Retailers, Maximize your Omnichannel Marketing for the Upcoming Holidays
Omnichannel marketing is key to growing revenue in an increasingly hostile holiday environment.
Because you’re reading this, I’m assuming 3 things about you:
- Marketing across channels is essential for you this holiday season
- Tracking and measuring performance across channels is important to you
- Personalized omnichannel marketing is a priority
With those assumptions in mind, here are three quick ways to start preparing for a busy, cross channel holiday season.
Learn from last year’s performance
It’s almost a given that your CFO analyzed last year’s holiday performance like a hawk, and it’s now up to you to take another glance at how your marketing goals and metrics held up previously.
Here are several questions to get you started:
How accurate was reporting?
Were you able to track users from each of your digital assets?
Could you track email campaigns onto website?
Were the discount campaigns a direct result of your in-store sales increases?
Did personalized campaigns run across your channels?
Remember that your CMO may already have specific metrics, goals, strategy for this holiday season, so be sure to tailor your analysis to this year’s needs.
You can save lots of pain and suffering by learning from past performance, so get digging!
Audit your current capabilities
Take your current holiday strategy and objectively ask yourself if your current capabilities can rise to the occasion. If goals seem difficult to meet, start pinpointing weak points in your current processes, team, and tools. You can take your analysis of last year’s performance to build a diagnosis of your situation.
We’ll use an example from above:
Reporting was not accurate + Team has to create manual reports, leading to inconsistent cadence and content + Reporting was only able to pull from separate sources individually (email/website/in-store) + We do not have a current data integration platform for easy reporting
The problems may be many, but laying out all your marketing issues allows you to find the easiest solution to solve all the issues at hand. For instance, it’s easy to see that the clear solution to the reporting problem would be to invest in an automated data management system.
Look to success stories
Most companies are struggling when it comes to cross-channel marketing personalization, but there are a few gems that have managed to connect the customer experience and drive significant ROI as a result. Apple has managed to track omnichannel customer movement through clever use of digital tracking and in-store digital check out with Apple IDs. Easton Bell sports has connected social, mobile, online, and offline data to mine lifecycle, demographics, buying patterns, and other critical data points, creating 360 degree views of customers.
Photo credits go to Chris Ford and Andy
