The One-to-One Multichannel Conversation

At this year’s Email Evolution Conference (#eec11), held in Miami, January 31^st to February 2^nd, there was a lot of talk about customer relationships, a lot of discussion about the one-to-one marketing paradigm and a series of panels about new applications and channels. Online marketing is becoming a one-to-one to one conversation and going multichannel—at the same time.

Both are good directions for marketers and consumers. On the one hand, marketing becomes more personal, dynamic, relevant. On the other hand, consumers live on different platforms, using different devices. Marketers must integrate email and social platforms and communicate more directly and across more platforms. Not surprisingly, several problems arise.

Problem #1: Who is the customer and where do they live?
It’s hard to know where your customers are and how they want you to talk to them. Marketers must begin to allow users to self-select their channel preference and use behavioral metrics to make those decisions in the absence of customer choice. For technologists, a database problem arises. If email is no longer the unique client identifier, how do you build and manage your customer database? The answer, of course, lies in allowing customers to choose their preferences, using behavioral tracking, and creating smarter, nimbler databases.

Problem #2: Where do we want to talk?

So we’re having more one-to-one conversations. The customer picks the time and place and platform. But when the customer chooses the engagement platform, the marketer must relinquish control. Is that the platform you want them to be on? Smart marketers will need to both listen and direct conversations. A conversation on any channel is better than no conversation at all, but a conversation that occurs in the most engaging (or lowest cost or highest ROI-yielding) platform may be the best solution of all.

Problem #3: How to design for difference?

Websites, email, social channels will all face design and programming issues. For email it will be tough to design a single email that works across all desktop email clients, plus mobile devices (a diverse crowd from iPhones to Blackberrys to Android, Nokia, etc.). Tough, but not impossible. Email design and coding will need to creat more scaleable, shorter, smarter emails, with a new design and code rubric so that they scale and render correctly on mobile devices and old-fashioned email clients alike.

Tags: convergence, database, EEC, Email, industry, iphone, Mobile, multichannel, one-to-one