Cracking the multichannel nut

It’s a mutichannel world out there. And there’s no escaping the fact that marketing across multichannels – and integrating these channels – can be a tough nut to crack. It's a new year, so there's an air of optimism. But is this the year that we'll see success?

I bring your attention to the Direct Marketing Associations annual National Client Email Marketing Survey which, whilst pointing to a bright future for email, suggests that its integration into a larger multichannel picture is still some way from realisation.

The report emphasises the power of email as part of an integrated campaign – with 39 percent of marketers reporting that combining email with direct mail had been very successful or successful and 34 percent finding similar success by integrating email with telemarketing.

But whilst 80 percent of respondents state that they expect their company’s expenditure on e-mail to increase, it could fall short of its potential.

“Email is an extremely powerful medium when used alongside other media yet remains the least exploited of all channels,” says Richard Gibson, chair of the DMA Email Marketing Council’s Benchmarking hub. “Audiences live in a multichannel world where they are happy to consume messages though a number of different media. Direct marketers need to understand those multi-channel linkages and weave together different on and off-line messages to build compelling, engaging, personal experiences that deliver a healthy return on investment.”

And this is where the real challenge lies. Few companies outside the Coca-Colas of this world can successfully integrate the different channels and media into cohesive campaigns. A quick discussion with marketers and agencies is revealing. Certainly, execution can be at fault – for instance, look how often firms start TV campaigns before they’ve sufficiently generated the indexes on their internet search campaigns.

But more significantly there seems to be a lack of understanding about integrated communications. There is a fundamental confusion over definitions, for a start, and I’ve heard several interpretations of ‘multichannel’ and ‘integrated’ communications bandied around by agencies recently. And if you’re in an organisation where some 50 individuals touch a campaign in just one route to market as I was told recently by one large CPG business, then it is easy to see how the issue of exploiting the multichannel environment is a priority for 2008.

With budgets on the likes of e-mail marketing going up, as suggested by the DMA, and the economy continuing its highwire act, firms will be wanting to get the most out of their money. It’s time to crack the multichannel nut. And we’ll be looking at this area in more detail in the next month.