Consumers are opting for a cross channel experience more than ever before while shopping in an average day.
Despite many different mobile marketing strategies and attempts at campaigns that will provide consumers with the ideal cross channel experience that will be able to reach them in a meaningful way that will encourage them to act on what they have seen.
The average consumer will easily hop from laptop to smartphone or tablet to a brick and mortar store for one purchase.
While mobile marketing companies know that this is the case, actually figuring out how to track any given consumer from one platform to the next has provided them with a highly challenging experience. This is among the reasons that many client side marketers have revealed that advertising and promoting over a string of different channels is among their lead priorities as of May 2014, when a study was conducted by Econsultancy in association with Oracle Marketing Cloud.
Over two thirds of the respondents said that cross channel and mobile marketing are a primary goal.
However, just because they have been taking aim at more than one platform, it doesn’t mean that they are necessarily seeing the results of their efforts. For instance, eMarketer recently stated in a report about the study that “43 percent said that they could understand their consumers’ journeys and change their marketing mix as a result, while 30 percent had implemented teams to work on integrated marketing.”
Moreover, that firm also explained that under twenty percent of the participants in the study were capable of actually measuring the financial results of having made cross channel efforts. This is problematic when taking into consideration the importance of the outcomes of online and mobile marketing, among other efforts. Moreover, these same respondents also said that they were even less able to be able to measure their customer retention rate as a result of advertising over a range of different channels.
Possibly more striking was that a mere 7 percent of the participants felt that their companies were actually ready to successfully take part in cross-channel advertising. On the whole, 62 percent of the respondents felt that their efforts were not aligned across each channel. Only 10 percent felt that their strategies that included several channels – such as radio, television, print, online, and mobile marketing – aligned from one touchpoint to the next.
The Intelligence Group chief strategy officer, Jamie Gutfreund, stated that “Brick-and-mortar retailers need to integrate mobile into their offerings as much as possible to provide a more streamlined and manageable in-store experience.” Failing to make the necessary adjustments for this generation, and failing to keep up with their changing needs will only cause businesses to suffer.