Data Append Makes Multichannel Marketing Hum

Communicating with your customers over multiple channels is known to produce superior results, yet many companies fail to reap the benefits of multichannel marketing because of missing data. The answer, as experts note, is to employ data append services to obtain the required data, enabling you to raise your marketing game to the next level-to secure more conversions, customers, and revenues.

Surveys show that integrated multichannel marketing generates more sales vs. traditional marketing. As Banta notes, “It is important to recognize the tremendous multiplier effect from the employment of multiple, coordinated channels.”

Banta’s data shows impressively higher response rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates for highly personalized multichannel campaigns vs. traditional campaigns:

Traditional Campaign Personalized Multichannel Campaign

1.3% response rate 9.4% response rate
3.3% click-through rate 56% click-through rate
2.9% order conversion 31% order conversion

A two-year study conducted by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) also showed that an integrated marketing approach increased brand awareness and image by 8% to 34%, and raised purchase intent from as much as 5% to 1,000%.

Aberdeen Group’s research supports these findings, showing that multichannel marketing engagement yields stronger brand equity, customer retention, and lifetime value.

The secret of the top-performing marketers, and what separates them from their lower-performing peers, is the care they take to build, enhance, and optimize their customer data.

As Banta relates, “More than half the battle in effective marketing campaigns is acquiring and maintaining good prospect and customer data. It is important for sellers to build a repository that allows them to effectively utilize unique attributes to segment prospects and customers.”

Prospects will never see your compelling messaging if you can’t reach them. Thus, step one is enhancing and optimizing your data, beginning with assessing which types are missing (email, phone, address, and demographic data), and utilizing data append services to obtain the missing pieces.

The detailed demographic data needed to segment prospects and customers can be obtained via demographic appending. As Banta explains, personalized communications yield better results, which can include “personalized greetings, relevant messages based on demographics and compelling graphics.”

The effort put into optimizing your data for multichannel campaigns pays off. As Banta relates, personalized communications yield a five- to 10-fold increase in response and conversion rates, explaining further that, “When print, e-mail, Web and telemarketing are combined in integrated, multi-channel campaigns, the results are even greater.”

Similarly, says eMarketer analyst Jeffrey Grau, “Smart multichannel retailers understand that by leveraging the strengths of their stores, Website, catalog and mobile offering they create a customer experience that is greater than the sum of its parts.”

}