence over their decisions.

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TURBOCHARGE WITH TARGETING,TRIGGERING AND PERSONALIZING

Communications based on traditional marketing calendar must be revised and considered from the customer’s perspective. Effective targeting begins when a business need is translated into a marketing tactic that fulfills a market need. Targeting needs to be sharpened by overlaying customer context like demographics, history of transaction behavior, product/brand preferences, lifecycle, lifetime value and more.

Beyond planned campaigns, marketers need capa-bilities to respond to customer behavior in real time. In order to proactively sell, retailers need the ability to motivate a purchase at the time the customer is making a decision using sentinels that monitor cus-tomer context such as location, promotion response, research, feedback and cart abandon-ment, and layer it with insights to create customer communications that are difficult to ignore.

Targeting gets retailers only half way. For a truly effective campaign, retailers must personalize every communication to a customer. Personalized com-munications will factor in the products/brands the customers prefers, the type of promotions they respond to, the medium of communication, the time of communication, the preferred channel of purchase. This type of communication that factors in the needs and preferences of consumers has a higher probability of influencing the purchase.

Personalization, when executed correctly, will trans-

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late to business performance. Per Mckinsey, personalization, when fully implemented can result in 10 to 30 percent uplift in revenue and retention.

GET MORE MILEAGE FROM ATTRIBUTION ANDMEASUREMENT PROTOCOLS

As marketing practices grow more granular with customer-centric and personalization processes, marketers need to ensure that measurement keeps pace. Marketing effectiveness should be measured by business metrics such as the contribution of a campaign towards revenue, profit and footfalls.

Marketers face challenges in accurately measuring the effectiveness of multi-channel campaigns since shopper responses often reside deep within those channels. When multiple channels contribute to a sale, marketers must recognize the contribution of every channel in moving the customers through their buying journey.

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Attributing the effectiveness to the first or last touch-point must be avoided since they tend to skew the value towards one channel over the other. Instead, marketers need to develop the ability to evaluate the contributions of every channel, promo-tion and campaign accurately and synchronize their marketing mix to continually improve the effective-ness of their efforts.


THE PATH TO SUCCESSMarketers who capitalize on multi-channel marketing clearly enjoy a decisive competitive advantage – they will engage customers better, execute effective campaigns and optimize their marketing budgets. However, in order to be successful, they must adopt the four steps of the multi-channel marketing path – obtain a comprehensive view of the consumer base, predict customer behavior, target specific customers with personalized offers and finally measure the effectiveness of message, channel and campaign to calibrate the next communication.

Manthan is the Chief Analytics Officer for consumer industries worldwide. Manthan's portfolio of analytics-enabled business applications, advanced analytics platforms and solutions are architected to help users across industries walk the complete data-to-result path - analyze, take guided decisions and execute these decisions real-time. Sophisticated, yet intuitive analytical capability coupled with the power of big data, mobility and cloud computing, brings users business-ready applications that provide on-demand access and real-time execu-tion - the only path to profit in a contemporary, on-demand and connected economy. Manthan is one of the most awarded analytics innovators among analysts and customers alike - with over 170 customers across 21 countries. To see how your business can gain from analytics. Visit www.manthan.com


Manthan is a leading cloud analytics company that has pioneered analytical applications for consumer-facing businesses. We excel in the application of decision sciences, advanced math, and artificial intelligence and have a restless ability to invent and bring ideas to life. Headquartered in Bangalore with offices in Santa Clara, London, Dubai, Mexico City, Singapore and Manila, Manthan’s current client footprint spans 22 countries. Leading investment firms like Norwest Venture Partners, Temasek Holdings, and Eight Roads (Fidelity

International Limited) feature on Manthan’s board.For more information, go to www.manthan.com

steps to cross-channel marketing nirvana€¦ · wearable computing 44% 39% 6% 15% 11% 41% 4 steps...

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