Why Cross Channel Marketing is Important

Marketers have endless tools to help a company understand their customer base whether it is email lists, Facebook Fan’s, or hard sales data. However, even with all this data, many companies keep these customers and potential customers in separate databases. Just as your company integrates IT with Management, Marketing and Sales may be just as important to integrate your digital channels with one another. Failing to integrate Facebook fans, Twitter followers, and email opt ins may be a holding your business from fully optimizing its marketing mix.

Gib Basset, a marketing specialist at Interactive Mediums writes “Cross channel marketing is a rather breakthrough idea, because it takes this notion a step beyond the mutually exclusive targeting of customers within channels. Cross channel marketing instead seeks to utilize each channel’s strength in unison to create a better outcome more efficiently than could otherwise be possible using multiple, disconnected applications and databases.”  Cross channel marketing software will be able to offer more holistic approach to marketing efforts. Since all of these media silos are essentially being pooled, figuring out which consumers are both email opt in, and or followers on Facebook and Twitter can be very useful when tailoring your social media outreach.

Coordination amongst digital marketing channels is certainly important. The process of integration may not be as simple as it sounds when large email databases reach thousands of people.   Scott Rhodes, group director of operations for Razorfish points out how this could be beneficial, “The rewards of slogging through this process will be significant”. Ultimately the process will allow the business to understand their most engaged customers and that will determine what they offer to them.

Business owners and IT may not immediately see the functional benefit, but “nearly 9 out of 10 senior level marketers think channel marketing coordination is important,” according to eMarketer. Nearly 80% of people used at least 2 digital channels to conduct market research. Its obvious consumers consult multiple sources in their quest to fulfill needs, but marketers are currently tailoring their offerings from independent channel data.

ExactTarget recently released software that allows marketers to see integrated data in an user-friendly dashboard. This will help marketers overcome the logistical complications of email surveys and will help achieve coordinated campaigns. It’s obvious we will see coordination amongst digital and non-digital channels become a useful tool for marketers to customize their value propositions in the future.

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