Why multi-channel marketing is the true power of the future retailing

Empower talents - give them the right tools

Business is about people, and empowering talents to achieve the goals that are set in common with management. Setting the right organization for multi-channel operations are breaking up traditional web departments and merging them into retail operations. The supportive functions needed are basically communication based marketing and customer intelligence functions. How to structure the organization will be covered in a later post.

“Monochannel” retailing are traditionally anchored and founded with physical retail stores. In the last 5-8 years there’s been a lot of online startups, and predictable a lot of them are suffering from a high ad spend and severe problems retaining their customers as loyal. Quite the same situations are daily challenging the physical retailers. The online ad spend is comparable with the physical worlds high prices on square meters – but both channels are suffering from low purchasing frequency because something is missing.

The answer is building a powerful multi-channel marketing supportive function – and anchoring it within each primary retail organization. With significant support from brand marketing and PR communication.

Customer clubs are for the multi-channel marketer the true path for being successful - both in terms of increasing basketsize, conversionsrate (especially online) and as a product getting more traffic into each sales channel; which means an increased purchase history.

True out the world many retailers are growing very successful customer clubs. If you’re seeking inspiration www.marketingsherpa.com is worth becoming a member of. They are pretty good analysts and covering both strategy, tactic and also methods for bringing the visions operational.

In my previously company (which my wife and I founded) 84% of total sales was generated from a loyal member base. We had a 110.000 member base of women with children in Denmark. Comparable Denmark is only populated with 5.5 million people – and 65.000 new children are born each year.

Being a brand owner with a significant brand, well known over 90% knowledge rate) the loyal sales to members should optimally be around 60-70%.

A past success with a customer led web-site

6-7 years ago I worked in a small Danish company developing and selling software for the professional graphical industry.

The company was suffering from bad sales figures – and with a very oldfashion appealing brand. Their customers didn’t think naturally of the company as a vendor to their workflow.

Within the company there was many fight for being the real leader. Fights between the four partners where the three of them had an engineer background. And the forth owner was working as a post sale technical.

After being in the company for two weeks, the issues was starting to fulfil the picture of an engineer driven company that invested every penny developing new software versions – being way ahead of the time to market.

With the sales and marketing team I started to develop a customer-led approach to the market. With an active PR strategy (actually me writing and photographing articles at existing customers, for the graphical press under a nickname), changing the corporate web-site from chaotic to customer-led with entrenches for the Ad agencies, press, newspapers and future employees.

Declaring internally that we every month (the magazines where monthly) had an article covering one magazine page. After three months the sales process for booking a meeting with a prospect got much easier.

The first period it took me 5-8 phone calls just to get in touch with the CEO of our customers. After three months it took 1-2 phone calls, and the CEO’s even called us back ...

On the corporate web-site the traffic due to ads in the graphical magazines and Google AdWords, combined with SEO, increased the traffic with 20x – and leads started to get in.

The process ended up with a huge project for a venture owned company – and the two venture companies even invested in the company I worked in. Unfortunally the company invested nearly all the money in developing and forgot to package the software – and sales dropped.

A good but in the end – sad story.