Ten Steps to Hitting the Sweet Spot with Your Multichannel Campaign

Print is a powerful component to any multichannel campaign but today digital devices, and mobile in particular, are reshaping the entire customer journey.  Recent research by CMO Insights indicates that by 2019, digital marketing will account for more than 75% of the marketing budget. A one-size-fits-all approach won’t work anymore. As we continue to move away from one-way, “outbound”-based marketing, marketers must arm themselves with the right tools in order to create a memorable brand journey.

One barrier that could be holding print marketers back from fully embracing cross-media adoption is the use of proprietary technology for digital design by many cross-media solutions on the market today.  It becomes a significant marketing challenge when the design tool does not support the latest digital technology, or when the designer is unfamiliar with the proprietary design tool or “editor” required by the proprietary cross-media solution.

Print Marketers who want to shift their focus to include multichannel campaigns in this rapidly developing digital space shouldn’t have to compromise on creativity for the purpose of print integration.  But how can marketers develop multichannel campaigns that feature both print and digital media while at the same time delivering on the promise of modern, integrated and consistent brand experiences, across all channels, without having to tradeoff media capabilities, presentation or design?

Enter XMPie PersonalEffect 8.0.

PersonalEffect 8.0 with Open XM technology opens the door to new cross-media capabilities with a new architecture for handling digital media personalization. The Digital media components to a cross-media campaign can now be developed using leading modern technologies and tools, such as AngularJS, jQuery, JavaScript, HTML5 and CSS3, to create responsive design web content, mobile-friendly landing sites, single-page applications and more. The integration of design, logic and data, serving multiple media channels, makes it possible to accomplish the blending of these media-specific capabilities, without compromise, into one synchronized and effective multichannel customer experience.

When you’re ready to develop your next personalized multichannel marketing campaign, keep these tips in mind to help hit the mark with consumers:

1. Use both print and digital – Increasingly, marketers aren’t talking one or the other. They are talking both. Seamless integration between the two is critical to creating stand out marketing campaigns.
2. Puts the customer – not the channel – at the center of your strategy. Customers move across different channels during the customer life cycle. Take this journey into consideration as you design your variable data campaigns with strategy and logic from the get go. Get customers excited for the brand journey! Plan ahead and keep in mind that you are creating a customer journey, not just a one-and-done deal. Trying to market products and services without putting the customer first is like swimming upstream.
3. Deliver a consistent brand experience, regardless of channel. Your beautifully designed personalized print piece shouldn’t link to an outdated online experience. This is key to customer satisfaction. A study of 27,000 American consumers by McKinsey & Company has found that a consistent customer experience across the entire customer journey will increase customer satisfaction, build trust and boost loyalty.
4. Make sure the design is responsive and mobile friendly – With the abundance of consumers using mobile devices and tablets today, it’s important to be sure your campaign will display correctly on their preferred viewing method. By working with modern frameworks and scripting languages, developers can ensure campaigns will always display properly.
5. Collect data from both print and online sources during your campaign. This will help build your unique customer profiles and improve the overall customer experience. You can use that information effectively throughout each communication cycle to build a much more loyal relationship over time.
6. Integrate digital technology into your print pieces – With this integration you can monitor campaigns, analyze results in real time and modify strategy and tactics accordingly. Options include QR codes, NFC, Augmented Reality Software or a ‘Print to Mobile’ infrastructure such as DocumobiFUSE technology, which digitally enables interaction with a printed piece via mobile phones, tablets and wearables.
7. Personalize your campaigns – Campaigns that are individualized will help deliver engaging and effective communications. The use of variable data, personalized images, personalized video and PURLs can all help drive strategic engagement.
8. Use recognizable branding across all channels – All campaign brand messages should deliver a consistent look and feel across all channels – from the style of photographs to the colors, fonts and graphics.
9. Measure results – Evaluate the effectiveness of each channel to assess your ROI and plan for future campaigns. Campaign monitoring and analysis will enable you to see results firsthand to determine what works, what doesn’t and why. Unsuccessful initiatives can be abandoned before they drain financial resources and past campaign results and data can be used for future campaign planning and execution.
10. Bullet-proof your future – Choose a solid and open marketing platform with capabilities that will continue to serve you well as technologies shift and advance. Nurture and continually develop a greater understanding your customer relationships– this will help you shape the way you connect with them for many years to come.

Consumers are already ahead of marketers in their anticipation of a modern, seamless, integrated and consistent brand experience across both print and digital. Use these tips to beat their expectations and take your multichannel campaigns to the next level!