A: To get started, a marketing team needs to evaluate their technology stack. You often see marketers using decades-old marketing technologies to communicate with their customers.
For example, there could be a team and a piece of technology that helps marketers send communications via mobile to their customers. And then there is another team and piece of technology that's used to send an email to a customer, and so on. We're seeing that this is an unsuccessful approach, because the marketing messages are often not on brand or they're each communicating different things. And on top of that, the data is all siloed.
The first step is for marketing teams to understand what technology they're using for each channel. And then on top of that, look at all the teams, because there could be a team for email, a team for mobile, a team for direct mail — internal teams often aren't talking to each other.
Companies need to evaluate how they think about their customer data. A customer might respond better to a direct mail campaign than an email campaign, but they keep receiving emails. If a company’s technology is siloed, they won’t know that the customer prefers direct mail. Marketers need to understand where their customers are in the journey, and not only who they are, but also what channels they're using. What channel should a marketer use to target a customer segment that will get the highest rate of conversion?
Companies should approach cross-channel marketing as a phased approach. They can start by identifying a few channels they would like to improve or focus on. If they want to improve their email campaigns, for example, they can begin by sending email campaigns based on where the customer is in the journey. And once they have that down, and they want to increase their marketing maturity, then they can start adding in additional channels that make the most sense for their consumer base.