I have been
very fortunate to attend Akin Arikan’s conference on “Managing online and
offline to fuel interactive marketing” in Paris yesterday. The small conference room was packed with
over 50 attendees. Akin is Director Product Marketing and Strategy at Unica in San Francisco, a blogger and author on multichannel metrics marketing.
Multichannel tracking may seem an overwhelming, if not impossible, task to accomplish because there are many online and offline combinations to buy a product today.
According to Akin, we should not give up, because there is an overall pattern with the multichannel buying process:
- Mass marketing is the best channel to generate awareness about a product,
- Online marketing is the best channel to engage and to persuade prospects,
- Direct marketing (including E-mail marketing) is the best channel to grow and retain customers.
The main issue is that “online marketers have a treasure chest that direct marketers hold the key”. Without detailed customer information, you can only get 50 % of the value of your Web Analytics solution. In most companies, customer information is owned and managed by Direct Marketing.
With detailed customer information, your advertising can evolve from mass marketing to behavioral targeting. Navigation on the web site, like browsing a specific car model section, can trigger a request for contact (if the user is anonymous) as well as a contextual Email with a special offer (if the user is authenticated).
At the end of his presentation, Akin emphasized how different the points of view of mass, online and direct marketers regarding measurement can be.
In order to
succeed with multichannel optimization, it is therefore critical to build bridges between off-line and on-line marketers and to develop
a common measuring culture and methodology in order to improve the overall Marketing ROI.
