Joining up online and offline marketing is nothing new. All it means is making sure that everything a customer sees, hears and experiences is consistent. Easy.

Well, perhaps not so easy these days. It’s no longer just about making sure that your direct mail packs carry the same message as your emails.

Multi-channel marketing these days means not just direct mail with a follow up email, but also managing your website, social media, call centres, SMS – the list gets longer every year. So how do you ensure you’re delivering joined up marketing across all your channels – both online and offline?

It all starts with the customer

The key is to understand your different types of customer. What do they buy? How do they buy? When do they buy?

Once you understand how your customers behave, you can tailor your marketing strategies to maximise your results. The products or services you want to promote, the channels you should use and when you should send your communications.

So far, so good.

But with so many channels, messages, offers and customer groups, how do you actually execute it?

We helped P&O to solve this exact problem.

An example of how successful R-cubed’s work has been

The P&O experience

Like many companies, P&O were sure that they could retain more customers, and drive more value from them, if only they could send them the right message, at the time.

They had identified opportunities where they could tailor communications to their customers, but the complexity of the strategy was too great to deliver with existing marketing tools.

How could they ensure consistency across website, email and the call centre?

We helped them develop a marketing automation platform that would send out the right message, to the right person, at the right time.

Within just three weeks, we had set up a platform that could –

• Send a series of automated campaigns to customers based on customer type, value and their interactions with P&O
• Replicate any offer for an individual customer across the website, email and via the contact centre
• Spot when customers were spotted browsing competitor websites and immediately trigger a unique email offer

The results

Over the first 3 months, P&O achieved a 30% uplift on the number of bookings, as a result of their new marketing strategy.

The more targeted communications also produced other benefits. With customers receiving communications that were more relevant to them, the unsubscribe rate dropped to just 0.5%.

The results clearly indicated that the more relevant customer communications produced not only increased sales, but also increased customer engagement.