CMOs and Cross Channel: You Won't Believe How Much Perception Differs From Reality

After reading the following sentence your reaction should be something along the lines of "tell me something I don't know."Marketers must keep pace with the modern customer – who is fast, digital and unstructured – to outpace the competition. 

Of course you already know that. Just as you already know that today's customers frequently interact with brands across multiple channels and devices leaving a trail of identifiers (like email addresses, loyalty accounts, browser cookies, and mobile device IDs) littered amongst the various technologies that power those customer interactions. 

And you most assuredly are well aware of the fact that in order to keep pace with customers in real time and effectively personalize each customer's experience, it's up to marketers to bring all of a customer's interactions, preferences, and behaviors across channels together in a way that allows them to get a complete profile of each customer that's up-to-date. 

Perception vs. Reality - It's Not Pretty

According to a recent Econsultancy report "while as many as 84% of marketers describe identifying users, personalizing messaging and measuring impact as 'very important to growth,' only 10–14% enjoy strong capabilities in these areas."

In the report the subhead used was "Belief vs. reality in digital capabilities" but you can easily substitute the word "perception" for "belief." The context is exactly the same. In just looking the first area, "matching customers across multiple devices" the difference between the two is 60 percentage points or in reality, 428%. Yeah four-hundred and twenty-eight percent difference between perception and reality. 

Now you see why I said you won't believe how much perception differs from reality?

But wait there is more, kids. 

This damning figure, according to Conversant Media who partnered with Econsutancy and Epsilon on the research tells us that "43% of companies believe they connect consumer data to persistent profiles, for one single, consistent customer view. Only 12% are actually doing it, and only 5% are connecting offline sales to the profiles. They don't have the in-house capabilities. And they're not partnering with vendors that can fulfill their promises."

Cross Channel Orchestration, Not Coordination.

It is important to differentiate between cross channel coordination and orchestration. 

Sending messages to individual Email, SMS, Push, and Social lists might feel like cross channel orchestration, but it isn't. Without the context of a unified individual identity, marketers are just scaling batch and blast practices across multiple channels.

Marketers need a technology tool that provides a single unique identifier which can be used across all channels which in turn allows marketers to eliminate repetitive or irrelevant cross channel messaging, and provides them with the context needed to speak with each customer individually. 

As the demand for multichannel campaign management (MCCM) grows, the number of vendors has grown, too. With so many options, how do you assess the capabilities of each one to make the best choice for your company?

Download the Gartner Magic Quadrant For Multichannel Campaign Management to learn the strengths and cautions associated with each vendor.