Most companies are still facing challenges in deploying cross-channel marketing, according to research conducted by Forrester Consulting, a department of Forrester Research, Inc., on behalf of ExactTarget.
According to Forrester, only 5 percent of the companies surveyed, the most advanced segment, “demonstrate behaviors significantly different from the study averages. [These respondents] are tenured interactive marketers that are already integrating all of the channels they apply.” The advanced group, primarily large media companies, indicated they still want to increase their customer insights.
But the responses of the top cross-channel marketers differed significantly from the others in the survey. Most respondents said their cross-channel efforts were hindered by limited staff, budget and know-how.
Nearly half of the respondents (49 percent) said they don’t have enough staff for multi-channel customer communications. Forty-two percent said they don’t have the technical staff to execute and measure cross-channel marketing efforts.
Siloed staff without any cross-channel visibility was cited by 37 percent of respondents. Nearly a quarter (24 percent) of the respondents admitted that the managers of various separate marketing programs didn’t collaborate well, while 23 percent said that staff has conflicting goals/objectives.
According to the research, the greatest factor behind the success of top cross-channel marketers was their ability to leverage technology to aid program execution, data connection and process management.
Half of the respondents from the advanced group, and 42 percent of all survey respondents, said they were very or extremely interested in using a single technology platform to manage their cross channel programs.
“Forrester believes that marketers should invest in an online marketing suite in order to sidestep the inevitable long-term impact of siloed approaches and marketing ROI,” the report said.
Even though most (70 percent) of the respondents said they had controlled budgets for operating interactive cross-channel programs, they admitted the available funds were still quite small. Half of the respondents said their technology budgets were less than 10 percent of their entire firm’s technology budget.
Forrester recommended that companies seeking to improve their cross-channel capabilities:
· Apply more interactive tools: These help marketers apply knowledge from one medium to the next.
· Take a gradual approach: Trying to do too much too fast can be more error-prone proceeding gradually. The biggest incremental uplift usually comes from moving to automation.
· Consider outsourced support: Some companies don’t have the internal man power to deploy cross-channel programs.
· Organize for better collaboration: Even though the advanced group said this is a challenge, more of them have individual teams to manage specific channels. A larger percentage use automation to for operational issues than did survey respondents as a whole. These technology-aided marketers could focus more on collaborative efforts and on joint planning of cross channel campaigns, according to the research.