Interactive Marketing means engaging each customer and prospect in a cross-channel dialogue that builds upon his or her past and current behavior.
The essential technology characteristics to enable your transition to Interactive Marketing are:
- Customer awareness
- Centralized decisioning
- Cross-channel execution
- Integrated marketing operations
IT ALL STARTS WITH LISTENING: CUSTOMER AWARENESS
Active listening is the ability to capture what a customer is saying – both explicitly and implicitly. Capture a customer’s behavior across all online and offline channels. Use this information to determine what to say next requires a technology solution that can leverage and process both historical and present situation, identify actionable insights, alert you when potential opportunities arise, and predict outcomes.
To make all this possible your interactive marketing solution requires:
- Customer Analytics
- Web Analytics
- Predictive Analytics
- Event Detection
MEANINGFUL CONVERSATION: CENTRALIZED DECISIONING
Imagine a conversation between two people. What if one person couldn’t remember what the other had said a minute before? Or if they could only remember part of the discussion – like what was discussed on the phone, but not what had taken place over lunch? Such a conversation would be deeply frustrating and profoundly alienating. The ability to carry on a continuing dialogue over time and across channels is fundamental to Interactive Marketing. Centralized decisioning enables you to “think before you speak” to your customer, and speak based on a complete memory of your conversations with the customer to date. It’s essential to engaging customers in an effective dialogue.
To make this happen, Interactive Marketing incorporates everything you have captured through your analytics and awareness strategies to drive:
- Segmentation
- Offer Management
- Real time targeting
- Interaction history
FLAWLESS CROSS-CHANNEL EXECUTION NEEDS AN INTEGRATED MARKETING PLATFORM
Traditional campaign management systems were often designed to support outbound push marketing. But today’s customers seamlessly move across channels in the course of making a single buying decision. The most effective Interactive Marketing solution operates through any outbound or inbound channel with ease, and manages conversations that continue throughout as many interactions as necessary to help customers reach their goals.
An effective Interactive Marketing solution offers capabilities that support flawless cross-channel execution including:
- Outbound fulfillment
- Inbound integration
- Lead management
GAINING TRACTION: AUTOMATED MARKETING OPERATIONS
Interactive Marketing requires strong foundation to increase your efficiency, and gain better control over your processes. Foundational support provided by marketing operations capabilities align resources to objectives, streamline production processes, track budgets and expenses, and improve team collaboration.
You can improve the operational efficiency and effectiveness by effectively:
- Budgeting and forecasting
- Integrated campaign planning and execution
- Standardized workflow
- Online approvals and electronic proofing