Building an Integrated Marketing Plan

Brand and the marketing plan
Your brand promise and your “higher order benefit” (the culmination of the three aforementioned questions) should begin to drive much of the focus of your multichannel business. Ideally this brand exercise leads you to a logical place, one that your existing database of customers is already familiar with and that they find relevant and meaningful.

If your brand is a true representation of who you are as a company, it should serve as a compass for your future direction. The merchandise assortment should fit together, threaded through with unique and relevant attributes fundamentally associated with your brand definitions. The creative look and feel of your catalog and Website should help establish or deliver on the brand promise. Your customer service, checkout process, product packaging, and shipping methods should all filter through your brand as well.

With the product right, the message right, the presentation right, and the fulfillment right, it's time to think about the communication plan. Customer acquisition and retention are still the goals, but the process is refined. Metrics are still critical, even more so, and allowable dollars per piece and allowable cost per customer acquired are essential to understand. It's no longer okay that customers acquired through pay-per-click (PPC) efforts are breaking even on acquisition; you must know how they perform when you put them into your marketing rotation.

Understanding how customers acquired through different channels perform will ultimately help on the segmentation front. How long can you mail a Web-acquired customer? How deep can you e-mail the file? How are marketing cost and breakeven affected by mailing and e-mailing one customer segment vs. only mailing or only e-mailing another? These important questions can be answered only through an in-depth study of the file, a solid segmentation plan, and diligent tracking and measurement.

The outcome should be a communication plan that uses the brand definitions to identify good prospect lists, craft solid ad text for PPC programs, home in on the most appropriate and profitable long-term keywords, prepare an efficient mail plan with relevant supporting e-campaigns, and maximize lifetime value not just through customer retention but through more-selective acquisition as well.

The multichannel environment has changed the way marketers must look at data. Where customer acquisition (or “front end” marketing) and customer retention and reactivation (“back end” marketing) were once linked in a very straightforward way, the linkage today is blurred by conversion and migration from channel to channel and a still not-completely-understood relationship between Web buyers and phone/mail buyers and the drivers of their collective purchasing behavior.

Next page: The three stages of an integrated plan