I. Marketing Gold — Easy to Mine, Hard to Find

“Customer centricity.” “Cross-channel conversations.” “Orchestrating the customer journey.” All of these buzz phrases capture the hottest trends in marketing, with good reason. Implemented properly, they deliver pure, unadulterated gold: demonstrably higher revenues. This “marketing gold,” in turn, translates into a measurable return on the large investments companies are making in multichannel marketing, which spans digital and offline channels.

These kinds of results are what make CEOs say to marketers, “Wow. The work you’re doing is incredibly important to our business growth.” Who doesn’t want to hear that?

Searching for the mother lode

Today’s multichannel marketing, like modern mining, is data-intensive. Both disciplines require sifting through vast amounts of data to pinpoint exactly where tiny bits of gold lie, whether mineral or behavioral. Every gold miner is in search of “the mother lode,” that fabled, huge vein of gold.

The most sophisticated companies typically approach multichannel marketing in this scientific manner. Their efforts are a precise, well-oiled machine — an endless loop of carefully coordinated campaigns that are conceived, executed, analyzed and refined in deep, stand-alone silos: email, web, mobile, social and offline. But how can the mother lode of gold be found when marketers are focused on secondary veins?

Unfortunately, any marketing professional can attest that marketing gold is hard to strike, even when equipped with terabytes of channel-specific behavioral data. Customer journeys are highly personal, and conversations occur across multiple channels.

Tasked with juggling multiple single-channel campaigns simultaneously, and correlating and cross-referencing results between them, it’s easy for marketers to become frustrated. Despite being professional communicators, they find it impossible to communicate effectively, in a customer-centric fashion, when taking a siloed view of campaigns and customer behavior.

Thus, searching for gold in the digital marketing landscape is part science, part art. Finding the mother lode of marketing gold — more revenues, superior customer knowledge and measurable return on investment (ROI) — requires a better toolset.

“Engagement” is the new gold standard

As noted above, the metrics currently used to assess the success of digital campaigns are channel-specific, and manifold. Specifically, marketers using traditional methods need to sift through 47 metrics to determine what’s working and what’s not. And that’s just for digital channels. Offline channels, such as point-of-purchase and traditional direct mail, have their own set of success measures.

As a result, the business value of multichannel marketing programs has been extremely difficult to measure, particularly when trying to marry finite past behaviors — such as time spent on a web page — with the return on marketing investment (ROMI) metrics CEOs really care about: increased revenues, higher/faster conversions and repeat business.

There is a new way to measure how “into” your company or brand a customer may be. It’s called engagement, and it is the new “gold standard” of marketing analytics because:

• • Engagement doesn’t measure just what customers have done. It helps to tell marketers what customers will do next. Compared with traditional analytics, engagement is the closest in proximity to, and strongest predictor of, revenue generation.
• Engagement is a single essential analytic that can be applied to every communication channel, on- and offline. It is the common thread that weaves through the highly personal, and often circuitous, journeys that individual customers take.
• Measuring engagement can point to how deeply customers, collectively and individually, are engaged with a company or brand. This gives marketers laser-like insight into what the next step of the conversation should be, and through which channel it should occur.

Sitecore gives marketers the right tools

Sitecore provides a comprehensive suite of platforms and tools to pinpoint “marketing gold” in digital programs, to accelerate buying cycles and drive revenues. This white paper explains what engagement is, how marketers can understand and leverage it, and why CEOs care. It contains an ROI Calculator that can give managers a quick view into the “mother lode” of business benefits their companies can derive from adopting Sitecore as their digital marketing solution: higher revenues, higher revenue velocity and lower costs.

Finally, this white paper provides a powerful, real-world example that shows how a Sitecore customer applied the science and art of engagement analytics to transform its global business.

II. The Elements of Gold: How to Gauge Commitment

To explain how engagement analytics work, and how they can be an important supplement to traditional digital analytics, it’s easiest to compare the two.

In the web world, traditional analytics are based on how visitors click to a web page, stay on the web page, how many pages they look at, etc. These analytics tell marketers how attractive a web page is — not its relevance to the visitor, or whether the visitor engaged with the site or took action. They also don’t give any qualitative feel; if a visitor spends a long time on a page, does it mean she or he is really looking at it, or were they distracted away from the computer?

Across all communication channels, traditional analytics also are poor at segmentation, one of the most important tools a data-driven marketer has. Traditional analytics are limited to using segments such as geographic region, return customer, etc. These segments are useful, but in an overloaded communication environment, filled with seductive channels, customers frequently hopscotch between web, email, mobile and social marketing interactions.

Given the fierce competition for customers — which extends beyond one-off transactions, into a battle to maximize lifetime customer value — what a marketer really wants to know about is customer engagement. How committed is a specific customer to a company or brand? And what should the marketer’s next move be? What message, delivered via which channel?

Assigning value to customer behaviors

Engagement is measured with value points that assign and measure the value of specific visitor actions and behavior. To effectively use this metric, companies can develop a numeric scale that interprets online data to determine and rank which actions demonstrate varying levels of visitor commitment.

For example, at a car company’s website, engagement value points could be assigned like this:

[Download PDF to see Table]

These actions will inherently vary across popular channels, but the levels of commitment — from high to low — can remain the same. This is an extremely important feature of engagement analytics; for the first time, marketers can use engagement levels as a means to easily orchestrate cross-channel customer conversations.

For example, if a prospect demonstrates high engagement in social media — first signing up for email “special deals” on a corporate website and then “liking” the company’s Facebook fan page — the conversation can be continued with an offer email to that prospect, with a special offer as a thank-you for the Facebook “like.”

III. The Path to the Mother Lode: Not as Random as it Looks

Because most companies are still focused on backward-looking metrics instead of engagement, a siloed approach to marketing is still prevalent today. The graphic below vividly illustrates the “Random Acts of Marketing” that comprise the typical customer journey.

[Download PDF to see Image]

But this circuitous journey can, in fact, be the path to the mother lode of marketing gold. By applying the concept of engagement — and metrics that quantify it — Sitecore unravels the mystery by tying the cross-channel threads together into a cohesive conversation. With Sitecore, the prospect can be guided down a streamlined path with a two-way conversation that seamlessly traverses multiple channels, as illustrated in Figure 2.

[Download PDF to see Image]

Engagement in the real world

Engagement analytics drive much of the action in the example below, which charts an individual prospect’s customer journey with the car company. These new-school metrics trigger the car company’s appropriate automated response, propelling the customer journey forward. This example also shows how closely multiple online and offline channels intertwine.

[Download PDF to see Table]

By measuring one thing — engagement value — instead of dozens of disconnected, channel-specific metrics, marketers can see, from customers’ actions and behavior, exactly where they are on their customer journey. This insight allows marketers to see how close to purchasing the customer really is, and know what to do next to move the journey forward.

IV. Who’s Doing It Right: Spotlight on Jabra

Translating the granularity of engagement into an online business strategy requires a number of resources: a business vision, a plan on how to implement that vision within the tactical framework of online media, and a technology platform to enable it.

In 2011, Jabra, a Danish producer of innovative headset and speakerphone solutions — with a 35% share of the global market for Bluetooth® wireless technology headsets — set out to transform its business with new thinking, and a new website based on the Sitecore Customer Engagement Platform.

Making “customer centricity” a reality

As inspiration, Jabra looked to the book Customer Centricity by Peter Fader, a Wharton Business School professor who “argues that too many companies are customer friendly, but not customer centric. In other words, they treat each customer the same, missing an opportunity to discover who their best customers are. Without that data, they cannot make their most valuable customers even more profitable to the firm."

With the support of the company’s CEO, Mogens Elsberg, Jabra set out to achieve its vision of achieving customer centricity, rebuilding the way it interacted with customers from the ground up. The challenge was, how could Jabra best apply the concept of data-driven customer centricity to its online presence? How could the website be used to provide each customer with an individualized experience, identify Jabra’s best customers, drive more revenue, and turn the best customers into lifetime customers?

As a start, Jabra developed an eight-point “customer centricity manifesto,” including the point, “We will allow customer-centric metrics to drive our decisions, priorities and actions.” With that tenet as a foundation, the Jabra team set out to convert theory into website features and services that benefit customers.

The process started with customer research. Thousands of customer participated in online surveys. Jabra interacted directly with a much smaller number of customers by telephone and in person, to answer the question, “What do customers want from Jabra?”

Engagement: The key to enhancing the customer journey

Leveraging the Sitecore Customer Engagement Platform — an integrated solution that connects channels, engagement automation, and engagement analytics with external tools and databases — Jabra unveiled its new site (which now comprises 17 regional versions) in May 2012.

In a novel twist, instead of describing its site in terms of navigation, features and functions, Jabra instead discusses how the Sitecore solution was used to engage customers in every aspect of their individual journeys. In doing so, Jabra’s new Sitecore-powered site meets the following key requirements, which are verbatim customer responses from its initial research:

• “It really has to be super intuitive to use.”
• “I expect that it works on my iPad and iPhone, for sure.”
• “Local presence is important for me to trust any website.”
• “It is smart that it is obvious to see what they [Jabra] do.”
• “I really also want to be inspired.”
• “If they don’t speak my language, for sure I cannot get support.”
• “I more often turn to social media, as I am already there.”
• “I must find the site relevant to me, that it is for sure essential.”
• “But really, I just want it to be easy to find the product I want to buy.”
• “It really has to ‘speak’ to me right away.”
• “I quickly decide if a site is relevant to me, if it’s not I leave right away.”
• “[For navigation] I like everything in one place, and I hate tabs.”
• “It must work on my iPad. But don’t overdo it.”
• “I want to compare my choices, just to get any easy overview before I buy anything.”
• “Video is great; I’d rather watch videos than read long text.”
• “I trust my friends and [YouTube] reviews …. And my dad.”
• “[For support] I’d rather help myself online than talking to some student.”

With the new site, the majority of visitor feedback is positive, including affirmative responses to the “Was this useful?” buttons that are used liberally throughout the site’s design. Jabra reports that these buttons are hit upwards of 10,000 times per month.

As the company shifts even more of its business to the new digital platform, Jabra is confident that it has taken the right approach to understanding customer behavior, and in using the Sitecore Customer Engagement Platform to deliver experiences that are personalized, customercentric and highly profitable.

[Download PDF to see Image]

V. Why CEOs Care: The Business Impact of Engagement

Sitecore recently commissioned Forrester Consulting to research current and planned practices in multichannel (or cross-channel) marketing, “the approach that marketers have adopted to manage and optimize customer engagement across the burgeoning landscape of customer touchpoints.”

Forrester found that “marketers who have adopted multichannel marketing practices have realized significant business benefits, ranging from improved campaign performance to higher return on marketing investment (ROMI).” Specifically, companies that identified themselves as mature multichannel marketers have achieved significant benefits (see Figure 3):

• The biggest gain reported by respondents was in the dimension of reach, with 48% of respondents reporting more than 15% increase in impressions.
• The second highest benefits were realized in customer satisfaction, with 43% of respondents reporting more improvements of more than 15%.
• Realized benefits extended beyond the marketing organization; 24% reported more than a 15% reduction in sales cycle times.

[Download PDF to see Image]

Forrester’s research also found a mix of strategic and tactical gains for a variety of stakeholders:

Marketing practitioners experience improvements in campaign performance. More than 60% of the mature multichannel practitioners reported more than a 10% increase in campaign payback.

Marketing executives found improvements in operational performance. Forty percent of mature multichannel marketers reported increases of more than 15% in revenue that are attributed to marketing programs. Sixty percent reported a gain of more than 10% in return on marketing investment.

Multichannel marketing increased alignment between sales and marketing. Mature multichannel marketers reported several outcomes about improved collaboration and alignment with sales. These marketing teams are 11% more likely to be a primary contributor to the sales pipeline, and 40% more likely to collaborate with sales on field programs. In addition, 60% of this group attributed a reduction in the endto-end sales cycle time of more than 10% to their multichannel marketing efforts.

Multichannel marketing has significant impact on customer satisfaction. When Forrester asked survey respondents about perceived benefits from investments in multichannel marketing, “customer satisfaction” was at the top of the list with 27% of respondents listing it as their top choice. In fact, the survey results revealed significant gains in customer satisfaction, with 69% of mature practitioners reporting CSAT (customer satisfaction) improvements of more than 10%.

Tactical results drive strategic gains. As could easily be expected, Forrester’s research uncovered links between tactical results (such as increasing campaign conversions) and strategic gains such as improving return on marketing investment (see Figure 4).

[Download PDF to see Table]

VI. Conclusion

As companies like Jabra can attest, striking “marketing gold” with a customer-centric digital presence is readily attainable with the Sitecore Customer Engagement Platform. With Sitecore’s ROI Calculator, any marketer can get a quickly approximation on how an the Sitecore solution can deliver benefits that are make CEOs say, “Wow. The work you’re doing is incredibly important to our business growth.” Specifically, the Sitecore Engagement Platform can immediately improve current operations while providing a strategic vehicle for achieving top business goals such as increasing revenues and maximizing customers’ lifetime value.

The Sitecore multichannel marketing solution is also a key enabler in helping companies adopt three of Forrester’s key recommendations that are stepping stones to the strategic benefits — the “mother lode” — of multichannel maturity:

Stop thinking about campaigns and start thinking engagement. Marketers who continue to build campaigns, and make offers, around products and product features will be perceived as “tone deaf” to the multichannel customer. Customers will engage with marketers who meet their needs — their changing needs — for different information and options during the buying journey. Marketers who continue to “go to customer” with product centric campaigns and offers risk becoming irrelevant.

Transform your website into a pervasive customer engagement hub. Too many marketers have grown accustomed to thinking of their websites as a collection of pages. That thinking is obsolete when virtually all multichannel touches aim to drive customers to your website. Leverage highly dynamic websites to drive unique experiences for customers. Dynamically deliver content, messages, experiences, products, and offers from pools of content assets based upon knowledge of the customer’s profile, behavior, and engagement history.

Choose technology partners that can help you rack up short-term gains on the path to the full vision. The secret to selecting technology solutions for multichannel marketing is to partner with a vendor that can immediately help improve your current operations, and also has the strategy and road map to help you realize your long-term vision. Select on vision, but roll out on tactics. The selection of the right vendor will enable a short-term ROMI as well as the surest path to the grand strategy.

To learn more about how Sitecore can put your organization on the path to “marketing gold” in today’s multichannel communication environment, please visit www.sitecore.net.