General Marketing

Don’t Put All Your Eggs Into One Marketing Basket

Today’s new cross-channel customer is online, offline, captivated, distracted, satisfied, annoyed, vocal, or quiet at any given moment. Marketing campaigns should be cohesive yet distributable across multiple channels. Segmentation strategies should now take into account channel preferences.

To truly become an effective cross-channel marketer, marketers must adhere to some basic principles, most importantly to ensure that the organization is aligned to be a cross channel marketer.

Key Digital Channels

Today, consumers have more options. They can choose which marketing messages they receive, when, where, and from whom. They expect, even demand, interactive communication. The new power channels are the consumers’ channels — email, mobile, social and the web.

The web and email have been two channels that are very common to retail marketers, but are still not being used as effectively as they could be. Social and mobile are two marketing channels that have emerged in only the last few years. Customers are spending less time on the general internet and more time on social networking sites such as Facebook and more time on their mobile device.

Channel Integration

Start with a couple key channels to develop integrated, efficient digital marketing programs – i.e., integration of content across social media and email marketing, and the development of more targeted messages based on search behavior data.

Studies have proven that customers are more likely to purchase from a brand, if the brand is able to communicate with the customer through multiple channels. For example, a customer who is an email subscriber AND Facebook fan is more likely to purchase from your store, than a customer who is just a Facebook fan.

Divide and Conquer: Refine your Segmentation Strategy

“In marketing I’ve seen only one strategy that can’t miss – and that is to market to your best customers first, your best prospects second and the rest of the world last. – John Romero

Not all customers are created equal. Segmenting customers according to interests and characteristics for the purpose of sending more targeted messages is one of the smartest moves an independent store marketer can make. This is a good first step, but is not as effective as the following.

Segment Based Behavior

To be truly relevant, independent retailers today should segment based on customer behavior, not just demographic information. Use whatever data you have available — previous email or web site click activity, purchases, or more structured data based on RFM (recency, frequency, monetary) analysis — to identify your best segment categories and send more relevant content to subsets of subscribers.

Create different versions of your marketing messages to appeal to the different segments, and take advantage of sophisticated filtering and dynamic content personalization technology to streamline the implementation of your strategy. Perform continual testing to determine the optimal strategy for each customer segment.

As you learn more about your customers you’ll be able to uncover additional categories and further refine your segmentation strategy for greater relevance and ROI. The key to this play is commitment — put forth the effort and it will pay off in the end.

The Customer Lifecycle

Customer life cycle is a term used to describe the progression of steps a customer goes through when considering, purchasing, using, and maintaining loyalty to a product or service. This allows the retailer to communicate differently with customers based on which stage of the lifecycle they are in or how much they’ve spent. This strategy will have a huge boost in your return on investment of money, time and resources.

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