Consumers are now spending more than 5 hours per day on their mobile devices.
And when they’re on their smartphones, they use an average of 9 apps per day. Let those numbers sink in for a moment.
The time has come and gone where emails and newsletters are the only way for consumers to hear your message. For your best chance at running successful marketing campaigns today, you need to find the right balance between your communication channels to reach people when they’re most engaged.
The Multi-Channel Marketing mix is different for everyone
Think about how many apps and social media channels you interacted with yesterday. For me, it was iMessage, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Email, Google Maps and a few different games. This spread is fairly typical for me, as it is for many other millennials and professionals in the digital age.
Since I access each of these apps at different times, marketers have to send me their message both on the right channel and at the right time to have the best chance for me to read it. If I get an email at 9pm, I may wait until the morning to check it. But if I get a mention on social media or a text message at 9pm, I’m more likely to check it right then.
Sending me a personalized message when I’m engaged with a specific app or channel will get you the best results.
What are the biggest challenges with Multi-Channel Marketing?
More than 90% of marketers struggle to seamlessly connect more than three channels on the buyer journey. Doing this effectively doesn’t mean you need to send prospects exactly 3 tweets, 3 emails and 3 text messages. It means that you need to find the right balance of these channels for your audience – and that balance differs from business to business.
Start your journey to multi-channel success by understanding the main challenges associated with a multi-channel strategy:
1. Silos
Oftentimes communications are owned by different functional departments depending on the use case. The engineering team may own push notifications, while the product marketing team owns transactional product emails and the corporate marketing team owns web emails. These communication silos are holding your team back. Ideally, one group oversees the entire customer communication experience. This allows your team to move faster and ensures brand and voice consistency across all touch points.
2. Real-time data
To be really effective in managing the overall customer experience, you need access to data in or near real-time. When you use different tools to execute messaging for each channel, your data is spread out across all your systems, making it extremely difficult to get a holistic view of your contacts’ behavior. Centralizing that data gives you the visibility you need to create more targeted and personalized messaging.
3. 1-1 personalization
Even if you’re already beyond the first two hurdles, you still need to implement a strategy that allows you to scale up and still manage the demands of true 1:1 personalization. This is where technology comes into play. Put your best foot forward and invest in a marketing automation system that enables your team to scale without compromising personalization efforts. Taking the time to evaluate each system outright will set your team up for success for years to come.
As far as scaling up, consolidating your disparate martech systems into one solution can help avoid some of the challenges listed above before they slow you down.
