Digital Transformation Should Be Cross-Channel

Consumers have come to expect well-defined and intuitive experiences wherever they interact with your brand. But as marketing continues to evolve and individual channels become more personalized in their individual silos, marketers are faced with a new problem: consumers don’t think about channels as distinct silos. They think of the brand, period. They expect seamless interactions across email, web, display, and anywhere they interact with the brand.

We’re in a digital-first, visual era where seamless brand experiences are more important than ever, and traditional martech stacks just aren’t built to keep up.

Engage your audience at every touch point

Customers are no longer okay with a company forcing them down a predetermined path. They want to write their own story. As the digital world continues to evolve, it’s up to the brands to continue to meet their customer’s desires for a seamless, cross-channel experience.

Omni-channel and cross-channel have become words that get thrown around, and a lot of marketers don’t know what it really means for their individual organization. We often think of it as having similar branding, consistent copy or channels being somewhat connected from one to the other, but it’s really about helping the consumer move from one step to the next regardless of device, vehicle, or channel so they can take their journey down the purchase funnel as they see fit.

Intelligent creative lets you create data-driven personalized messages your customers are excited about. You can easily add real-time elements (think real-time pricing or inventory) to your landing pages, display ads, and emails so you can be sure that you’re providing the best and most relevant experience for every customer at every moment.

Take this Delta Airlines, Medallion Member email for example. Delta partnered with Movable Ink to celebrate members with a mid-year review that incorporated 19 personalized data points and produced up to 72,000 possible variations.

Handle change management within your organization

In order to deliver against the consumer’s need for seamless cross-channel experiences, you’ll need a robust martech stack to help you achieve your goals. When it comes to getting started with new marketing solutions, adoption is often one of the biggest hurdles teams face. The level of pushback will depend on your company culture, but it is important to keep in mind that more often than not risk-averse companies quickly fall behind their competitors. As you move forward with implementing new technology, identifying dependencies in your current process will make all the difference. Finding martech solutions that help your team work cross-functionally more efficiently will be the single key variable in driving adoption. Marketers are strapped for time and resources, so the efficiencies you create through the upgraded martech stack will serve to prove out the ROI to senior leadership. And your colleagues will thank you for making their lives easier.  

For example, your web team is developing creative all of the time and getting those images approved by legal. Why can’t that same approved creative seamlessly go into your emails or ads? In a lot of organizations, email, web, and performance marketing work very separately, but when you connect these different departments and create an infrastructure that helps them work together toward the same goals, everyone makes more efficient use of internal resources.

With intelligent creative, your team can make countless creative variations from a single set of code. It solves your most painful and time-consuming production problem, so you can free up your bandwidth and spend time doing the important  work: coming up with ideas for sophisticated campaigns that are consistent and compelling across the board. And in turn, you’ll get a better understanding of your customer across channels. Most importantly, identifying those opportunities helps you make the business case for your budget and getting that all-important executive leadership buy-in.

Unleash the power of your data

Data, as expected, is the most important asset that any marketer has. It is the lifeblood of any campaign. Marketers have a breadth of data that is continuously collected across different channels where consumers engage, but because the channels are generally siloed, so too is the data.  Undertaking a process to organize all your consumer data to make it feel less disjointed and more accessible is the first step you have to take towards creating a cross-channel experience. But that is a massive feat. Being able to tap into different data sets in real time achieves the same goal as the creation of a data-lake, and can save your bottom line. Via Movable Ink, and through the use of multiple APIs and data sources in a single touchpoint, you can connect seemingly disjointed data sets to create highly personalized, intelligent creative.

Once you have a clear structure for your data, you need to identify which data points you have available for your consumers and use as many as possible without crossing the line and being perceived as creepy.

In order to understand what’s working and what’s not, test and iterate in order to figure out what your consumers want to see and don’t want to see. Put yourself in the shoes of the consumer you’re trying to talk to instead of only looking at them through the lens of a forecast model. When thinking about your consumer, take a step back and don’t think about forecast models or simulations. Think about using your data to deliver the most relevant experience possible at the moment of interaction.

Prior to joining Movable Ink, Julio worked across multiple SaaS companies whose integrated solutions focused on driving digital innovation for retailers.