3 Reasons You Should Engage in Multi-Channel Marketing

Plain and simple: Email marketing produces great results and it’s cost-effective. According to the Harvard Business Review, direct mail can cost as much as 100 times more than email marketing, while email marketing can still pull 95 times better ROI. Email converts better than search and social media, too. But does that mean you should put all your eggs into the email basket and forget about those other channels?

The short answer is no. Here’s why:

Lines Between Channels are Blurring

As more channels emerge and the buying journey becomes increasingly convoluted, the excellent ROI stats from email marketing may become somewhat diluted. As explained over at SAS, “It is increasingly difficult to know which channels, campaigns or sequence of touch points contributed to qualified conversions and sales.” As a result, multi-channel marketing is becoming not just a good idea, but a critical one.

There are Real Opportunities with Multi-Channel Marketing

Your No. 1 job as a marketer is to be where your customers are. Your No. 2 job is to bring in the revenue. Multi-channel marketing lets you do both.

Consider this: According to Mashable, 72% of consumers want an integrated marketing approach. They also noted that consumers gain 74% brand recall when advertising is integrated across mobile, TV and online. And if that’s not enough to sway you, consider this: Internet Retailing reports that multi-channel customers spend a whopping 82% more than single-channel customers do.

Email Intelligence Makes it Easy to Get Started

To implement a multi-channel marketing strategy, you need to have a clear and cohesive understanding of how your customer behaves across all channels and at every touch point.

Fortunately, there’s a simple solution: Email Intelligence. With Email Intelligence, you can add relevant demographic, psychographic and purchase data to every email address on your list. You can also gain new points of contact, including postal addresses and social media profiles. And you can verify that the email addresses on your list are active and accurate.

Using this information, you can begin to add new channels to your marketing strategy, all while ensuring the message stays consistent across the board. You can also drill down to a more personal level in your marketing, segmenting your list and targeting messages according to criteria such as where your customer lives, what your customer purchases or what other interests your customer has. And once you’ve verified and scrubbed your list, you can begin to re-engage with inactive subscribers; if one channel isn’t working for a subscriber, try a different one.

By continually incorporating the freshest data into your list, you’ll be well positioned to capture the advantages that multi-channel marketing can bring to your organization. For more information on how Email Intelligence can help you engage in multi-channel marketing, click here.