Kodak's Frankie Gray

Cross Channel Marketing: A Great Opportunity For Growth - Part 2

By Frankie Gray, Kodak MarketMover Business Advantage Solutions  Managing  Consultant

In last week’s part 1 of this article, Frankie Gray shared that if you can get it right, a data driven, multi-channel campaign approach can drive significant results, which are both effective, and cost-efficient in driving a better result. Marketing strategies driven by customer intelligence can not only increase sales, but stimulate sustainable and profitable growth as well as provide insight to low-performing segments and build loyalty around high-value customers.

Customer Choice

By communicating to customers and prospects with relevant messaging and offers, that are received through the ad-channels most preferred to; at the times they want to be contacted; and in the way they want to be reached, even small-scale cross media campaigns can achieve significant results. A recent Forrester study showed 55 percent of people “strongly agreed” that they wanted to have influence to the media channels and timing of the advertising messaging sent to them. They determine what is “relevant” and avoid your communication if and when they don’t want it.

Better understanding your audience involves communicating relevantly with a customer-centric view of messaging But you cannot tell how someone would like to be reached when you first make contact. The first time is always going to be a shot in the dark.

Results, Refinement and Redeployment

What makes a campaign truly effective is the consistent delivery of messages across all marketing channels then being able to clearly measure and evaluate the performance of all key touch-points. Campaign results are then used to refine the strategy for ongoing communications and redeployment of follow up messaging to present increasingly relevant offers and information.

1. You can execute a targeted/personalized direct mail communication based on audience segments and or the analysis of the data being used in the campaign.
2. That prospect is directed to a targeted/personalized interactive channel such as a pURL, email, or mobile QR Code and SMS platforms for continued messaging and call to action, tracked in real time.
3. Those actions allow for the collection of information through those channels as well as gaining a better understanding of what the next touch or communication should be.

By combining multiple touch points and channels of execution through print, email, microsites, mobile, and social, you have begun to build a relationship that goes beyond a campaign and creates a dialogue, further developing a stronger customer engagement.

No Magic Bullets

I often refer to there being no “magic-bullets” that guarantee response when it comes to executing data driven multi-channel communications. Marketing is no longer about sending a message and expecting it to be heard. Industry statistics have commonly shown that static or generic marketing communications are ineffective generating response rates of less than 2% on average. Compared to that of multi-channel campaigns which according to PODi, can range anywhere from 8% to 28% and higher. Being a marketing solutions partner to your customers, means combining customer intelligence with multi-channel strategy and creative thinking that results in having “engaging” conversations.

It Starts and Ends With the Data

Customers consume and create multiple and simultaneous media channels. Social media and mobile platforms give new ways for customers to go from offline and online messaging to “whole messaging.” Be clear on defining your audience and communicate relevantly to design and build campaigns and communications programs that deliver meaningful results. And remember, the technology itself is not the strategy; insights drive the strategy, which starts and ends with the data.

Cross Channel Marketing: A Great Opportunity For Growth – Part 1

By Frankie Gray, Kodak MarketMover Business Advantage Solutions  Managing  Consultant

Theory, Potential, Risk and Success

In a world where new media and new online platforms seem to spring up every couple of months, the talk in the print business always comes around to the subject of multi-channel marketing.

Everyone can see the potential for combining direct mail with email blasts, personalized URLs and websites, SMS text messaging, smartphone and iPad platforms, social media, and QR codes to create multi-touch cross media campaigns based on something pretty close to one-to-one targeting. But this is one specialty where there is a lot more theory than practice.

Companies with respected, well established printing businesses are often reluctant to risk their reputations by stepping outside their areas of expertise. They would rather be seen as expert printers than second-rate marketing service providers.

I can understand that point of view. But I have been working in this field for a long time now and I have come across a lot of solid evidence and well-documented success stories that prove this kind of transformation can work extremely well.

Become a Multi-Channel Marketing Partner

Broadening out to become a multi-channel marketing partner doesn’t mean you will be out of your area of expertise. Indeed, the performance of some marketing agencies is so dire that you may far outshine them. After all, printers are practical, down to earth people. They know about ink on paper, and there are not going to be many successful cross channel campaigns that don’t have an important role for print at some point.

Printers’ Skills Translate to Marketing Services

Printers estimate resources and cost jobs accurately. They have learned to handle smart software, as well as big and brutal machinery. They have probably dealt with jobs that called for web or e-mail alongside printed versions of bills or other documents. And anyone who has had experience with transpromo and variable data work already knows a lot more than most about the practical aspects of personalization and targeting.

Because of all this relevant expertise, there is a huge opportunity in multi-channel marketing for companies with a digital print background. I have seen countless examples of commercial printers that have achieved strong growth by developing the new skills they needed, implementing the right technologies and repositioning themselves as boutique marketing service providers.

Successful Price-Driven Versus Value-Added Transformations

This takes printers well clear of the price-driven commodity end of the print market and gives them the opportunity to offer higher-margin, value-added services. This is an area where fast-growing demand is not always matched by expertise on the ground. So the demand is there.

What I have found most striking is the number of successful transformations that have involved small businesses. Commercial print companies in the $2 million to $5 million bracket seem to find it much easier to adapt and change direction than some of their larger competitors, who are often tied into long contracts and long-term financing of large, high volume presses and equipment.

The smaller companies often know their customers and their customers’ markets extremely well, which can be a major advantage in the move from print service provider to marketing solutions partner.

Managed Campaign Services

It is these enterprising and commercially aggressive print firms that Kodak had in mind when it launched its InSite Campaign Manager platform a couple of years ago. This platform introduces printers to a range of useful tools that make it much easier to plan, tailor, implement, and track integrated and effective multi-channel marketing campaigns.

InSite Campaign Manager tools are now part of a solution we call MarketMover Managed Campaign Services. It is a managed hosted service, accessed via a simple browser-based interface.

There can never be any substitute for clear strategic thinking about the who, what, where, when and how often questions related to a potential campaign. But Managed Campaign Services provides straightforward ways to create custom web pages and PURLs, to automate tasks like data merging and cleansing, to segment customer data by demographics, expressed interests or buying patterns, and to track performance metrics to analyze results and return on investment.

Comfort Barriers

Nevertheless, there are other barriers to moving into cross media marketing that have nothing to do with resources or capabilities. For many people from the print industry, the transition is one they do not feel comfortable with.

Moving from a transactional relationship with customers to a more consultative campaign development role is not always easy, and it may sometimes seem impossible.

• In the transactional scenario, the customer is used to saying: “I’ve got this file and I need 50,000 of these – and I need it done in five days. What will it cost?”
• In the campaign development context, the customer will face a very different conversation, based on far more complex questions and far less clear cut answers.

Not One Size Fits All Marketing

This is not one-size-fits-all, post-WWII mass marketing. This is data driven, multi-channel and multi-touch communication. The marketing service partner needs to know specifically who the customer is talking to. And there must be clarity about several other key factors before any major decisions are made.

• What kind of data are we using?
• What assets are we going to use to support that data?
• What’s the right messaging?
• How do we want to touch those individuals, and through which execution methods?
• How are we going to measure all those different channels and create a report that’s going to be meaningful in driving what the next communication, the next touch, should be?

The choice and combination of media serves the strategy, based on the data. Compared with the simple certainties of the old transactional world, it is demanding, challenging, and unfamiliar. Indeed, there is only one reason why this kind of multi-channel, multi-touch approach is worth the effort, for both customer and marketing solutions provider - it works!

If you can get it right, a data driven, multi-channel campaign approach can drive significant results, which are both effective, and cost-efficient in driving a better result. Marketing strategies driven by customer intelligence can not only increase sales, but stimulate sustainable and profitable growth as well as provide insight to low-performing segments and build loyalty around high-value customers.

Cross Channel Marketing: Right Time for the Print to Marketing Move

The Heart of Cross Media Marketing

The customer data that lies at the heart of all successful cross media marketing needs to answer a few basic questions. People coming into marketing services from a printing background must ask themselves questions like:

• Who are we communicating with?
• What do we know about these individuals?
• How can we leverage that information?

If the members of the target audience can be defined and some of their likes and dislikes can be identified, there is a basis for action. Whether this is successful or not will come down to the skill of the execution. The theory, at least, is simple. All you need to do is deliver the right message, at the right time, through the right channels.  

But, remember, this is not the old one-shot hit-and-hope process. This is multi-channel, multi-touch marketing. So we need to understand a number of key factors.

• What kind of data are we using?
• What assets are we going to use to support that data?
• What’s the right messaging?
• How do we want to touch those individuals, and through which execution methods?
• How are we going to measure all those different channels and create a report that’s going to be meaningful in driving what the next communication, the next touch, should be?

Continuous Loop Process

I try to promote a continuous loop process. Just sending out one message really doesn’t do the trick. We need to invest the time and resources to nurture a relationship, listen to the feedback and keep those relationships relevant and up to date. This takes extra effort , but it’s worth it. And it’s something even small print businesses can learn to do very well.

The final question is always “How do I persuade my customer to invest in this more sophisticated multi-channel approach to communication?” The answer is to focus on the real value of a hot, truly qualified lead. I’d ask the customer “If just one person responds to your offer, what is that worth to you?” That value might be $50, for a one-off product purchase. It might be $500, for a conference registration. It could be $40,000, for an enrollment to a university course.

Once it’s clear what a single response is worth, you can backtrack through the campaign and segment and target the audience more precisely, so that you end up marketing to those individuals the data tells you are most likely to give you the response you need.

It’s not right for every customer and every type of sale. But for the higher value items, including all those juicy enrollments and subscriptions and registrations for events and services, good cross media multi-touch marketing is perfect. And if you’ve got the print room and the presses, the experience of handling personalization and other variable data techniques, and the determination to broaden the scope of your business, you may just be in the right place at the right time.         

Cross Channel Marketing: A Glittering Cross Channel Marketing Toolkit

The Cross Channel Marketing Tools

Let’s talk turkey about cross channel marketing. What are the channels involved likely to be? Well, print – especially variable data, carefully personalized, thoughtfully written, cleverly designed full color print – is always going to be in there somewhere.

Spray and Pray Marketing

Then there’s email. For many years, email was the buzz, the answer to every challenge – cheap, intrusive, modern, and easy. The only problem was that it frequently failed to produce results. And that’s not surprising, really. Because the availability of large and seductive external mailing lists or carefully compiled customer data files, and the low cost of firing off thousands of email messages into the wide blue yonder, led many companies into orgies of spray-and-pray marketing. But the scattergun approach meant low response rates, and stood a good chance of infuriating the 90+ percent of recipients who felt they were being spammed.

The Glittering Toolkit

Now we have access to a glittering toolkit that includes mobile platforms, personalized URLs (pURLs), microsites, social media and QR codes. We have much better solution architectures and data analysis tools. We also have evidence, from a recent Forrester survey, as well as the evidence of our own eyes, that people like to choose how we communicate with them. The Forrester study showed 55 percent of respondents “strongly agreeing” that they wanted to call the shots and decide how companies contacted them.

I see it myself all the time. The companies that take the hint and provide ways to let their customers choose when and how they are contacted and with what kind of information are the ones that are seeing the best results from their marketing campaigns.

So we need to honor the end customer’s preferences. And there is only one way we can do that – by collecting, analyzing, understanding, and using the right kinds of customer data.         

Cross Channel Marketing: Big Opportunities for Small Print Service Providers

New Opportunities to Compete & Win

The first thing to say about cross channel or multi-touch marketing is that it is not just for the big players. In fact, it’s clear from my own experience that this is a wonderful opportunity for smaller commercial printers who see which way the wind is blowing.

In several parts of the US, I have already seen many examples of printers in the $2 million to $5 million category who have developed the new skills, implemented the right technologies and repositioned themselves as boutique service providers. With less capital tied up in job-hungry hardware and fewer long-term contracts, they are often much better placed to move into the market for higher-margin value-added services.

Becoming a Marketing Solutions Provider

In many cases, these printers know their customers and their customers’ markets very well, which puts them in a good place to begin moving  from being a print service provider to being a marketing solutions partner.

But long-standing customer relationships can be a barrier too. Some print providers feel uncomfortable with the shift from a purely transactional relationship to a consultative campaign development role, and some of their customers also find it strange.

You may say, “Hey Joe, I’d like to help you develop your next multi-channel campaign. Let’s sit down and talk about what we could do with the data that you have.” You may get an immediate, enthusiastic response. But you may get a very different reaction. “What are you doing with marketing? You are my printer. Give me fifty thousand of these – and I need them by Tuesday.”

Fear and Preparation

From what I’ve seen, the fear of that conversation is one of the biggest roadblocks. But it doesn’t have to be a problem, as long as you’ve prepared for it. You know your customers. You know what they want and need for their business.

If he needs higher margins, you need to be able to show him how smart use of data can help him target bigger buyers or more affluent neighborhoods. If he wants volume, show him how clever mailings can link with personalized URLs (pURLs) to get the attention of hard-to-reach young adults.

No customer wants to be a guinea pig. If you can demonstrate that there are tried and tested multi-channel solutions that have delivered cost-effective results for people in similar businesses or similar situations, that will certainly help.

If you can show there are businesses like theirs that are getting great results – winning new business, acquiring new customers, establishing loyal and durable relationships – simply through making better use of the data they already have or can easily collect, you’ll get your chance.         

Cross Channel Marketing: The Multi-Touch That Means So Much

Integrated Marketing Communication Programs

What are we talking about here? Cross channel marketing? Multi-channel communication? Cross media communication? Multi-touch marketing? They’re all frequently heard buzzwords these days, and all these terms have slightly different nuances and meanings. But in essence, what we’re focusing on is the exciting new set of opportunities offered by integrated marketing communication programs that work across several different media.

Personally, I tend to default to the phrase “multi-channel marketing”, but I know several other specialists in this area who prefer the less common “multi-touch marketing”. They have a case, because “multi-touch” at least points directly to the one unique characteristic that makes this kind of approach so powerful. The ability to create more than one point or one touch of communication with the potential customer is what makes this so different from the traditional tools of 20th century marketing – television commercials, radio spots,  billboards and one-size-fits-all mailings.

What’s startling to me though, is the number of ad agencies and marketing firms that are still stuck in this single-channel, mass audience mindset. They have been slow to catch on to the changed world we’re living in, and that has created real opportunities for print service suppliers to capture this new space and develop expertise as cross channel marketing partners.

Connecting print and digital channels

By exploiting the full potential of customer data and making the connections between print and the ever-increasing range of digital channels available, we can help our customers touch their customers more often and in more appropriate ways. We can help them say more and sell more. And if we help them sell more, we can be pretty sure they’ll come back for more of our magic sauce.

Nothing succeeds like success. And there’s nothing more addictive than a rising sales graph.

Cross Channel Marketing: Turning Customer Data Into Actionable Insight

An OutputLinks Conversation With Frankie Gray, Business Development Strategist & Management Consultant Eastman Kodak Company

Ian Shircore: Frankie Gray, you have been deeply involved in cross channel, multi-touch marketing since before most of us had heard these terms. Why is the idea of multi-channel marketing – or whatever people choose to call it – getting so much attention now? 

Frankie Gray: A few years ago, when the economy took a dip, it was a wake-up call for a lot of folks. People said: “Budgets are down and consumers are expecting more, so how can we deliver that?” Multi-channel communications or multi-channel marketing is part of the answer.

Ian Shircore: OK. But what’s changed? Is it the fact that you can point to success stories?

Frankie Gray: Yes, to some extent. Now, you are not a guinea pig. There are others like you that are receiving wonderful benefits and results, driving new business, establishing loyalty within their customer base, or acquiring new customers through acquisition-type marketing.

But it’s all starts with the data. You can talk about a lot of channels. But I don't care which channel you mention, whether it’s print or email, personalized URLs (pURLs) or microsites, and now mobile platforms and QR codes. All those channels need to start with some kind of data source. So I really try to emphasize to my customers the importance of looking at a campaign in terms of data: Who we are mailing to? What do we know about those individuals? How can we leverage that information, executing into the right channel at the right time with the right message?

Ian Shircore: And taking this approach creates new opportunities for print service providers?

Frankie Gray: I think the opportunity for print service providers on the commercial print side is this: they are yearning to establish intimate relationships with their clients. But they need to differentiate themselves with high margin, value-added services or solutions. Their problem is “How do we stop being transactional in our engagement with customers?” and “How do we become value-based, solutions-based?”

That is a difficult transition for most commercial printers to make. If you think about campaign development versus transactional, transactional is, for example, “Hey, I’ve got this file. I need 50,000 or 100,000 of these, and I need it in five days.” When we are talking multi-channel, we really need to understand a lot more detail. What kind of data are we using? What assets are we going to use to support that data? What’s the right messaging? How do we want to touch those individuals, and through which execution methods? And then, how are we going to measure all those different channels and create a report that’s going to be meaningful in driving what the next communication, the next touch, should be?

Ian Shircore: So the multi-touch aspect is closely tied in with the multi-channel approach?

Frankie Gray: Of course. You really want to understand the end customer, the customer’s customer. I try to promote a continuous loop process—just sending out one message really doesn’t do the trick. We need to nurture a relationship.

Let’s look at going from being transactional to value based. When I approach my customers, I say, in order to measure the ROI, “If one person responds to your offer, what is that worth to you? Is it a $50 product? Is it a $500 conference registration? Is it a $40,000 enrollment to a university?” Once we identify what a response is worth, we can better segment and target the audience. Then we can market to those individuals who are more likely to produce a higher response to that particular campaign.

Ian Shircore: Are you looking for data, then, or intuition and creative insight?

Frankie Gray: If we think about it, we’re trying to turn data into actionable insight. How do we identify high value segments? How can we understand behavior within data? How can we relate marketing activities directly to revenue performance through all those different value segments?

First of all, we need to listen to what our customers are saying. I don't think enough people are doing that. I think we make assumptions as to the message that we want to put in front of people. A lot of times that message has no relevance to a certain portion of those people.

There was a recent Forrester study putting forward the statement, “Companies should let me decide how they should contact me.” And 55% “strongly agreed” that is how they wanted to be communicated with. I have found the people who do that successfully are the ones that are receiving favorable results. They are taking the time to develop the relationship and that’s translating into higher responses.

Ian Shircore: Have you got one real set-piece example you can show us that demonstrates how this data-driven, multi-touch cross channel marketing approach can be put into practice?

Frankie Gray: Well, education is one popular segment that is using multi-channel marketing. In any university, student recruitment is an important factor. There was a college outside Chicago, in Rockford, IL, that wanted to get high school seniors to visit the campus and consider enrollment. They created a one piece self-mailer. Most colleges send out letter-form communications. You get an envelope and a standard letter and a business reply envelope, and out it goes. But just think about the generation gap that’s there in the way we consume mail. Young people are very digital in their communications. A printed form letter with lots of text to read doesn't speak to them. That's not how they consume messages. They like short, specific messages.

The college marketers segmented their database by gender, with a bright fuchsia piece for females and a neon green piece for males – pleasing to the eye for that generation – with iPod-style silhouette people. And the mailer was personalized by first name only, just saying "Rock on, [first name]." When you opened it, it said: “It’s fun. It’s easy. It’s free. We’d like you to explore our campus.” There were just six little bullet points of information for them to read, without even a picture of the college.

But the hook of the campaign was the chance to be in a draw to win a free iPod, just for scheduling a campus visit. And there was a small reward – a 99 cent digital music download – for everyone who set up a visit. The main response mechanism was a pURL. So, when they visited the pURL, it confirmed the college had the right contact information. It also collected new info -- maybe an email address or a cell number, as an answer to the question “How can we get in back touch with you?”

The pURL listed the main areas of educational interest, with brief bullet points, and the students just clicked on them. They didn't have to fill out anything. So now the marketers were capturing information about what prospective students would want to discuss.

There was a little calendar that allowed them to select the day and time block when they would like to visit the school, so they could click on either morning or afternoon of a particular day. That was all. And there was a quick acknowledgement saying "Thank you for participating. Please look for our follow-up communication."

Later there would be another email that said "Thank you, so-and-so, for your interest in a campus visit. We look forward to seeing you on [the day they had selected in their pURL], to discuss your interest in [whatever program they had clicked on].” There were details of who they should contact if they had any questions, and a link at the bottom to get the free music download for taking part. For 99 cents, plus the cost of the print, the campaign opened the door to a potential $30 or $40 thousand dollar enrollment fee.

There was a final touch, too. If the visit was completed, the student would be in the draw for the iPod. If not, they still got the free 99 cent download. And even if they did not attend the visit, the college still had the contact information and would send out another touch to say: "We are sorry, So-and-so, that we missed seeing you on the campus visit. We’d still like to discuss with you our educational program, so maybe we can reschedule a better time." Even a lack of response was still a response.

Ian Shircore: Wow. So that’s integrating direct mail, personalized URL, and emails, and generating at least four touches. But it has a light touch, the way they went about it.

Frankie Gray: I like that example because they really understood their audience. They asked the right questions. How do we communicate the right way? How do we get the right hook? If it cost 99 cents to get a prospective customer, that's great. That's 99 cents well spent, because it had the potential to translate to a much larger dollar.

Ian Shircore: Do you have a set of golden rules for multi-channel marketing projects?

Frankie Gray: Marketing is no longer about sending out a message and expecting it to be heard. There really is no room any more for silos, to just be focused independently on one channel. Consumers avoid communication if or when they don't want it and they now have much more of a choice. The time frame that they make their decisions in is very quick. So we need to be relevant in how we engage folks because we have just seconds to get that person to even consider going on to view or read our offer.

When it comes to engaging our customer, no matter what the end transaction is, there's always data attached to it. Everything must be driven by data and customer intelligence. Data goes right across the marketing channels and sales disciplines. And you can't manage what you don't measure. So it’s important to know:  Who got the message? How did they get it? When did they get it? What medium did they respond to? What was the response time? What information is shared? What's the satisfaction that was expressed? How do we track return on marketing investment, analytics and reporting?

Ian Shircore: So are we really at the point where this is the future for print service providers?

Frankie Gray: I’ve got lots of customers who are small $2 million to $ 5 million commercial printers who are now in a competitive place to compete with the big $10 to $20 million guys because they now understand how to implement the technology. They understand how to have that new conversation with customers that's solutions-based and not transactional.

I see a lot of success among those $2 million to $5 million commercial printers. It is easier for those guys to change their methodology. It's harder to sway some of those big customers to new ways and new technologies. So the smaller guys are more like boutique service providers. They truly are becoming marketing solutions partners.

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