Multichannel Marketing: Adapt With Multichannel’s Evolution

He offered a number of pointers to attendees about what’s ahead for the business. “About six or seven years from now,” he said, “the Internet will be in its ‘second life,’ where the experience will be more about entertainment and information. For now, it’s difficult when you’re trying to absorb postal increases while investing in your site to see where that’s heading. Things like online marketing and search will become more old-school techniques and there will be new tools that’ll shape how your customers interact with you. Google will inevitably have a competitor and that’ll change search.”

Today, the key missing piece in the multichannel puzzle is a framework on how to make sense of this. And what will be necessary for catalogers and other marketers is what he terms multichannel forensics, an analytical study of how customers interact with products, brands and channels.

Hillstrom defines multichannel forensics as a means of learning whether a retention or acquisition strategy is needed. The process classifies customer behavior into four migration modes: isolation, equilibrium, transfer and oscillation. This way, marketers are able to find out whether a product, brand or channel can grow independent of others or whether it fuels the growth of other products, brands or channels. Or even still, marketers can determine whether a product is the beneficiary of these other factors. For more information on multichannel forensics, go to www.minethatdata.com .