Closing Online-Offline Marketing Gaps

Today’s technology-driven marketing provides incredible opportunities. However, many marketers find themselves falling short in their ability to execute holistic, multi-channel campaigns.

This shortfall stems primarily from the inability to piece together customer behavior from both their online and offline worlds. By bridging that gap you’ll reap tremendous business rewards – a stronger brand, better ROI, higher satisfaction rates and greater lifetime value. But possibly the largest reward is that you and your marketing team will able to consistently make better decisions.

Here are six online-offline gaps to keep in mind.

Gap 1: Marketing Strategy
Start with a strategy that recognizes the environment you’re in and capitalizes on the strength of each buying channel and preferred customer behavior. A fragmented strategy results in fragmented initiatives. A strategy that assumes you can override people’s natural behavior is doomed.

Gap 2: Technology
CRM systems. Web sites. POS systems. Customer service systems. All great marketing tools. But frequently, we find that they are siloed in their companies; they’re not integrated and often have entirely different data structures, data content and business rules. They almost never rely on a common customer key across systems.

Gap 3: Data
This can be the heart of the problem. And there are really two gaps: data capture and data storage. On the online side you’re faced with e-mail address quality, volume and coverage issues. You are also faced with the magnitude of clickstream data that exists. Marketing efforts that use offline media to incent online response create an enormous gap because you generally lose the customer key that ties the two together. When the sales force is involved, yet another layer of cloudiness is introduced.

Gap 4: Internal operations
Ask yourself a question. Can you orchestrate seamless customer contacts between sales, marketing, and service as well as capture relevant data at each point? If the answer is no – and for most it is – you have a gap.

Gap 5: Analysis
If data is the heart of the gap issue, analysis has to be the connective tissue. Missing data, inconsistent and incomplete data, and unknown customer interactions wreak havoc with marketing’s need for insight and information-driven plans.

Gap 6: Brand presentation
Because of the complexity and spontaneity that social media fosters, brands are finding it exceedingly difficult to maintain a consistent look and feel and to keep their messaging intact.

What to Do:

• Set some definitive goals to focus your efforts. When you define the specific gaps and tactics where you will concentrate your efforts, several good things happen. First, you’re likely to achieve them. Second, you will be able to determine what data you really need, and can then scale your time and cost to get it done appropriately.
• Define milestones that will keep management committed.If closing the gap was quick and easy, no one would be talking about it. You must get your management to understand the complexities and the tasks associated with this effort. Don’t forget that most of management will be driven by short-term revenue and profitability goals. Set your work plan to show steady and meaningful progress to your end goal. If not, you run the risk of losing your support and/or your budget.
• Create a team that consists of marketing, sales, customer service and IT. To close the gap, you need to make it a corporate-wide initiative. Securing the involvement of these stakeholders will secure company buy-in from the start and improve your likelihood for success.
• Determine what data is necessary to achieve your goals as well as where you will get it, how you will code it and how you will manage it. The first three recommendations are simply good business practices. This one is where the rubber meets the road. The best approach is three-pronged:

1. Pull all your existing data into a single, consolidated database. This includes your CRM, POS, Web transaction, order entry, customer service systems.
2. Code all your interactive campaigns with appropriate tags such as Web trends or the simple use of cookies.
3. Spend the money to put a meaningful incentive in your offline media, in order to encourage your recipients to identify themselves on the Web in some way. This can be done either through registration on your site or at a landing page. Be sure to include a customer key so you establish the link between the offline campaign and their online activity.

• Use an “experimental design” approach as the foundation for your analytic efforts. While your endless quest for perfectly accurate and complete data goes on, there are some techniques you can use in the interim to fill in the gaps. Utilizing experimental design techniques such as full factorial, fractional factorial, and Plackett-Burman, allows you to better establish the cause and effect relationship between the marketing stimulus (both online and offline) and the ultimate behavior it is meant to drive.
• Build Customer Touchpoint “Use” Cases. Take the time to comprehensively map out as many customer behavior scenarios as you can. Include touches with your Web site, your sales force, your retail store, your partners or channels, your customer service agents, and your marketing materials. Doing this will allow you to optimize key interactions by investing budget dollars in them, coding and tagging appropriately, capturing data from them, and ensuring that your brand presentation is consistent. You may not be able to cover everything, but focusing on a few that really matter can make a significant difference.

Janet Rubio is chief insights officer of Engauge.