cross-channel marketing platforms buyer’s guide - experian · the cross-channel mantra all of...

What every brand should know about selecting a cross-channel marketing platform vendor

Cross-Channel Marketing Platforms Buyer’s Guide

The rationale for a cross-channel marketing program

The means and methods for identifying the best vendor to help your organization execute a cross-channel marketing strategy of its own

The path to implementing your own cross-channel marketing program

The definition of a cross-channel marketing platform

This guide is intended to help you understand each of the following so that you can

confidently embrace cross-channel marketing and effectively implement a truly

optimized cross-channel marketing program:

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I. Summary ....................................................................................................................................................................................................... 4II. The cross-channel rationale: Is it really necessary? ................................................................................................................................... 5

Multichannel consumers in a channel-centric world .......................................................................................................................................................................5

Multichannel is NOT cross-channel ....................................................................................................................................................................................................6

The risk of waiting ...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................7

The brand meltdown ..............................................................................................................................................................................................................................8

The heart of an integrated cross-channel marketing platform ......................................................................................................................................................8

III. Planning your own cross-channel program ............................................................................................................................................. 10Identifying your requirements ............................................................................................................................................................................................................10

1. Tearing down siloes AND corporate mindsets .................................................................................................................................................................................10

2. Marketing Sophistication Curve℠ .......................................................................................................................................................................................................11

3. Customer mapping — aligning your business around the customer ......................................................................................................................................12

4. Data requirements ..................................................................................................................................................................................................................................12

IV. Evaluating vendors ..................................................................................................................................................................................... 13Strategic fit .............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................13

1. Flexibility ...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................13

2. Collaborative mindset ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................13

3. Holistic discovery process ....................................................................................................................................................................................................................14

Is the platform truly cross-channel? .................................................................................................................................................................................................. 14

1. Why it matters..........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................14

2. The cross-channel smell test ...............................................................................................................................................................................................................15

Cross-channel system architecture ...................................................................................................................................................................................................16

1. Data capabilities ......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................16

2. Scalability, availability and disaster recovery ...................................................................................................................................................................................17

3. Application flexibility ..............................................................................................................................................................................................................................17

4. Single customer view .............................................................................................................................................................................................................................17

5. Real-time ...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................18

6. Testing .......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................18

7. Security .....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................18

8. Going beyond execution........................................................................................................................................................................................................................19

9. Global ....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 20

10. Test drive ................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ 20

V. Top 20 must-ask questions for cross-channel marketing platform vendors .......................................................................................... 21VI. Conclusion .................................................................................................................................................................................................. 28

The cross-channel mantraAll of this raises the question of how brands should best employ technology, data and insights, as well as evolving customer habits, to meet their financial goals. In other words, how do brand marketers use all of these new interconnected technologies and touchpoints to shift the consumer-brand dynamic back in their favor?

Cross-channel marketing has become something of its own organizational mantra, with a growing number of companies expressing cross-channel aspirations of their own and an almost equally long list of vendors promising platforms and programs capable of delivering on those plans.

Despite these intentions and vendor promises, it is still clear that there is considerable confusion about how best to implement a cross-channel marketing program that actually meets the needs of the modern consumer.

The cross-channel imperativeModern consumers do not traverse marketing “channels,” they do not represent some archetypical “buyer personas,” nor do they envision themselves engaged in the buyer’s journey. No, in their minds, they are simply engaged in the age-old, everyday practice of shopping — or, if you prefer, searching for products, services and information about something of interest to them.

The issue, of course, is that this phenomenon is undergoing dramatic and irrevocable changes driven by technologies that are giving consumers insights and access into brands at a pace that outstrips marketers’ own efforts to generate insights into those same consumers.

Though not so very long ago a customer might have been pleasantly surprised by, and statistically more likely to respond to, a personalized email using dynamic, variable-based content, today that same customer expects to seamlessly navigate across a growing array of channels and be met at every step of the way with messaging and offers tailored to her unique relationship with that brand.

It is important to remember that a brand’s inability to meet such standards is not the problem of today’s customer, whose multichannel mantra might be best summed up as convenience. As more technologies continue to make it easier for consumers to find precisely what they want and when they want it, it is required that brands accommodate this convenient new world or lose customers to the next competitor that will accommodate such needs.

I. SummaryToday, most marketing organizations are experiencing immense changes that are reshaping virtually every facet of the customer experience.

Endless supplies of devices and channels connected through a hyper-expanding network that never sleeps have combined to create a

consumer class that wants — no, expects — meaningful connections to the products, services and brands they find of interest.

The result has been a kind of polar reversal in the brand-consumer power dynamic — the consumer gobbles up more and more control of the

so-called “buyer’s journey,” while marketers engage in a desperate struggle to catch up (let alone get back in front of the curve).

The result is an abrupt (and escalating) pressure on corporate marketing organizations to become experts in this new customer-centric

terrain, to take up position on every possible customer channel and to recognize — and intelligently engage — their customers wherever and

whenever they choose to make contact.

Today’s brand must find a way to connect all of its channels if it is truly going to understand what its customers are doing. It’s not just about what they’re doing in the store versus what they do online, for example, but understanding the continuum of the entire customer experience.

– David Seifert, VP Ecommerce,LIDS Sports Group

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II. The cross-channel rationale: Is it really necessary?Given the enormous complexities and organizational commitments required for the design and implementation of a cross-channel

marketing program, it is entirely fair and reasonable to ask whether such an initiative is, in fact, truly necessary. Or, for those already

committed to cross-channel, the question instead might be one of degrees, as in just how thorough or complete must the scope of their

cross-channel marketing programs be?

Multichannel consumers in a channel-centric world

For good reason, the enormous and fast-moving changes sweeping across the marketing landscape have been likened to a kind of technological tsunami. Just as floodwaters are said to find a way around, past or through impediments, so too are modern customers piggybacking on an endless array of interconnected devices to research, surf and search, inquire, listen, and otherwise find a way into the brands that most intrigue them.

The challenge, of course, is that an awful lot of this multichannel consumer travel is taking place via methods and means for which brands are wholly unprepared. Or as Forrester Principal Analyst Lori Wizdo puts it, today’s consumers “control their journey through the buying cycle much more than today’s vendors control the selling cycle.”1

In an effort to recapture some of that control, many, if not most, brands are adding additional channels to their existing marketing mixes.

1 Wizdo, Lori. Buyer Behavior Helps B2B Marketers Guide the Buyer’s Journey. Forrester Research Inc. Oct. 4, 2012.

Unfortunately, these additions usually are implemented in ways almost guaranteed to fail (or, at the very least, to create significant new demands on already strained marketing resources).

First, these new channel programs are modeled along the same channel-centric approach that already limits the brand’s reach. In other words, these channels are working in addition to, verses in conjunction with, existing marketing efforts. Operations remain stubbornly siloed. Second, these new additions often take a back seat to the organization’s “favorite child” marketing program — they’re brought in, as it were, as a kind of “step-channel” unlikely to get the resources or credit as their favored counterpart.

“There are too many companies out there that are still very siloed, thinking about channels and how to optimize those channels,” says Dan LeBlanc, Vice President, customer intelligence & relationship management at Provide Commerce, the company that owns leading brands such as ProFlowers, RedEnvelope, Gifts.com and Shari’s Berries. “They just aren’t recognizing how the modern customer acts.”

In defense of these positions, many marketing organizations point to the old adage about not fixing something that isn’t broken. The logic being that, for example, if single-channel is still delivering results, then why rearchitect the entire marketing enterprise until — and unless — it is absolutely necessary?

The problem, of course, is that by the time a brand realizes that other channels are gaining favor with its customers, it will find itself in a desperate game of catch-up with those same customers. Or as any savvy marketer knows, it is much harder to determine retroactively what happened to customers after they’ve abandoned the brand than to monitor their behavior, and engage them while they’re still onboard.

What every brand should know about selecting a cross-channel marketing vendor | 5

Problems arise when the customer migrates across

those channels. Absent the integrated capacities of a

true cross-channel platform, the customer’s experience

with the brand might be described as careless,

uncoordinated, turbulent or even downright chaotic.

Multichannel is NOT cross-channelWhat these organizations are in fact practicing is more akin to multichannel marketing. Customers may indeed be able to engage the brand across multiple channels and even find many, if not all, of these channels expertly implemented and managed.

Flash back for a moment to the early days of the cellular industry when a traveler might expect to have the same call repeatedly dropped due to “dead zones.” Today, such interruptions in service are considered jarring enough to send that customer in search of a new contract with competitive carrier.

The point being, that the same expectation of seamless, pain-free handoff from one channel to another is coming to every brand. A consumer who experiences a sophisticated, turbulence-free customer experience with one brand is going to easily sniff out and abandon the nonintegrated cross-channel poseurs.

“[Today’s] customers are increasingly well-informed and communications savvy,” states strategy and technology consulting firm, Booz & Company, which means that the conventional marketing world’s “channel-by-channel approach is no longer enough.”2

Or as Wizdo concludes: These fragmented brands “might be marketing consistently over multiple channels, but they aren’t engaging customers in a seamless experience.”3 And there is risk in failing to do so — real and tangible risk.

2 Multi-Channel Customer Management: Delighting Consumers, Driving Efficiency. Booz & Company. Nov. 6, 2009.3 Wizdo, Lori. Buyer Behavior Helps B2B Marketers Guide the Buyer’s Journey. Forrester Research Inc. Oct. 4, 2012.

– Jeff Hassemer, SVP, Global Marketing PlatformsExperian Marketing Services

The irony is that many of today’s marketers, while themselves being multichannel consumers, treat their own customers as if they will always engage along the same channels. They’re planning for how things were, instead of how they are, and it’s starting to come back to bite them.

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– David Seifert, VP Ecommerce LIDS Sports Group

Not much for me here ... Generic

Marketing CityPopulation: 7,256,866

sale (POS), third-party resources, social media, call center systems, etc. A brand’s ability to capture, aggregate and mine that data easily and quickly for deep insights into its customers will enable the brand to leapfrog its competition.

The absence of this cross-channel customer intelligence can be seen in the very real losses suffered by today’s businesses. One study states that U.S. retailers lose nearly $100 billion each year from poorly executed cross-channel marketing efforts.4 And in case you are wondering, it’s a global problem. The same study shows German businesses losing more than $1.5 billion annually “due to a narrow focus on single channels.”

And therein lies the answer to any fence-sitting brand unsure about the urgency of the cross-channel imperative: The multichannel buyer is already here. Customers are out there knocking on a variety of doors and more often than not, they find an uncoordinated response (if they find one at all).

4 Datamonitor/Ovum Research Study 2011

The risk of waiting

To ignore the cross-channel imperative represents a huge risk. Everybody’s working toward cross-channel right now and the retailers that don’t get to this point are going to seriously lose some business. Just because I bought a product in the store doesn’t mean you shouldn’t know it when I call you on the phone or when I send you an email. Or if I buy something online and you don’t connect the dots ... well, people are just going to stop buying from you.

Those dots are, of course, the customer data that is collected across every available resource, including marketing channels, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, point-of-

– Dan LeBlanc, VP of customer intelligence, Provide Commerce

The brand meltdown There is another risk — that of the unattended social channel that’s talking about your brand without you listening.

For example, regardless of what brands think about social media’s efficacy as a branding agent, it poses a very real risk as a kind of anti-agent. In other words, social media can (and there is plenty of evidence of this happening) devastate a brand that isn’t paying attention.

What if your company — perhaps just one employee — makes a public mistake and a belligerent customer exposes that mistake through a social network. “And then it goes bad,” continues LeBlanc. “And then it goes really bad. And then it goes really, really bad,” — the metaphorical equivalent of a nuclear meltdown, although in this case it’s your brand — “and you don’t know how to control it.”

The secret, then, isn’t effective damage control. It’s to be out on those channels, listening, paying attention, being aware of what customers are saying about your brand. “Businesses,” adds LeBlanc, “have to be obsessed about the customer — you have to be obsessed about the experience that customer has. If you integrate all of your channels, you’re really going to flourish. Fail to do so, however, and you are going to struggle. You might even get slaughtered, to be blunt about it.”

– Peter DeNunzio,President of cross-channel marketing, Experian Marketing Services

In the old days, companies controlled the brand. But social networks have reversed that dynamic. So today when a company errs, the risk isn’t that the customer tells the neighbors — the risk is that the customer tells his or her social network, which, of course, is connected to the entire global population. The risks of a brand meltdown are not to be taken lightly.

The marketing industry hears a lot of talk about ‘empowered consumers’ and it’s easy to dismiss it as just another fad. The truth is that the empowered consumer is an industry-altering phenomenon that will either make or break modern organizations. The companies that reconfigure their marketing programs, policies and infrastructure for an empowered, multichannel consumer are going to win. It’s that simple.


The heart of an integrated cross-channel marketing platform

The simple definition of an integrated cross-channel

marketing platform is one that is built from the

ground up with the expressed intent of helping brands

understand and meet the needs of today’s informed

and empowered multichannel customer.

Through the rest of this guide, we will talk about how

brands and marketers can plan for, and execute, their

own cross-channel program.

Dana notices a friend’s Facebook post gushing about a special

offer for a pair of shoes that she’s had her eyes on for some time.

Dana follows her friend’s Facebook link to the shoe retailer’s

Website where she registers to receive the same offer. A coupon

soon arrives via email.

That weekend Dana also receives the shoe retailer’s print flyer,

where she happily notices several other items she wants, as well as

language indicating she can redeem her emailed coupon for those

items as well.

Once inside the store, however, Dana reopens the email on

her smartphone only to discover it isn’t mobile-friendly.

THE RESULT: A lost sale, a newly minted brand-hostile customer and wasted resources for an improperly executed campaign.

To: Dana

Your 20% offer

*Error loading*

A cross-channel horror story

There are plenty of other fish in the sea!

Annoyed that she cannot read the coupon on her phone, Dana is

confident the offer still will be honored. After all, she had to sign

up for the offer on the company Website, so she must be in the

database — a phenomenon she has come to expect from all of her

favorite retailers.

At checkout, however, Dana is shocked to learn that the cashier

knows nothing of the promotion — “It must be an online-only

deal,” he says. Worse, he cannot find a record of Dana in the

customer database.

III. Planning your own cross-channel programWhile the basic principles behind a cross-channel marketing program are consistently the same, each organization will have unique

requirements that influence its design and implementation.

Identifying your requirementsTearing down siloes AND corporate mindsets

As noted in a recent Experian Marketing Services’ white paper, from an institutional perspective, the implementation of a cross-channel marketing program represents wholesale, foundation-rattling5 change. Far from simply adding one or more new channels to an existing marketing mix, a cross-channel marketing program fundamentally changes the way an organization engages its customers.

Given the scope of such an endeavor, it is not surprising that veterans of successful cross-channel marketing efforts point to C-suite stewardship among the first and most important requirements. Says Seifert, “Getting the CEO and CMO, the top-level people, totally engaged and totally involved is really critical. It’s all about what the attitude of the company is from the top down.”

5 Building a strategic cross-channel roadmap., page 6, Experian Marketing Services.

Once the executive team is onboard, management ranks across the organization must similarly sign on to the effort. Again, because cross-channel marketing reinvents every part of the brand-customer relationship, it is of the utmost importance that every department fully be apprised, and support, the effort.

Indeed, not only must old operating siloes be toppled, so too must the managerial mindsets that put them there. Marketing leaders still wedded to traditional marketing methodologies and “favorite child” programs as the instruments of their success must be prepared to abandon such notions, along with the policies, processes, budgets, attribution models and platform vendors that support them.

Email marketing, for example, may continue to be a performance rock star, but physical and mental room must be made for complementary channels that can, when integrated into a single unified platform, cut costs, improve results and strengthen the brand.

Have we met?

Who’s Dana?

Specialsale!

Buy this!

YOUR BRAND

http://www.experian.com/marketing-services/cross-channel-marketing-roadmap-wp.html?WT.srch=EMS_CM_CCMbuyers

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marketing projects with many of the world’s best-known brands and couples those with an organization’s own unique needs to determine the steps needed to establish a truly cross-channel optimized marketing program of its own.

To learn where your brand lays on the Marketing Sophistication Curve, Experian Marketing Survey offers a free assessment here.

Marketing Sophistication CurveSM

Once the institutional commitment has been made, a logical next step is to determine the sophistication of your organization’s existing cross-channel efforts — a kind of “you are here” assessment relative to where your marketing organization ultimately wants to be.6

A powerful tool in this process is Experian Marketing Services’ Marketing Sophistication CurveSM, an intuitive and straightforward application that factors in years of successful, hands-on cross-channel

6 Multi-Channel Customer Management: Delighting Consumers, Driving Efficiency. Booz & Company. Nov. 6, 2009.

Cross-channel optimization

Multichannel marketing

Channel optimization

Channel execution

Marketing Sophistication CurveSM

Cross-channel marketing is fast becoming a strategic necessity ... that requires a coordinated effort among marketing, sales, service and IT executives.6

– Booz & Company

go.experian.com/marketing-sophistication-curve?WT.srch=EMS_CM_CCMbuyers

Customer mapping — aligning your business around the customer

With your enterprise fully committed and armed with the Marketing Sophistication Curve, providing a solid assessment for where you are and what is needed, the next step in the process is to tailor your brand’s cross-channel requirements to your customers’ unique behaviors and needs.

Begin by mapping your customer experiences by brand segment. Develop personas for each brand as well as a customer journey for those personas.

•Where are your existing customers looking for information?

•How do they engage with your brand?

• Which channels are you currently using and which would you like to add?

•How do your customers behave in those channels?

• How do you want them to behave, i.e., if you send them an email that links them to the Website, what are the next steps in that engagement path?

Remember this is your opportunity to “blue sky” the possibilities previously thought unrealistic or even impossible. If you’re building your dream cross-channel marketing program, it’s easiest to incorporate it into the mix at the very beginning of the process.

Do you want the means to capture, integrate and respond easily in real-time to customer actions and motivations? How about personalized Web content based on visitor history? What about channel-agnostic, real-time, triggered messaging? Why not create

dynamic content rules that can be used in real-time across multiple channels using integrated customer profile data?

In short, your company must determine what it wants for and from its existing and future customers. Imagine ways that your company can inform and engage those customers and drive desired actions. More than simply engaging your customer, how might you actually delight that customer and even exceed his/her expectations, every time? (And by all means, ask for expert assistance in determining everything that is possible in cross-channel marketing — more on this in the vendor selection portion of this document.)

Data requirements

Data is the cornerstone of any cross-channel marketing practice. It is the informational wellspring from which the marketing organization derives its understanding of its customers’ thoughts, behaviors and intent. If we think of data as the colors of a painter’s palette, then it goes to reason that the greater the volume and variety of data available to marketers, the more detailed their understanding of the customer.

An obvious starting point in this process is to take inventory of the quantity, quality and variety of data currently collected by your organization. Consider also the kinds of data that could be used to form a more complete picture of your customers — not just existing customers, but the ideal marketing persona. (Remember, this is blue-sky time where, as marketers, you can look down the road at where you wish to be and the kinds of customer data that will deliver you there.)

Along those same lines, consider third-party data that could be used to augment existing channel-generated data. (In our rapidly changing Big Data world, many marketers are unaware of, and pleasantly surprised by, the availability of rich data that exists beyond first-party data. So if you don’t know what’s available, by all means ask.)

The customer is what keeps our business growing. As an organization we take a customer-centric approach and start with understanding our customer needs first and then building our marketing plans and strategies around them.


– Donnie KajikawaSr. Marketing Manager, CRM, Pogo | Electronic Arts

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IV. Evaluating vendors

The rapidly expanding scope, technological sophistication and relative newness of cross-channel marketing can simply be too much for

even the largest of brands to tackle on their own. Organizations need help from vendors that specialize in the design, development and

implementation of cross-channel products and services. What then do you look for in a cross-channel vendor? For starters, you want to find a

company committed and able to immerse itself collaboratively in the strategic and tactical fibers of your organization; that will effectively serve

as an extension of your existing marketing operations; that has built its platform from the ground up exclusively for cross-channel, customer-

centric purposes; and that measures a project’s success by its client’s (rather than its own) standards.

Strategic fitCross-channel marketing is as much a discipline as a technology — as much a revolutionary transformation to customer-centric thinking as an evolutionary embrace of multiple new marketing channels. Far from being yet another iterative technology-driven response to changing market conditions, cross-channel marketing instead represents a wholesale change to every aspect of the brand- customer relationship.

Metaphorically speaking, we aren’t talking about

Marketing 2.0 but rather an entirely new marketing

operating system (and business philosophy).

This means that the success of your cross-channel marketing program will depend heavily on your selected vendor’s capacity to understand your business model fully, the internal operations supporting that model, your near- and long-term objectives and how best to map the immense, game-changing benefits of cross-channel marketing to meet the unique needs of your enterprise.

1. Flexibility

Our industry is awash in vendors prescribing a technology-centric approach to brands’ cross-channel marketing needs. Many, if not most, of these vendors have, in fact, come to cross-channel marketing in much the same way as their customers — they started out in a channel-centric mode of operations and platform development and have eventually added new (siloed) channels to their offering over time.

As we have seen, however, cross-channel marketing doesn’t work well that way. It requires an entirely different organizational/philosophical mindset and a platform architecture that gives life to that way of thinking.

Consider, for example, that the lion’s share of corporate marketing operations falls along different parts of the cross-channel spectrum (see the Marketing Sophistication Curve). This means that different brands will require different products and services that can be flexibly tailored to their existing and long-term needs. In cross-channel marketing, there no longer is room for a one-size-fits-all package.

Technology, after all, is a tool. That tool can liberate or limit, empower or encumber, and as such, brands should avoid vendors that require them to fit their needs to the vendor’s solution. Experience has taught us that brands that go this route inevitably find themselves struggling as much with the technology as the challenges that technology was intended to fix.

2. Collaborative mindset

Look for a vendor with a background of deep organizational collaboration. Companies such as these become intimately involved with each client’s marketing team members to understand their goals fully and tailor solutions expressly aimed at one thing: meeting or exceeding those goals.

These vendors operate almost as extensions of their client’s marketing operations and measure success by their client’s expectations, rather than their own. They help to build a strategic roadmap upon and they use their extensive knowledge of industry best practices, case studies and successful implementations to guide and ground their efforts in ways that will ensure success. At this level of engagement, a collaborative spirit is an absolute must.


3. Holistic discovery process

The vendor’s discovery process is perhaps the best indicator of its flexibility and collaborative planning posture. Projects as ambitious, far-reaching and complex as cross-channel marketing demand a comprehensive, iterative discovery process that thoroughly and systematically explores key facets of the brand’s marketing and customer relationship management processes.

For many brands, this is their first, and obviously most important, investigation into a truly coordinated cross-channel marketing operation and, for that matter, the data management requirements critical to success.

For example, the most powerful and effective cross-channel marketing platforms will leverage relational database structures, enabling brands to be more responsive and agile when targeting customers. But the algorithms that make all of that possible must be carefully mapped to brand business requirements, key performance indicators (KPIs), workflow, reporting regimens, etc., prior to implementation. Similarly, the discovery process with a vendor should disclose likely data anomalies, the need for calculated fields to support your marketing goals, as well as gaps where existing data won’t meet your needs (along with recommendations on how to correct that).

The bottom line is that the cross-channel marketing roadmap borne out of the discovery process is absolutely critical to the brand’s long-term success.

Is the platform truly cross-channel?For purposes of this guide, a true cross-channel marketing platform is one that enables intelligent interactions with each and every customer in real-time with personally relevant content across all channels in a coordinated, seamless fashion.

The importance of this definition cannot be overstated because there are many cross-channel “solutions” that, over time, have been cobbled together using disparate, channel-specific applications. As we shall see, such platforms create a disjointed operating environment for both customer and brand alike.


– Donnie KajikawaSr. Marketing Manager, CRM

Pogo | Electronic Arts

This same fragmented, unfocused approach is apparent to the customer. The bottom line is that if you don’t do it internally, you won’t have it externally.

1. Why it matters

We humans are fast becoming habituated to the myriad benefits offered to us by modern technology: speed, mobility, choice, personalization, convenience, entertainment, access to information, networking — the list continues to grow. The result is a consumer class that expects these benefits from all brands, not just a select few.

For brands, this means consumers expect them to recognize and remember them instantly regardless of the touchpoint, channel, device or time of visit; they expect real-time responses containing messaging and offers tailored to their unique history and relationship with that brand; and they are even coming to expect a kind of proactive intelligence from brands that help guide them to additional, educated buying experiences.

The simple truth is that only a true cross-channel marketing platform, expressly designed and developed to meet the unique and evolving needs of today’s multichannel consumer, will suffice. While more conventional, channel-specific marketing programs may, for a time, soldier on by appending additional channels to their existing platforms, over time the system’s intrinsic structural inadequacies will doom them to failure.

2. The cross-channel smell test

Given the enormous interest in the cross-channel imperative, it is little wonder that many vendors are jumping into the fray with their own cross-channel solutions. Therefore, brands must be capable of seeing through the hype and choosing a platform legitimately able to meet their cross-channel requirements. Simply put, it’s virtually impossible to align marketing activities around the customer if the technology powering marketing interactions is fragmented or disjointed.

•

Early warning signs that the system isn’t truly cross-channel:

Platform history — Precisely because cross-channel marketing represents a wholesale change in the way brands think about and engage their customers, it similarly requires a wholesale change in the technology responsible for making that customer-centric marketing operation a reality. In other words, did the vendor start from scratch and build a platform with the vision and understanding of today’s modern customer? Or is it an agglomeration of disparate systems masquerading as an integrated cross-channel solution? The difference speaks volumes to its ability to meet your organization’s cross-channel marketing needs.

• Multiple logins, user interfaces, support teams, etc. — Platforms requiring multiple logins, application specialists, support teams or user interfaces are proof that you are dealing with siloed applications forced to operate under the same hood.

• Antiquated database structure — Channel-centric marketing programs have long depended on flat or list-based data management systems. The challenge arises in extending the capabilities of such systems to meet the unique and rapidly evolving demands of today’s multichannel, multidevice, always-connected consumer. Making any type of change to such databases, such as adding an additional field to a table, could take as long a year, which is certainly not the speed required to engage in modern customer interactions. Relational databases with columnar table structures, on the other hand, are expressly designed to incorporate data from any number of channels, deliver insights into that data and react on the fly to customer engagement. Updates to these databases can occur at lightning speed (minutes or even seconds) and do not interfere with campaign execution.


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Multiple logins, user interfaces and support teams required

Flat or list-based data management

System compiled from previously disparate single channel systems

Cross-channel system architectureNow that we’ve covered the obvious, surface-level warning signs of a counterfeit cross-channel marketing platform, it’s time to look more closely at the constituent features, attributes and traits that make up a legitimate cross-channel platform.

As we’ve noted elsewhere in this guide, the key to any authentic cross-channel marketing platform begins with the thinking that goes into it. That is to say, an experiential-based understanding of the modern, hyperconnected consumer; the demands such consumers necessarily place on modern organizations; and the rapidly evolving cross-channel challenges likely to face brands in the coming months and years.

For starters, an effective cross-channel marketing platform is designed from the ground up to accommodate today’s consumers who demand the ability to move easily across an ever-expanding population of channels irrespective of time, location or the device(s) used, and for the brand to recognize and engage them in ways that are personally convenient, informational and useful.

More specifically, an authentic, integrated cross-channel marketing platform includes:

1. Data capabilities

Data is the lifeblood of any true cross-channel marketing platform and the informational equivalent of the customer. The greater a brand’s quantity, quality and richness of data, the more able it is to develop a precise understanding of its customers’ desires and translate those desires into mutually agreeable actions.

“Today’s customers are inundated with brands 24x7, ” says Donnie Kajikawa, Sr. Marketing Manager, CRM, Pogo | Electronic Arts. “Getting different brand messages being pushed to them at every touch point in their day, with no regards to where and when they want to receive it. The challenge is taking all the customer data available to you and understanding a day in the life for each individual — to deliver what they want, when they need it.”

As such, a vendor’s ability to rapidly, flexibly and creatively capture, clean, store, manage, process, analyze, optimize and report large and complex customer datasets in a scalable, flexible environment is of paramount concern.

Specifically, the vendor should be offering data:

• Integration — Integrate data across all customer channels (on- and offline, structured and unstructured), as well as third-party assets, POS, CRM, etc. Again, the richer the data, the more precise the brand’s understanding of its customer and appropriate its response(s) to that customer.

• Cleansing — Corrupt, incorrect or otherwise “dirty” data is more of a liability than an asset. Bad data goes in; bad results come out. The vendor’s ability to ensure clean, accurate, correct, deliverable data at ingestion and ongoing is fundamental to any cross-channel marketing program’s success.

• Accessibility — Today’s multitasked marketer usually has neither the skillsets nor the time to run sophisticated SQL queries on their data or submit and wait for responses from IT. Consumers are moving faster than ever, which means marketers, and the technology they depend upon, must respond at comparable speeds. Look for a system that provides drag-and-drop functionality for creating and executing business rules and running queries at speed. Your data is no good to you if it isn’t easily accessible.

• Speed — Today’s customer expects seamless, real-time navigation across channels and brands to respond in real-time or near real-time to their actions and inquiries. This means the platform must have the capacity to ingest, process, distribute and report on large (and rapidly growing) volumes of data quickly. If a million records are uploaded into the system, test to see how long before that data is in place and actually usable. Similarly, consider how long it takes to create, execute and generate reports using virtually any business rule. Are those speeds measured by clock or calendar? A key here is to think big because the volume and sophistication of data is growing by orders of magnitude and a million records today may easily be 10 million before you know it.

An effective cross-channel marketing platform is designed from the ground up to accommodate today’s consumers who

demand the ability to move easily across an ever-expanding population of channels and devices.


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2. Scalability, availability and disaster recovery

As the number of consumer channels and corresponding data generation sources continues to grow, it is imperative that the platform possess the ability to scale easily and rapidly to accommodate those changes.

A modular, integrated, channel-agnostic system architecture expressly designed to scale out and to meet such growth means that the brand can simply add and configure additional servers without making unnecessary and potentially destabilizing changes to core applications.

Core databases behind the application also should have

the ability to scale. Multiple servers working off a single

data management system (DMS) means the vendor can

quickly configure new servers on an as-needed basis.

This is extremely important since any volume-generated downtime (for example, a holiday crush of shoppers) can lead to massive losses in revenue (not to mention customer goodwill).

In essence, this ability to scale across data centers (active-active distribution) means that a brand is less at risk in the event of a volume spike. By contrast, active-passive distribution systems require a manual migration of an application to another data center, chewing up valuable time and resources, while simultaneously placing the brand at risk in the event the application fails to operate correctly in the new data center.

It also is important that there are no single points of failure built into the infrastructure. Every component should have a hard standby (e.g., two sets of firewalls, two sets of load balancers, etc.) and at the individual server level, there should be redundancy and failover should be 100 percent nondisruptive to the application.

3. Application flexibility

From an application flexibility standpoint, new social media and related channels are certain to emerge in coming months and years, with each likely to grow even faster than its predecessors. As consumers quickly adopt new channels, brands can ill afford to wait months or even years for additional channel modules to be added to a vendor’s platform only to still be trailing behind the consumer.

True cross-channel marketing platforms are content

agnostic, which means everything in the system is

treated as an object. This enables new channels to be

added to the platform in as little as a few days, enabling

brands to be more nimble and always present wherever

their customers may be.

4. Single customer view

For obvious reasons, the integrity and cleanliness of customer data is of critical importance to the success of any cross-channel marketing program. Unfortunately, incomplete or incorrect customer data or multiple (and competing) versions of the same customer are all too common in brands that support multiple channel applications.

Further muddying these waters is the growing complexity of customer data along with the growing need to integrate third-party, POS, CRM and other data sources into the same pool. Look for a vendor capable of cross-channel identity resolution, meaning the ability to consolidate and clean all of your customer data to create a single, comprehensive view of each customer.


5. Real-time

Today’s customers expect not only to easily navigate through multiple channels using their devices of choice, but also to receive prompt and appropriate responses at each point of engagement.

To meet such requirements, the organization will need a cross-channel marketing platform capable of:

•Real-time recognition of visitors at the point of interaction

• Capturing customer data across time and channel, regardless of how subtle or deep that engagement

• Continuously updating that customer record to accurately and completely reflect the nature of those encounters

• Automatically triggering responses to such engagements that are predicated on that customer’s unique history of engagement with the brand

Only then will your customers receive precisely the information they want, where they want it, when they want it, and in a form and format of their choosing.

6. Testing

For years, split or A/B testing has been a dominant requirement for marketing managers everywhere. A/B testing has been especially popular with email marketers focused on optimizing email creative and landing pages for customer conversions.

But, A/B tests also are limited, particularly in a multichannel world where a seemingly endless number of variables can impact a customer’s decision. Instead of looking only at subject lines, delivery schedules or product offerings (most of which occur nowhere close to real-time) today’s cross-channel brands have virtually unlimited testing opportunities.

Channel integration and its relational data systems, triggered responses, dynamic content, etc., leads to virtually unlimited opportunities for multivariate testing, which in turn, leads to deeper insights into customer behavior, wants and needs. At the same time, improved data processing speeds means those insights can be put to work much faster, leading to still richer discoveries, ad infinitum. This “fail fast, learn fast” environment is ideal for innovative marketers eager to find new ways to engage customers.

7. Security

The security of customer data has never been more important. Customers expect the brands with which they engage to respect their privacy and to safeguard their personal information, which means brands in turn lean heavily on their vendors to extend those same safeguards to their own platforms.

The vendor should follow Organization of Standardization (ISO) 27001, which provides a model for establishing, implementing, operating, monitoring, reviewing, maintaining and improving an Information Security Management System.

At a minimum, ensure that the platform provides for:

•Data integrity

− All client data is uploaded over secure FTP/FTP over SSL, and that SSL encryption is used for any data uploaded via the application interface.

− The vendor uses a shared environment and all client data is logically separated.

•Access control and separation of duties

− Access is granted only to appropriate and approved individuals based upon business need, and all personnel who access or submit material to our clients’ systems are uniquely identified and authenticated.

− Duties are assigned in such a manner that a person does not have the opportunity to conceal their errors or irregularities.

When considering platform security, take into account

system infrastructure, the vendor’s security processes,

and whether or not data security is ensured across

the entire lifecycle (collection, creation, transformation,

storage, management and destruction).


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•Security assessments

− Applications must undergo security assessments. These assessments should include static testing (testing of the code itself), dynamic testing (application subjected to automated exploit attempts) and manual testing (person acts as a hacker to ensure the application is not subject to intrusion/abuse).

•Application/account access and permissions

− The application’s environment should include intelligent firewalls and Intrusion Detection/Prevention Systems (IDS/IPS).

− Access to a client’s account should be controlled by secure user IDs and passwords, and any data uploaded or downloaded is protected by SSL encryption.

− Advanced permission controls for account data or specific application features are also helpful.

8. Going beyond execution

At its core, integrated cross-channel marketing is about making a brand as meaningfully accessible as possible to any interested customer from both an inbound and outbound marketing perspective. To successfully implement this process, brands must choose a vendor platform that allows them to:

• Continuously and consistently capture data on customers who venture into those channels over time, regardless of the form or format of that engagement

• Use deep segmentation to develop increasingly meaningful insights into those customers

• Leverage those insights to create precision-targeted content, offers and asks that facilitate each customer’s journey

a. Attribution — As the number of customer channels continues to increase, it becomes increasingly difficult for brands to accurately attribute motivation, support and success to specific channels. A customer who purchases in a retail establishment may have started the journey through a social media post from a friend, engaged the brand via an online catalog and received an email offer that he redeemed in the store.

So which channel should get credit (or more precisely, how much credit)? Which messaging worked best? Who gets credit for the sale? Where do budget allocations go? Look for a platform capable of attribution modeling across the full multichannel lifecycle.

b. Retargeting — Consider also the platform’s ability to retarget customers based on their response to other forms of engagement. For example, a customer who fails to open an email could be served online ads (Web or on social sites, such as Facebook) with the same messaging from the email, while a customer who did open the email will receive different messaging.

c. Guidance and services — Technology is the engine behind any truly integrated cross-channel program; however, the multichannel pressures facing today’s marketing organizations also require the expertise of professionals who have consistently delivered results in the implementation of these systems. Consider the vendor’s background working as a collaborative partner delivering:

− Strategic consulting guidance that tailors the cross-channel solution to the brand’s unique requirements, rather than the vendor’s technology

− Deep cross-channel marketing expertise that spans across multiple channels like direct marketing, digital advertising, mobile and social

− A hands-on client services model that ties its own success to that of its clients

− Modeling and analytical expertise, as well as a history in “Big Data management” that makes it possible to squeeze every last bit of business intelligence from the brand’s data

− A proven track record of innovative creative approaches to even the most vexing marketing challenges

− An unparalleled record of on-time, on-budget project deliverables


9. Global

Many vendors promote their platforms as global in reach and scope, but more often than not, their localization capabilities are limited. Brands with an international presence or operating in multiple countries, should consider:

• Is it a single, global platform that can be accessed and shared by global teams?

•What are the platform’s localization capabilities?

• Can messages be deployed through localized time zones? Languages?

•Are there local client support teams?

• Does the vendor have local expertise and insights in the markets in which it operates?

10. Test drive

For obvious reasons, a cross-channel marketing platform is one of the more important investments an organization is going to make. As such, organizations are advised to ask for a test drive of the application to ensure it is capable of meeting their requirements.

Consider testing the platform for many of the attributes listed above, including data load, query and reporting speeds, and differences in speeds based on data type (and batch versus real-time); determine whether your own marketing staff can write and test business rules; check to see if a sample customer profile is managed as a single record across multiple channels; etc.


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V. Top 20 must-ask questions for cross-channel marketing platform vendors

As many marketers are new to purchasing cross-channel marketing technology, knowing the right questions to ask a vendor (and what

to look for in an answer) can be extremely helpful in narrowing down the field to only the vendors that can truly support modern

customer interactions.

Because the technology required for true cross-channel marketing is very different and far more powerful than single-channel technology

marketers may have used in the past, brands should be armed with a small but effective set of questions as a starting point.

To guide you, here are 20 key questions that every cross-channel marketer should ask a potential cross-channel marketing vendor.

Are campaigns in each channel managed via separate user accounts or is everything handled through the same platform requiring only one account to gain access?

Business reason to askSeparate accounts to access different “modules” or functionality within a solution usually is a giveaway that the platform is not a true cross-channel marketing platform but rather a conglomeration of legacy single-channel systems.

What to look for in a vendor•Aplatformrequiringonlyasinglelogin(username/password)toaccessanypartofthesystem.•Nousershouldberequiredtomaintainmultiplelogins.

Is your platform list-centric or customer-centric?

Business reason to ask

A customer-centric approach is a big, but necessary, transition for marketers who have grown accustomed to list-based campaigns and technologies. Essentially, it’s the premise of true cross-channel optimization.

List-based technologies often require separate rules, separate data reads and separate content to be passed back and forth between independent systems. This method leaves significant room for mistakes, unnecessary duplication efforts and reduction in time to which marketers can execute and respond.

What to look for in a vendor

Customer-centric technologies. That is, rule-based systems that do not have to rely on lists.

These technologies allow marketers to create chains of business rules that would otherwise be built into a segmentation scheme. These rules allow for selection of any number of variables based on the current customer and context. This reduces the complexity of cross-channel marketing significantly.

QUESTION 2

QUESTION 1


Explain how your platform defines campaigns consistently across channels.


In order to manage campaigns across multiple channels effectively and easily, the processes and the tools your marketing team uses need to be consistent regardless of channel. Having to define campaigns in a different way for each channel not only requires additional resources, training and expertise, but also impedes a brand’s ability to execute campaigns and respond consistently to customers.

What to look for in a vendorCampaigns across channels should be defined in the exact same way, in every channel, across the entire platform. Also, look for platforms with a single and consistent user interface for campaign setup across channels.

Detail your company’s history in data management.

Business reason to askData is the lifeblood of true cross-channel marketing. As the amount of data collected and required for cross-channel marketing grows, data management expertise will take upmost precedence.

What to look for in a vendorLook for a vendor with extensive experience in database construction, data compilation and data management. Without a true historical commitment to the complexities of data management, inexperienced vendors may end up out of their league when it comes to cross-channel marketing data requirements.

Does your platform use a centralized cross-channel subscriber database? If so, is all data stored in a single location or do some areas require data be stored separately.

Business reason to askCreating a complete, accurate and current customer view enables brands to engage their customers more effectively. When data is not centralized, the ability for marketers to report and execute on data in real-time is significantly stifled.

What to look for in a vendor Look for platforms that use a single subscriber database where all activity across all channels is housed.

QUESTION 5

QUESTION 4

QUESTION 3


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Describe how your platform maintains performance and scale when loading and querying data within the system.


Brands need the ability to respond to customers quickly and appropriately. Minutes can mean a lifetime to the hyper-connected consumer and significant missed revenue opportunities for a brand. Additionally, stale data can not only contribute to these missed opportunities, but really prove to customers that their unique and changing needs are not the brand’s top priorities.


The size of a vendor’s boxes within the network is simply table stakes. Look for vendors that talk about the way queries are processed and have the capability to load only the data and the query that’s pertinent to the data being written. This is usually accomplished through a series of store procedures and table writes as opposed to a more labor-intensive core SQL functionality. Store procedures and table writes, coupled with a columnar data structure, can increase load speeds exponentially.

Does your platform allow for campaigns to be sent while data is being uploaded to the system? Please explain.

Business reason to askSometimes updating the most obscure flag in a random column can bring your entire marketing operation to a halt. This is caused by database contention — an entire table getting locked while any small field in that entire table is updated.

What to look for in a vendorLook for vendors that have limited database contention. This allows for continual access to data and the ability to send campaigns as data is being updated.

Describe the innate flexibility of your data model.


As data is the lifeblood of cross-channel marketing, the ability to manipulate, change or add data fields, at speed, is critical. Today’s marketers face a challenging, ever-changing environment. Marketers need to be able to populate (add and remove) data frequently. Thus, their cross-channel marketing platform’s data models need to be flexible to quickly adjust to ever-changing business needs, emerging channels and new data input.

What to look for in a vendorTraditional marketing systems often require an entire rebuild of tables to add fields. This takes up valuable time, energy and effort. Look for platforms that allow for new fields to be added to a table in seconds versus what could be up to a year.

QUESTION 8

QUESTION 7

QUESTION 6


How do you plan to add on new channels to the platform as they emerge and how quickly could you do this? Please explain.

Business reason to askNew channels will emerge and consumers will adopt quickly. Marketers must have the ability not only to embrace the new channel quickly, but to integrate it seamlessly into their cross-channel marketing program.


The vendor should be able to adopt a new channel within a few days if needed. This is only possible, however, if the vendor’s technology is content agnostic, which means that everything in the system is treated as an object. To the platform, an SMS should be treated no differently than an HTML email, for example. This allows the vendor to craft the content object easily for whatever channel is needed to communicate with the customer and write it into the content stream.

Vendors who require a build of a whole new module as channels are added will fall behind as the devices and channels consumers use proliferate.

What modules are reusable within the entire system and across channels?

Business reason to askReusable modules within a system enable programs and campaigns to be executed across channels with ease. This allows marketing teams to “build once, deploy everywhere.”


Almost every component and feature in the platform should be reusable, so a lot of rebuilding is not required. Filters/segmentation/audience selection, templates and content (usually stored as blocks in cross-channel marketing platforms) should be reusable across any channel. Queries should be the same, from content to reporting to campaign management.

Describe your testing capabilities.

Business reason to askAs the number of ways in which brands can interact with and understand their customers expands, testing and the ability to act upon test results quickly will play an even bigger role than it does today. Cross-channel marketing offers marketers an unlimited amount of testing opportunities and the platforms they use should enable them, rather than limit them.

What to look for in a vendorLook for platforms that offer multivariate testing and allow your marketing team to test any aspect of any campaign it desires. Make sure tests can be cut in any way (random allocations, filters, field value, etc.)

QUESTION 11

QUESTION 10

QUESTION 9


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How does your platform help users create and manage segments, and what tools do you have for simplifying the segment-creation process?


Audience building or segmentation is an important component of delivering intelligent interactions and ensuring your audience receives the most relevant messages.

Because speed and flexibility is an imperative for effective cross-channel marketing, today’s marketers need the ability to run queries and segments quickly and efficiently.


The platform should allow marketers a simple and intuitive way to create and manage segments, without the IT team or vendor resources.

Look for platforms with simple drag-and-drop interfaces, enabling any team member to create simple-to-complex queries easily, without needing database expertise or SQL experience.

Can real-time counts be run, and are segments immediately actionable?

Business reason to askVisibility into final segment counts helps marketers confirm the final audience list, catch final count errors or adjust the segments if the final count is not showing the expected result. With customers continually moving and changing behaviors, real-time counts and the ability to immediately make those segments actionable is critical.

What to look for in a vendorA vendor should offer real-time segment counts. Segments should be immediately available to run any activity, including campaigns, dynamic content and business rules. Look for vendors that don’t make you wait in order for the segment to become “ready.”

What types of real-time triggers can your platform accommodate?

Business reason to askTriggers are critical to modern customer interactions. They enable a brand to immediately and appropriately respond to customer behaviors and actions.

What to look for in a vendorEnsure the platform is able to trigger messages based upon any event in any channel. Also ensure that the platform is able to run date calculated triggers.

QUESTION 12

QUESTION 14

QUESTION 13


What’s your average monthly client message volume?

Business reason to askThe ability to handle large volumes of messages is critical to a cross-channel marketing platform. Any interruption of service could potentially mean millions of dollars in lost revenue for brands who are active mailers.

What to look for in a vendorCheck into a vendor’s history handling many large volume clients, especially during the holidays when volume increases significantly. Vendors who lack experience managing high volume of messages (billions a year) could potentially bring your entire marketing program to a halt.

What data quality capabilities or services do you provide?

Business reason to askInaccurate data is plaguing brands. On average, most brands believe that 25 percent of their data is inaccurate. A marketing campaign is only as effective as the data it is based on, thus data hygiene should be of the utmost importance.

What to look for in a vendor Look for vendors that offer in-house, real-time and batch processing data hygiene solutions.

Describe your strategic consulting services offered.

Business reason to askStrategic consulting services are especially important to brands that are new or just dipping their toes into true cross-channel marketing. By leveraging the expertise of professionals versed in cross-channel marketing, brands can ensure cross-channel success.

What to look for in a vendorLook for vendors with exhibited experience in cross-channel marketing and C-suite level consulting. They should be able to help you tactically and have experience in developing cross-channel roadmaps that can guide your brand as it moves up the Marketing Sophistication Curve℠.

QUESTION 15

QUESTION 17

QUESTION 16


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What types of consumer insights can you provide clients?

Business reason to askEngaging today’s complex consumers requires a deep understanding of who they are, what they do, what motivates them and where they spend their time — both online and offline. Marketers need to apply consumer insight to design, plan, execute and optimize cross-channel programs that are engaging, personalized and relevant.

What to look for in a vendorLook for a vendor that can provide both behavioral and attitudinal data to provide a more vivid and complete understanding of how consumers think and what they do in a multichannel, multicultural world.

QUESTION 18

How can your company help improve campaign targeting?

Business reason to askTruly intelligent interactions are possible only when marketers are able to accurately identify and target their best customers and prospects through linkage, data enhancement, modeling and analytics. This is necessary to gain a single, integrated and comprehensive view of your customers.

What to look for in a vendorLook for a vendor that can connect offline, online, first-party and third-party data sets, as well as enhance your existing customer files with contact listing information, email address, phone number and other disparate data sets.

Describe your company and your platform’s global presence and support.

Business reason to askAs brands continue to expand globally, they can capitalize on efficiencies and simplify operations by using a single global platform.

What to look for in a vendorLook for a vendor with a strong history of global presence and local expertise. Ensure the platform has localization features, such as time zone and language support.

QUESTION 20

QUESTION 19


VI. Conclusion

Far from something to feel intimidated about or threatened by, cross-channel marketing represents an enormous opportunity for brands eager

to leverage emerging customer channels and the volumes of rich customer data they generate.

Never before have so many consumers volunteered so much about themselves, making it possible for brands to build impossibly detailed

customer profiles beyond the wildest dreams of earlier generations of marketers.

To manage this process, however, requires an authentic cross-channel marketing platform expressly designed with the modern consumer in

mind, by a vendor with detailed, intimate and established knowledge of what it takes to succeed.

In this guide, we have offered a glimpse into the world of cross-channel marketing and the steps brands should take to choose a cross-

channel marketing platform to create more intelligent interactions with their customers, every time.


About Experian Marketing ServicesExperian Marketing Services is a global provider of integrated consumer insight and targeting, data quality and cross-channel marketing. We help organizations from around the world intelligently interact with today’s dynamic, empowered and hyperconnected customers. By coordinating seamless interactions across all marketing channels, marketers are able to plan and execute superior brand experiences that deepen customer loyalty, strengthen brand advocacy and maximize profits.

Learn more about Experian Marketing Services’

cross-channel marketing platform

[email protected]

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