Today, customers have control over the buying process, forcing the marketer to adapt in providing them with an optimized and engaging experience.
Multichannel campaigns have become the norm and marketers have reconciled to adopting multiple ways to reach out and engage the customer. In a survey conducted by Forrester.com on 226 marketers,
- 40% of the respondents considered themselves as “mature practitioners” of marketing for multiple channels
- Another 40% of marketers described themselves as transitional, or on the way to engaging customers across multiple touch points
- Among the top obstacles that prevented them from adopting a multichannel strategy until now are lack of knowledge and skills and having to depend on external marketing services partners
- Only about 5% of the marketers mentioned they had no plans to embrace multichannel marketing
The study also quantified the benefits of engaging the customer across multiple touch points. 48% of the respondents could gain a 15% increase in impressions and 43% of respondents could gain a 15% increase in customer satisfaction scores by engaging the customer through multiple channels. 24% of the respondents reduced sales cycle times by more than 15% and 40% of the marketers increased revenue by more than 15%. Another 60% of respondents increased their return-on-marketing investment by more than 10%.
However, success of multichannel customer engagement depends on greater integration between various marketing processes and the adoption of new technologies. Those who have successfully implemented multichannel engagement strategies have adopted new technology aggressively and coordinate intensely with technology and sales teams alike. Developing the company’s website into a “pervasive customer engagement hub” and the technical infrastructure around it would increase coordination and integration on this front.
