The focus of innovation in e-commerce platforms is moving toward analytics and data gathering. New analytic capabilities provide behavioral and cross-channel tracking insight into consumers, while new data-gathering capabilities reveal information about their location, social graphs, telephony, clicks, and purchase history.
These capabilities enable the creation of an unified customer profile that provides improved customer insight for use in developing more-effective marketing campaigns. Access to a single, integrated view of your customers and your campaigns enables you to determine which channels are best for which customers and prospects in terms of time and cost for the type of product or service being promoted. This view also allows you and your team to plan new interfaces and approaches to embrace mobile users and increase in-store digital capabilities in a seamless and intuitive fashion.
To do all this, however, you need a single platform to manage and deploy your information assets across multiple channels including the Web, e-mail, mobile devices, and print.
Selection considerations
When selecting an e-commerce platform that provides a media-rich, community-oriented customer experience—one that leverages customer feedback, ratings, and peer group recommendations—you must consider a variety of factors:
1) The platform should be based on an open, standards-based enterprise content management system that can readily integrate marketing automation tools, back-end commerce functions, order management, and inventory and fulfillment services as well as customer relationship management systems.
2) The ideal platform will manage all forms of content—Web, e-mail, community feedback, profiles, history—and provide automated output for launching a new campaign.
3) Content should be able to appear as a promotional Website with a targeted teaser on the company’s home page, as a personalized e-mail promotion, and as a custom text message alert for an individual whose geo-location data identifies him as in range of a store running the promotion. In fact...
4) The platform must support the mobile channel efficiently, especially if you have a brick-and-mortar presence. The mobile phone provides immediacy between a retailer’s Web-based promotions and the in-store experience.
Implementing your cross-channel strategy
There are two key challenges to implementing a true integrated cross-channel strategy. First, traditional systems such as enterprise resource planning systems, CRM systems, customer self-service applications, community forums, and the Web are set up as silos. This means that getting up and running with a single platform to drive, analyze, and optimize multichannel campaigns requires significant IT investment and operational expense—if it can be done at all. These silos house unique data related to a customer’s profile, interactions, and records, and manage different data around a customer’s history and experience.
The answer to this challenge is a virtual repository, which effectively allows third-party systems to be connected, enabling access to the data throughout the enterprise. This content unification should include federated search and access control as well as bulk import/export of data. Virtual repositories provide companies with flexibility and enable the development of content-centric applications regardless of the original source of the data.
The second challenge is a cultural one: Changing the way marketing analyzes how best to drive a campaign and breaking down internal barriers to facilitate the cross-departmental collaboration necessary to support a cross-channel effort becomes the new bottleneck. This challenge can be an exciting one to address and overcome, however.
One of the key messages to communicate throughout the enterprise is that a business is no longer just a physical presence, storefront or otherwise, and a website; companies are now visible across a multitude of channels and interact with customers and potential customers in a variety of ways. In addition, marketing is no longer a one-way street. The challenge is to establish which channel each customer prefers, then market accordingly, and listen.
A common marketing platform to drive and analyze campaigns acts as a virtual hub, storing and referencing relevant information from any and all external systems. This enables you to run contextual, personalized, relevant campaign promotions that leverage nearly any unique dimension of your organization's internal knowledge about a customer, his friends, or like-minded communities of users. In-store kiosks, promotional coupons sent via the post, the friendly mention of a personalized promotion by a customer service agent on the phone, all give immediacy to Web-based promotions and the in-store experience. An integrated multichannel campaign plan can glue everything together.
The bottom line (both figuratively and financially) is that analytics that span channels optimize the relevancy of your campaigns and guide more-targeted outcomes—in other words, purchases. Understanding who your customers are, how best to reach them, what their purchase preferences are, who their peer group is, and what their peer group is recommending or purchasing themselves can enable different types of promotions that you can test and optimize for the best outcome.
Kevin Cochrane is chief marketing officer for Web solutions provider Day Software.
