The activity most important to your business may not be that critical with the group next door or the competition for that matter. While many organizations today focus their marketing analysis on email and website analytics, they’re missing the various other ways their prospects and customers are engaging with their brand. Engagement is more than an email open or a web page visit, it’s a response to a question on Facebook, a retweet on Twitter, and a phone conversation with a company representative. Is your marketing team reporting THAT data?
It’s likely some of that data is reaching your executive team for analysis, but chances are, most of these additional marketing and client success activities are difficult to manage because multiple systems are in place. Marketing uses the marketing automation platform (MAP) and portions of the CRM. Sales solely uses the CRM. Account management uses the CRM and a purchasing system. Client Success uses the CRM and a project management system. You get the idea. Your multichannel engagement data is probably in three or four different platforms and marketing may only have access to one or two of them. That makes determining who your best customers and brand advocates are pretty difficult unless the IT department is connecting all the dots. (You’ll probably need to create a work order for that.)
There’s a better way.
Instead of operating three or four systems that aren’t all connected to one another, why not combine all their data into one platform for marketing to utilize not only as MAP but also as a customer lifecycle management tool that helps identify best fit, highly engaged prospects because of the data received regarding highly engaged and loyal customers?
Customer Lifecycle Marketing (CLM) provides marketers (as well as sales teams, account managers, and client success representatives) with the ability to measure and analyze multichannel engagement scoring. From opened emails to face-to-face meetings over coffee, CLM tracks engagement – not activity.
Engagement is very different from activity. A sales person can make 80 phone calls and leave 70 voicemails in a day – which is a lot of activity! They are busy but are they effective? What about a sales person who makes 40 phone calls and speaks to 30 prospects? If you were evaluating sales reps on their activity, the first rep would win a prize! But, most likely, you would be interested in learning more about the conversations the rep with 40 phone calls had with prospects because they actually generated engagement.
Engagement comes in many forms! But what’s key is that CLM captures engagement from multiple, disparate systems and provides a 360 degree view of a prospect or customer’s engagement with a brand.
That’s why multichannel engagement scoring is so important. If an organization is utilizing multichannel marketing, then multichannel engagement is, without a doubt, a result of those efforts at some level or another. What good is the engagement if it can’t be measured and acted upon?
