A big opportunity for marketers in a digital world is to synchronize these moments. As we know, the digital era was ushered in by search engines, which created a new moment of truth and enabled advertisers to align to buyer interests via the new discipline of Search Engine Marketing.

Television advertising or a typical direct mail campaign is largely ”asynchronous” since these cannot be timed to appear precisely at the time of the viewer’s consideration and interest. A brand impression delivered when I’m not interested is largely ignored and represents wasted media budget.

Of course, mass marketing and direct mail campaigns are often timed to sync with various seasons. For example, I’m much more likely to be choosing a hotel prior to school Spring Break. Additionally, marketers may place promotions directly in the path to purchase, such as a standing display in store to align with the time of purchase. However, today we need more granular, more sophisticated synchronization; we need real-time marketing.

As Google observed in a white paper called “The Zero Moment of Truth,” the digital path to purchase generates many new occasions for truly interactive marketing. Consumer decisions are made in a wide variety of ways and are influenced by a wide variety of factors.

Well-timed, relevant interactions feel much less like advertising and more like advice.

Well-timed, relevant interactions feel much less like advertising and more like advice. It doesn’t interrupt my enjoyment of content but rather becomes content I enjoy. What are some ways to synchronize with buyer intent? Here are two key techniques:

Real-time content – Though content management has been available for years, few web sites offer content that adapts in real time based on the visitor’s profile. Most visitors are anonymous, but cookies provide bits of information including which pages the visitor touched on the last visit, or a question they answered earlier. Using these clues to dynamically alter content is now much easier with interaction management tools.

For example, a hotel chain might place an article about best restaurants in Florida on an affiliated Florida destination site. Unlike a static ad, an article can be updated based on motivational factors such as weather, recent news or a widely publicized celebrity event. Simply changing the opening line of the story, changes the relevance of the content.

Intelligent interactions – Every search result, website click or email open is an opportunity to interact and not to simply “make offers.” Rather than delivering a single message to the target, campaigns can engage visitors in a sequence of interactions. For example, a landing page on a hotel chain’s site might start with an observation and a simple poll: “Over 50% of Florida vacationers come from the Eastern United States. Are you from a) Eastern US, b) Western US, c) somewhere in between, or d) none of the above. Submit to see today’s results.”

Based on the answer, the next web page in the sequence can change, involving the visitor in an interactive experience rather than a reading experience.

These simple techniques are not employed by marketers for two reasons. First, interaction management is sometimes perceived by marketers as very technical and complicated. Second, getting even small bits of useful customer-specific data is cumbersome. However, both of these barriers are quickly coming down. Interaction management is moving from the realm of technical wizardry to simplified and integrated tools for marketers. And the safe and proper use of customer data to better serve customers with relevant content is easier today.

So what are you waiting for? A pitch in time saves nine!

For more information about real-time marketing and campaign management, please visit our website.

The most important ingredients of a party are the guests: no guests, not much of a party. Over a long and fulfilling lifetime you make a lot of friends, so the key to planning this party was contacting our parent’s friends who now live in multiple cities.

We started by designing the invitation and, since most guests were born before Facebook’s inventors, we stuck with more conventional sharing and gave them the option of letting us know by email (on my domain) or phone (my brother’s house). This was the start of our “RSVP integration” nightmare.

Cards went out and, not surprisingly, we had a few deliverability issues including an invitation to Frank, one of my dad’s best work friends from years ago. Yes, he worked in an era when the Company was a place you worked for life, and relationships with co-workers and friends were like adjoining backyards without a fence.  Frank’s invitation came back to my brother’s house undelivered, so my dad called Frank to invite him directly. Frank later confirmed by email.

Meanwhile we received more phone calls and emails, which my brother and I traded back and forth. This is where things got really hard to track. Was the lady nicknamed “Mona,” who left a voicemail, the same household as the email from a “Mr. Bose?” The conflicting names and channels meant that when my mom called I didn’t have a simple answer to her question, “So how many people are confirmed so I can let the caterer know the count?” Well, our aggregations are probably wrong because our data quality is poor due to our inability to integrate across phone and email, “170, I think.”

A party is like a product that you market to your guests. As the marketer, you must contact your customers, engage them and end with a call to action (an RSVP in our case). Since you will hear back on multiple channels, you’d better be prepared to capture, integrate and aggregate the response from your customers across multiple channels. A marketer’s challenge is to do this for millions of customers. All marketers get anxious about a call from the “CMO,” but in my case, that means the Chief Mommy Officer.

Learn more about multi-channel marketing strategies for data quality, audience creation and response attribution tips and trends in Experian Marketing Services’ recently released 2012 Digital Marketer Report.

Ten Tips for Cross-Channel Optimized Marketing:

1. Build a comprehensive, unified view of prospects and customers
2. Link behaviors and attributes across all channels and data sources
3. Identify and address specific customer segments
4. Personalize messages and interactions
5. Engage in a consistent voice across traditional, digital, social and mobile channels
6. Respect preferences through registrations and opt-ins
7. Secure personal, sensitive and confidential data
8. Center the marketing process around customers-not around channels or campaigns
9. Strengthen relationships by optimizing the experience to customer life stage
10. Correctly attribute sales to marketing investments

“Don’t waste my time” is the mantra because we are busier than ever…

In addition to being harder to find, today’s consumers are more demanding of their brands. They expect brands to listen, interact, behave well and most critically, be relevant. “Don’t waste my time” is the mantra because we are busier than ever, have more choices than ever, and get bombarded with more messages than we can possibly make sense of. A typical path in the customer’s journey helps illustrate the challenges of cross-channel, or multiple touch-point marketing. Effective marketing strategies must connect many dots in order to lift sales. Each stage of the customer’s path to purchase requires a different tactic to plan, manage and execute.

To read an in-depth analysis of what marketers need to do from a marketing technology standpoint this year, download The Experian Marketing Innovation Report 2012.

Halloween – when we acknowledge and mock our most visceral fears – is an appropriate day to introspect about personalization and privacy.  The increasing amount and integration of personal data enables both fiendishly clever personalization and ghoulishly undesirable loss of privacy.

For example, the Gilt Groupe, an online, members only buying service makes every visit to their site unique and personalized based on the tastes and preferences of the member.  This is made possible by the fact that the site requires registration, and by sophisticated analytics used to present only the most relevant choices to each visitor.

On the other hand, consider the targeted advertising in Google’s Gmail service.  Though mostly innocuous, there are times, after noticing an advertisement clearly triggered by the content of my private communications, I am reminded that the price of “free” is a loss of privacy.

Even if we look past specific privacy concerns, personalization may have the unintended consequence of limiting our view of the web as noted by Eli Pariser, MoveOn.org executive, in his book, The Filter Bubble.  Nonetheless, personalization will continue to increase as consumers ignore “one size fits all” advertising.

Amazon.com was the pioneer in friendly, helpful recommendations.  Even though they use purchase history to predict and direct our interests, it never feels intrusive.  Why?  What makes personalization a trick versus a treat?

Personalization is the behavior of a service changing based on personal information.  Here are three rules for “good behaviors” that will banish those eerie feelings of being followed:

• Relationships – personalization doesn’t work well with strangers.  However, if a site or service establishes a relationship in the form of registration, or an Opt-In, then it is perceived positively.
• Transparency – like Amazon, make it clear why I am seeing the specific action or recommendation.  Don’t be mysterious.
• Consumer Control – allow me to modify my “presumed” attributes.  Maybe things have changed, or maybe someone else last used my computer, or maybe I want to buy for someone else.

If personalization is done right, more people will be willing to take off the mask of anonymity and share a bit of themselves in order to get a more relevant, valuable online experience.

Tablet sales are enjoying their “hockey stick” moment.  Sales of iPads alone are estimated to be over 8 million units this year.  By next year, the market adoption of tablet devices in the US is expected to reach 13% of households (source: eMarketer).

What does the consumer adoption of tablets mean to retailers?  The peculiarity of the tablet platform blurs many distinctions, and makes it hard to figure out.  Tablets belong both to the mobile category and the laptop category, where they have taken a bite out of PC sales.  Tablets can be likened to the relaxed browsing of a magazine, newspaper or book, but they are also likened to the task-orientation of a shopping cart.

the rich imagery, tactile response, and immersive nature of tablet browsing support novel ways to engage, inspire and interact with shoppers

Whatever the big picture, initial reports consistently show great promise for retailers.  I spoke recently with a leading multi-channel retailer who noted simply, “The tablet is basically a shopping device.”  This luxury home furnishings retailer aims to deliver a distinctive experience across channels – in store, on the web, and now on the tablet.  They have found that the rich imagery, tactile response, and immersive nature of tablet browsing support novel ways to engage, inspire and interact with shoppers.

The tablet is attractive to both the consumer and retailer.  Consumers experience the tablet in one of two modes: 1) window shopping without the hurry or the hassle, and 2) impulse buying to find what you need and get it fast. Retailers are tapping into the powerful capabilities of this new platform with applications that extend the customer experience across channels (print catalog, store, mobile, and web).

Typing is easy on the tablet unlike smartphones, so it readily supports applications with social features like “send to a friend” or post with a comment on Facebook.  Moreover, the wide screen and built-in camera provide a great canvas for application designers to make the catalog experience varied, appealing and useful.  Using the tablet with family, I noticed another interesting aspect of tablets: sitting together on a couch, tablets allow “exploring together” that is unique to this digital medium (reminiscent of sharing a photo album).

Altogether the tablet is a boon for retailers.  According to Forrester Research, tablets have a 4-5% conversion rate compared to PC’s having only a 3% conversion rate. Partly this is because tablet users are more affluent and tech-savvy.  Nonetheless, as tablets move into the mainstream, their benefits will only multiply as retailers further explore their uniqueness.

Today there are still unanswered questions: Should we build a browser app, or a native app?  Should we launch without creating videos first?  Is this a platform for driving store traffic, and so do we need to offer discounts?

With another holiday season already upon us, retailers shouldn’t wait for answers to these and other questions that can only come from experimentation in this new channel.  This is the year to climb on board, because one thing is clear: Tablets are here to stay.  Behold fair maiden, your shining cross-channel knight has arrived!

About the Author

Andy is a digital marketing strategist with Experian Marketing Services.  He brings 25 years of experience in product innovation, ecommerce, business intelligence, and sales enablement to the challenges of marketing in the age of the digital consumer.  His areas of interest include tablet shopping, personalization, mobile apps, and loyalty marketing.

Twitter: @anindaroy

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/anindaroy