What is Channel Centric Marketing?
Channel centric marketing simply means marketing to customers on the channels where they spend the most time. This tactic is old news. Now, omnichannel marketing is the baseline. Marketers must have an omnichannel marketing strategy to survive.
Channel centric marketing leaves out a critical aspect of a customer journey which is that current and potential customers interact with brands on multiple and different channels at different times in their buying journey. Omnichannel strategy is foundational for digital marketing. It is foundational because it allows marketers to create customer centric journeys which build brand loyalty and increase customer attraction and retention.
A consistent omnichannel customer experience must exist in a single platform. That included the engineering, management and delivery of the experience. Creating a personalized omnichannel experience involves marketing, data science, and operations. A fractured customer experience happens when there isn’t a robust platform to bring everything together. An omnichannel customer experience platform (OCX) brings data, insight and action together. Marketers can design and execute seamless experiences. The platform is the brain that triggers a hyper-relevant communication sequence that is always personalized against the single view of the customer.
The need for a single customer view to engage with today’s always-on, connected consumer across an omnichannel journey highlights one limitation of channel centric marketing; the purpose of developing a single customer view is to understand how a customer interacts with a brand across all channels, not on a channel-by-channel basis. Customer journeys are dynamic, and becoming more digitally focused with customers engaging in multiple channels, on multiple devices. The key limitation to channel centric marketing is that it cannot match the dynamic nature of today’s customer journeys; it knee-caps itself, in other words, by focusing on a one channel/one customer approach.
Brand interactions transcend products. Products, channels and people change. An omnichannel customer experience platform adapts to any change based on real-time signals.
That ability to adapt based on any updates to the single view of the customer is the differentiator between organizing an experience around a product, channel, or department vs. organizing it around the customer.
Creating a Consistent Omnichannel Experience
Redpoint rgOne is an omnichannel customer experience platform-as-a-service. rgOne is a single platform to design, build and execute a personalized brand experience around a real-time single view of each customer. It is for brands to deliver customer experiences that go beyond the channel-specific context.
This omnichannel approach advances the concept of a customer data platform (CDP). A unified customer database accessible to other systems.
The purpose of a unified customer database accessible to other systems is to create a personalized customer experience. rgOne achieves this through identity resolution that uses persistent keys and in-built probabilistic algorithms using first-party data to resolve individual identities. Individual identities are created with data from many sources, which is then corrected and standardized. That unique identity is expanded upon to define households and use probabilistic methods to improve data quality, define extended relationship groups (grandparent, parents, kids, cousins, etc.) and release all the trapped value in the data.
With first-party data applied immediately to a customer record the record is fresh and accurate. Customers themselves are handing over the data. Customer validation of their own data is THE Gold Standard for identity resolution.
Why is Omnichannel Marketing Important?
While a CDP can certainly support a channel centric marketing strategy, the technology is more suited to support omnichannel marketing, which integrates channels and eliminates data silos and data latency to enable an organization to move at the pace of the customer throughout a dynamic, non-linear customer journey.
An omnichannel approach connects a customer’s digital and traditional experiences, which increases customer satisfaction and lifetime value. Research from IDC shows that omnichannel shoppers have a 30 percent higher lifetime value than customers who use a single channel. An Aberdeen Group survey shows that companies with an extremely strong omnichannel customer engagement have an 83 percent customer retention rating compared to 53 percent for companies with weak omnichannel customer engagement.
Omnichannel marketing more accurately reflects the way today’s consumers engage with brands across both physical and digital channels and online and offline touchpoints. The strategy enables a personalized, relevant experience that is always in the cadence of the customer journey wherever a customer chooses to engage. Channel centric marketing is out because it lacks the insight and ability to follow customers on their journeys. Omnichannel marketing technologies give brands the capabilities to meet customers and potential customers where they are in their buying journeys and create lasting and meaningful relationships. Customers are in charge of their buying journey. Brands must get in front of them with the right message at the right time to stay top-of-mind and to create connection and loyalty.
For more on the Redpoint omnichannel approach that puts customers in charge, and puts you in control, click here.
