Customer Relationship Marketing, Non-Personal Promotion, and Direct-to-Consumer are all concepts in marketing that aim to create the most important communication with your target. Whether the communication happens on the phone, on the Internet or in the form of direct mail and/or email, the interaction with your target or prospect should be informed by customer intelligence. The practice of building customer acumen into every interaction, and listening to the response so the next communication can keep getting better, isn’t at the core of intelligent Multi-Channel Marketing—it is Multi-Channel Marketing (MCM).

We talk about “discovery,” or new response channels that can be stored on our database to help our clients understand not only what the value of their targets is, but also what part of the target lifecycle , and what that target’s significance is to the client business as well. These bits of found knowledge are important insights that can be made useable by Marketing Analytics, and they really do accrue value over time. Building a roadmap for including analytics is a step-by-step process.

Analytics Creates the Multi-Channel Roadmap

1.  Building Informational Assets With Strategic Discovery

Often the first engagement with new clients is to develop some customer-focused and market-focused analytical benchmarks that can be used to help make decisions about new marketing campaigns and, more often than not, help forecast ROI for each campaign. Many of our clients don’t have the time to look or simply don’t want to find insights that can come from a 360° view of their customers. We are looking for uniqueness such as target lifecycle stages and target value or segment.  This Strategic Discovery Process begins to answer questions about customers that can drive our Multi-Channel campaign design and how we measure the success of it.

2.  Segmentation—Giving Your Targets the Attention They Need

Normally, a segmentation system is designed to be helpful in driving messaging tone and focus while identifying the proper message to deliver. Segments should have the correct classification by one or more characteristics in order to realize which of your targets will need what type of attention. The perfect segment should meet specific standards:

• It’s internally harmonized
• It’s externally harmonized
• The target responded similarly
• It can be reached uniformly (through all the MCM channels)

3.  Campaign Targeting, Testing and Analysis

Each campaign plan team needs to establish a clear method for campaign targeting and testing for maximizing results. We need to have a mandate to check the boxes on each of these components:

• The campaign design should include a consistent “test and learn” approach that can be carried out from one campaign to the next with new learning goals building upon findings from previous campaigns. Add to this a method for building a business case for each campaign to predict ROI and help with prioritization of the campaign changes.
• When the targeting and testing method for each campaign is recognized, make sure to carefully document this process for potential reproduction.
• Develop a protocol for predictive analytics for each campaign—whether models will be created for the pilot phase, or be built on results for future stages of campaign development.
• Of course each campaign needs an established methodology for back-end campaign analysis—which will be documented for future use and roll out.
• Establish best practices of reporting on campaigns—different types of reports for different levels of management are usually required, and this practice would be established early on in the campaign design process.

4.  Integrate Analytics for Response Management

As marketers seek to embrace target engagement, their presence takes on singular importance. Multi-Channel marketers need to examine how to bring direct marketing and web activity more closely together for:

• Fulfilling targets’ needs by providing immediate messages relevant to them on a personal level.
• Measuring directly ascribes and personally identifiable conversion results from campaigns that cannot be easily achieved through traditional methods, such as Non-Personal Promotion (NPP) or Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) advertisements.

5.  Identify Opportunities for Impactful Insights

We normally use survey methods both to collect critical data needed to drive Multi-Channel Marketing programs/campaigns and to build predictive analytics.

• Evaluate whether there is data you wished you had for campaigns, but that is not available from any source
• Behavioral surveys with compound analyses are highly useful for identifying the feature and proper mix for plans as well as prices that consumers are willing to pay for those features.
• Determine if there is a proof of concept for the use of primary research to devise targeting strategies and campaign design.

By creating a checklist of these five stops on your Analytics Road Map, you can incorporate your target intelligence into Multi-Channel Campaigns and deliver greater relevance, better results, and promise a constant ROI…without hesitation.