Multi-Channel Analytics
Today I received an SMS from a popular flight career stating that base fares have been slashed to by 50%.I called the customer care to understand the terms and conditions of the offer and finally made online bookings of my holiday tickets online. What struck me was that I had used three channels of communication to make the purchase, and even more interesting was that I made the final purchase online, and the offer came to me through a SMS campaign. Further, how is the carrier going to attribute my ticket purchase to a successful conversion on the SMS campaign?
With advent of new channels of communication such as internet, mobile etc. in addition to traditional channels, customers can now potentially receive campaign information through one channel to make a purchase on another channel.
Increasingly companies are finding it difficult to tag the successful transactions to the right campaign. Also, sometimes it is difficult to identify the true value of a customer.
Why is it important?
A noted website conducted a study on its direct revenues and pull-through revenues- to its surprise, it realized that the pull-through revenue exceeded its direct revenues by three times. Let us look at a simple case of two campaigns
If the online ad was evaluated only on the online purchase, we would make the conclusion that Campaign 1 was twice as effective as Campaign 2. However in reality, if we measure the direct and pull through revenues, Campaign 2 in fact has generated twice the revenue as Campaign 1.
The tables have turned! Wrong attribution of campaign revenues would mean sub-optimal allocation of marketing budgets leading to potentially inferior campaigns!
So what is the answer?
Multi-channel Analysis – Multi-channel analysis is the science of using data across different channels, identify common elements and study the true impact of channels, campaigns and resultant revenues.
Why is it so hard?
The answer is the “common” element. In the earlier example, the popular flight carrier has no way of knowing whether I heard about the reduction in fares through the SMS campaign. So is there no way? Well, there is - had the SMS campaign given the user a coupon code to use, and if I had used it to make the online purchase, the pull through revenue could be assigned to the SMS campaign (the “common” element here being the coupon code)
Data is the key
A key starting point in any multi-channel analysis process is to identify all the Data sources, from which the information needs to be integrated. It is also important to capture customer demographic data, in addition to channel data.
Once the data sources are identified, the most important step is to create the linkages in data through common elements. These could be as simple as using unique coupon codes (as illustrated earlier), service tags, reference numbers etc. Increasingly organizations are trying to use multiple 1-800 numbers to understand when multiple campaigns are run through different channels, how to attribute call volume and resultant sales to a specific campaign in a channel.
In the absence of these, creative methodologies would be needed to identify linkages; however these would be at a macro level but still can give good insights.
Conclusion
Organizations, which interact with their customers through multiple channels, would increasingly need to leverage multi-channel analysis to get a true picture of the customer and gain a competitive advantage in this economic climate.