Step 8 is marketing & promotion.
What a can of worms that is … or at least can be! And obviously, in a single post, I’m not going to cover this topic. This is a topic of unending variables.
I really only want to make a few points. First recognize the difference between the channel or medium and the activity. You can advertise by mail, market by mail and promote by mail. Mail is a medium of communications. Advertising, marketing and promoting are the activities.
Multichannel commerce, it seems clear, by definition refers to conducting commerce (which means generating sales) thru multiple channels. So, I’m not taking about advertising, which is just sending a message. I’m thinking about making an offer to a customer or prospective customer to conclude a transaction with me.
We have more channels than ever, for commerce:
- brick and mortar stores (fact-to-face)
- paper mail (flyers, postcards, letter packages, catalogs)
- electronic mail
- social media
- web store
- smart phone app
- tablet app
- telephone
- direct response broadcast (radio, television)
… and I’m probably leaving something out.
So, in the ideal world, your marketing & promotion efforts will generate commerce transactions with your customers. And it should be your customers choice to use any particular channel. Your offers, products, promotions should all be visible to your customers across all channels. And that takes no small effort.
Here’s the next important point: If you can’t measure it, consider not doing it. The beauty of direct marketing, direct commerce, whatever you choose to call it, is that it’s measurable. And with technology you can almost measure everything. But not everything is worth measuring. But if you’re not measuring anything, you’re wasting a lot of time and money. And if you’re measuring so much you can’t comprehend the data or analyze the data, you’re still wasting a lot of time and money.
So, be deliberate about what you measure. The most basic and most useful things to measure are:
- customers who got an offer
- customers who bought
- how much they bought
- how many they bought
- what it cost to make the offer
- what it cost to fulfill the offer
You’ll know a lot, if you keep these six data points for every channel and every promotion.
Think about this … it’s a lot to think about.
