Ten Tips for Better Integrated Marketig

Two beefs I have about most white papers: Either they’re written in so much jargon as to be impenetrable and inactionable, or they are so basic as to be useless. Happily a recent paper from JupiterResearch and RightNow Technologies entitled “Vital Marketing: 10 Core Tactics to Improve Marketing Campaign Effectiveness and Efficiency” is actually useful. Here, in brief, are the paper’s 10 vital tactics:

1) Share customer data across the organization. “Marketers often fail to implement the vital marketing tactics—in part, because organizational and technical hurdles keep customer intelligence in disparate silos,” notes the report. The authors also make another point that apparently bears repeating: “Simply having more data is not necessarily an ingredient for success. However, having reliable, ready access to multichannel customer data is necessary.”

2) “Optimize customer data collection.” Ways to do this include keeping online registration forms short and sweet (don’t ask for demographic data that you’ll never use, for instance) and using subsequent touchpoints, such as order-takers in a call center, gather additional data and verify existing information.

3) “Correlate goals with behavior and available customer data… For example, e-mail campaigns should not highlight a call center’s phone number without understanding the impact this tactic has on call center volume. Ultimately, understand customers’ behavior, and determine if their behavior aligns with the goals of your organization. Such understanding requires testing the tactics and the ability to segment customer data by any number of attributes.”

4) Test, test, test. (But you already knew that.)

5) Segment your customer data in other than the usual ways. According to JupiterResearch, only 31% of marketers segment their database using click-through information from previous e-mail campaigns; just 16% use customer service interaction data. “The greatest number of marketers reporting average unique conversion rates of more than 3% employ attitudinal segmentation (49%), compared with less than one-quarter (23%) of marketers that do not use any segmentation and attain the same level of results.”

6) Personalize. Companies that personalize their marketing e-mails are 40% more likely than those that don’t to have average unique conversion rates of more than 3%.

7) Consider coordinating your multichannel marketing efforts. Sending an e-mail in conjunction with a print mailing is one example that has boosted response for users.

8) “Develop companywide integration and coordination.” This goes beyond integrating inhouse data. “Although 79% of marketers centrally manage the scheduling of e-mail marketing campaigns to avoid message overload, the majority of marketers (53%) select lists at the business level, with no guarantee that another division or unit has not previously used the same list. This lack of coordination creates infighting over which group owns the data. Ultimately, it contributes to companies’ overloading customers with messages from multiple business units, breaking their own rigid rules of message frequency.”

9) “Build simple data collection campaigns that support companywide goals.”

10) “Select a strong technology partner.” (A vendor did sponsor the report, after all.)