Solving your toughest marketing challenges.

www.jacksongroup.com

Customers are channel neutral:

The truth about multi-channel marketing

A Jackson Group White Paper

David HarkinsVP,Director of Strategic Services

Introduction

Solving your toughest marketing challenges.

www.jacksongroup.com

The pervasiveness of telephones,email,and the Internet in the last few years have provided customerswith multiple opportunities to interact with organizations–and they do so with ever-increasingfrequency.The challenge for most organizations is to determine how to create meaningful interactionat each touch-point that adds value for both the customer and the company–while still maintainingthe brand promise across all channels.Organizations have made significant investments in developing technology to engage and interactwith the consumer for the purpose of providing improved choices in product selection and purchaseon the front-end,yet similar investments have not been made to integrate the back-end fulfillmentand transaction management technology.As a result,the typical organization has created multipleways for the consumer to engage the company,only to disappoint the same consumer by thebottleneck of information created by the silo approach to managing each channel.This approach to engaging the consumer is driven primarily by a culture that values customeracquisition over customer retention as a means to meet revenue targets.In an era when almostevery product and service offered could be called a “commodity,” organizations are finding thatthey’ve failed to understand how to build their brand and deepen customer value with consistentinteractions and communications through multiple channels.The purpose of this paper is to highlight potential challenges to multi-channel customer interactionsand identify high-level solutions to these challenges.

Multi-channel marketing defined

Solving your toughest marketing challenges.

www.jacksongroup.com

The term “multi-channel marketing” refers to the process of building a customer relationship acrosstwo or more marketing or sales channels.The channels are those that are interactive,such asface-to-face,telephone,email,Internet,or perhaps direct mail.These channels provide an organizationthe opportunity to develop and maintain the brand promise as the customer engages theorganization at each point of contact.At the core,multi-channel marketing is about building relationships.It is not about technology,butrather the consistency in fulfilling the customer’s expectations when engaging a specific organization.What we’re talking about is the message and the consistency of that message (or brand promise)across all channels.This approach can be actionable without significant investments in complexsoftware or technology.