5 Performance Marketing Basics in an Omni-Channel World

Today’s tech-savvy customers seamlessly move from one channel to another before making any specific purchase decision. They get inspired by one channel, start their purchase on another and finish it off on a completely different channel.

With performance marketing, where payouts are made only when an action is complete, it has become imperative to streamline your marketing efforts to extract the maximum out of your affiliates.

THE NEW RULES OF (MULTI-CHANNEL) CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT: HANDBOOK FOR GROWTH MARKETERS

Winning CX will come from Brands who can balance relevance, consistency and convenience to drive engagement. The kind of engagement that drives optimal customer lifetime value and real business impact.

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These are the 5 basic rules you can adapt to optimize impact from your campaigns and results:

1. Uniform Marketing Message

Consistent and cohesive marketing message across all channels ensures a seamless customer experience at every touchpoint and simplifies the entire buying journey. You have to build your digital strategy around your customers and then mold separate channels with a uniform message. This consistency ensures that the transactional data is uniform, thus helping you standardize and measure your digital strategy’s impact across touchpoints.

Also, there might be different departments managing disparate media verticals and specific channels; a unified message will help make timing, targeting, and syncing, more focused. This eliminates silos and the entire organization speaks a common language.

2. Go deep with Attribution Models

‘Last’ or ‘First’ touch attribution is no longer the answer. Most organizations these days set percentages to specific aspect in the attribution model for revenues among the marketing touchpoints, to capture indirect influence. But, experience says the target audience is biased, which can skew results.
Walk-through the entire customer journey to understand how they migrated from channel to channel and use data-driven analytics to better understand the relevance of each touchpoint between your company and the customer. The more you understand each interaction, the better you will be able to attribute the credits.

Attribution models can only serve as a guideline while you are planning your budgets. Thus, the need is to carefully scrutinize attribution results, and make adjustments accordingly.

3. Analytics is the key

You have to master measurement and analytics like a boss for an omni-channel approach. You have to dive into your performance marketing data along with other data sources to have a better picture of the performance of each channel and consumer behavior to quickly identify and respond to campaign issues.

Even though we cannot fully measure across various channels and devices – a customer’s path to purchase and advancements in technology are bringing us closer to a true cross-channel measurement.

Among the KPIs that you should track are:

• Website traffic, clicks, conversion rate, and revenue
• User acquisition KPI to track the increase in new visitors, bounce rates, and conversion costs
• Attribution KPI to determine role of influencers and social media interaction
• Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), customer retention, segmentation etc.

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 You can also expand your performance dashboard to include data points like:

• In-store fulfillment options like ‘buy online, pick up in store’, ‘reserve online, buy in store’, online registrations for in-store events, personal shopper appointments etc.
• Browsing, cart additions, and purchases in stores
• Online orders via employee or in-store tools
• Save cart options to track digital touchpoints
• Tracking of ‘like’ and ‘share’ of products
• Email signups and app downloads
  
  Mapping behavioral data with location can yield significant insights, and collecting the right data can help illuminate the influence of various channels over online or offline shopping activities. Also, investing in identity resolution and testing will help you connect customer behavior across devices and channels.

4. Figure out the right combination​​

You have multiple channels and figuring out which one to choose, how much budget to allocate and in what order to deploy can be a hard nut to crack. Experience, heuristics, analytics, and testing can help you tinker with the right combination.

Identifying niche publishers who align best with your target buyers and integrating them into your marketing strategy, will help you attract a highly-segmented audience.       

5. Customer Centric Approach

Whatever be your strategy, the customer will always remain the focal point. While tracking interactions for performance, you can also understand what customers expect from your brand – so, build your marketing message that makes their experience more pleasant.

Identifying their behavior, requirements, preferences, and motivation is a key to success for an omni-channel marketing plot. Clubbed with performance marketing where you can track the customer journey map and decode what prompted them to make a purchase  this will help you channelize your resources through all touchpoints that attract most customers and improvise on those, which don’t.