Better Marketing Reception
Today’s competitive environment requires the ability to make each marketing channel as efficient as possible. The goal of ensuring that all customer contacts are timed appropriately, in forms that appeal to customers and in channels best suited to them, containing messages unique to their needs, is challenging at best. Considering that many transactions probably will have to occur in near real time, it’s clearly not possible to make these decisions one by one. And getting messages coordinated between channels represents an additional level of complexity.
Many companies typically have conflicting channel and product managers, competing organizational goals and other critical constraints that ultimately prevent achieving the very things they are trying to accomplish.
For example, say you are head of e-commerce for a large retail firm. You’re given the task to increase customer Web marketing activity, so you designate your superstar to take on the challenge. She delivers a great product that allows customers to access a variety of information about their account. You are excited about the great results and your firm is happy.
At the same time in another part of the company, the customer service manager has been asked to change the e-mail processes, to allow CS reps to e-mail offers based on the types of service calls they receive. A new Web site is added to enhance customer service, providing a broad array of formatting and content choices. The new users are anxious to begin communicating effectively with their customers.
Additionally, the direct mail manager, whose compensation depends on the revenue he is able to stimulate, is preparing a major campaign to promote yet another new service idea. He has added another corporate e-mail address for this purpose, and has been working with a new product roll-out group in marketing to develop effective creative. In order to capture the response rate effectively, customers who receive the mailing will be asked to call an inbound 800 number solely for this product introduction. The campaign is expected to mail in a few days.
Independently viewed, each of these channels may be very effective, but when observed as a whole, they may interfere with each other. Results for each independent effort may be negatively affected. Even worse, customers could receive conflicting messages from your company.
In physics, there is a particular property involving waves. It’s called interference. When one wave bumps into another, the original two become indistinguishable. The resulting independent waves create
