5 Signs Your Company Needs To Do Multi-Channel Marketing

Filed in Multichannel Marketing on March 12, 2019 by

Isn’t digital and direct mail marketing enough? When siloed, these methods don’t often gain the right results. But with a cohesive multi-channel approach, your campaign could increase ROI, build pipeline, and ultimately realize new customers. Multi-channel marketing benefits your business by enabling you to reach your customer no matter where they are.

With the right data, determining which customers are the right customers and what message is the right message can be easy. But knowing the right time and place to launch that message becomes more complicated. That’s where multi-channel comes in. Customers occupy an ever growing range of locations and engagement opportunities. Building a diverse and targeted marketing campaign means that you need a multi-channel strategy to ensure that you never miss an opportunity.

1. Want to Boost Your ROI?

measuring roi

The top two reasons for a low ROI are: an incomplete contact list, or that your message isn’t getting through. The easiest way to fill any gaps in your list is to give your it a through scrubbing. If you are utilizing your own list of clients, then check it to make sure that all client addresses are current and correct. You can certify addresses manually (got a temp handy?) or utilize one of the many companies that will run your data through CASS-certified software to correct or update faulty addresses. If you are sourcing your list from a second party, always check when it was last updated. More than 30 days and you are at risk of buying old information. Out of date or mistyped addresses will cost you on returned mail, so always clean up your list before your next campaign.

On the other hand, when your message isn’t reaching your customers, you need to simplify and diversify.

getting the message

First: Simplify.

Does your customer understand your message? Is it too complicated? Does it have an easy CTA? If you are offering too many choices to your customers, they may be confused as to what their next step should be. Instead, simplify your message and make it easy for them to take the next step.

Second: Diversify.

Is your message reaching your customer? This is where multi-channel marketing comes in. Automated digital marketing is low-cost and allows you to the freedom of preset triggers. However, direct mailing boosts appeal with the benefit of tactile marketing. Individually, each method has a comparable ROI, but together these two create a substantial increase in engagement. Even better, increase your range with web and social media channels and watch that window of missed opportunity shrink.

2. Is Your List Too Small?

Quality begets more quality. Start off with the best possible customer profile and your message will go further. But what to do when your old list just isn’t cutting it anymore?

Expanding your working list is something you should do every time you change tack. With every change comes new prospects. But you should generally review your materials periodically to ensure that your campaign is on track and that you aren’t missing any current trends. In addition to keeping your business model dynamic, this will provide a wider range of relevant data and more quality contacts that are a good fit for your product.

Once you have updated your customer profile or created new ones, you can expand by purchasing new contacts. If nothing has changed, cloning prospects from your existing list may be a viable solution.

accessing social media

Ensuring that you are targeting the correct customers is an ongoing process. Starting with the best ideal customer profile is essential but don’t stop there. This system is full of checks and balances. Even with the perfect profile, confirmation that your message is working will help to validate the accuracy of your data.

3. Do You Have Enough Data To Segment Your Leads?

Before you can fine-tune your message, you have to really know your audience. And that means data, data, data! To segment your leads, you need to know as much about your customers as possible. What are their demographics, their psychographics, pain points, behavior, location, position in the funnel, etc? Creating a consistent experience for your customer is essential to a successful multi-channel marketing campaign. And to create consistency, you have to build a single, cross-channel view of your customer. However, this should not mean that your single view is static. To keep things fresh and dynamic, you have to revisit and evolve your customer view based upon new data. Since customers will interact at multiple touch points across several channels, it is crucial to have a clear idea of how they will interact with your brand in each venue.

Keep in mind that it isn’t the size of your body of data, it’s how you use it that makes the difference. That data gives you the means to find answers but keep in mind that the solutions (and your customers) are dynamic. By keeping things fluid but stable, you can identify the touch points that your customers interact with in each channel, anticipate their behavior, and better assess their value to you.

4. Is Your Sales Cycle Stagnating?

the sales cycle

The value of your customer isn’t just how much they are worth to you but more importantly, how they are scored. Lead scoring is not only smart, it is essential to ensuring that the window of opportunity is never missed. Premature or late pitching detracts from your image and wastes valuable resources. Instead of hitting a client multiple times in an attempt to make a sale, lead scoring allows customers to move through the funnel at a pace that seems more natural. No more feelings of coercion or pressure to purchase. Instead, customers are scored and grouped in ways that reflect their readiness to buy. By knowing their exact point in the sales cycle, you can engage them with precision and convert targets in more relevant ways.

5. Are Prospects Falling Through the Cracks?

Is your list of prospective customers substantial, but leave you feeling like you are still missing opportunities? If your message continues to miss the mark, it is time to deploy marketing response attribution! Knowing exactly what triggered your prospect to initiate contact is a powerful tool for both marketing and sales teams, gaining insight into how the prospect entered the funnel in the first place. Third-party automated marketing platforms make marketing response attribution easy and allows you to determine which touch points are blowing it or blowing it out of the water. With techniques like batch coding and by running a holistic automated campaign you can identify precisely which direct mailer, social media, or email campaign resulted in the web traffic increase you are seeing.

Fine-tuning your message based upon your available data is always advisable. Make revisiting your campaign to check for areas of improvement part of your routine.

The number of people engaging in social media and utilizing mobile devices grows every day. Recent estimates put the number of people on social media alone at around three billion, which at 40% of the global population makes it a channel that companies cannot afford to ignore. Make expanding your marketing horizons with a multi-channel campaign a part of your business plan to take advantage of this ever growing market.

Looking for more insights into how to improve your multi-channel efforts? Contact a PFL marketing expert to learn how we can help companies of every shape and size achieve their goals, increase ROI, and improve response rates across a variety of marketing channels.

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