Multichannel Marketing: Putting it All Together

In the mid ’90s, Louis Stack, founder and president of Fitter International, was like many people — he’d never seen a Web site. Then a Web developer from Florida offered to create one for his Calgary, Alberta, Canada-based company that sells balance and fitness equipment around the world. By 1997 — the same year Stack’s catalog, Fitterfirst, was launched — the site was downloading orders. Today, Fitterfirst also sells products from a retail store attached to its headquarters, and through 2,500 international dealers and wholesalers.

Like plenty of other multichannel marketers in North America, Stack’s challenge these days is in coordinating his company’s multichannel efforts. Chief among his concerns is effectively measuring sales from each channel, budgeting and marketing to the different channels.

“Tracking is becoming more important than ever,” Stack says, noting that Fitterfirst uses Web tracking software. “It’s good, but not good enough. We’re always looking for new options.”

Lisa Papageras, e-commerce manager for Hudson, Ohio-based Universal Screen Arts, also has had trouble with tracking software. Universal Screen Arts markets through the Signals, Wireless, What on Earth? and Art and Artifact catalogs. “Some of them do better than others. But my piecemeal way of doing it brings me closer to what happened,” she says, adding, “I do believe in them as a piece of my piecemeal.”

Papageras says there are so many different ways customers can be driven to Web sites that putting it all together has become more challenging than ever. She suggests coding every link to your Web site a little bit differently, “so that all these tracking mechanisms have a different fingerprint on the order.”

Rory O’Connor, Web developer and president of Bellingham, Wash.-based Web design firm The White Room, says that like source codes on catalogs, “Each marketing campaign should have a unique source that gets attached to orders in your system. Having a site that can track through online marketing to orders is essential,” he says.

Google AdWords and Overture offer conversion technology that is very easy to install and can provide you with a complete picture of how each of those campaigns is doing. “It’s also wise to have your own tracking and reporting system built into your site so you can track other efforts, such as e-mail performance and organic search conversion,” O’Connor points out. “The system should also corroborate the numbers from the third-party tools.”

At the fore of any good multichannel program is a reliable matchback system. Outdoor sporting goods marketer Orvis Co. has enhanced its segmentation reporting and testing for retail-dedicated mailings, both electronic and paper, says Vice President of Marketing John Rogers.

Optimize Mailings

“We employ a comprehensive matchback procedure that recognizes and credits the catalog for sales that occur on the Web site. We also recognize catalogs’ impact on retail,” Rogers says. “This way we ensure we’re optimizing mailings to benefit all channels.”

With regard to budgeting, Orvis measures each channel’s performance independently “with all the obvious metrics,” Rogers says. “Then we evaluate the contribution they have on other channels. While we may leave dollars in each P&L, we’re cognizant to cross-channel contributions, and bring that insight into strategy and planning.”

Effective tracking helps multichannel merchants with budgeting. “As with any type of marketing, [your budget] should be ROI-based,” O’Connor says. “But you can only determine what works for your catalog by ‘casting the net wide’ and seeing what it pulls in. Once you’ve narrowed down a set of practices that works for you, figure out a comfortable ROI and work within it.”

To determine if your costs are justified, says Papageras of Universal Screen Arts, break down the online order into multiple layers. “We know how much we paid for an e-mail to be sent,” she says. “We know how many clicks are in paid search. We know how much we’re paying for a partner or affiliate and how much it costs to send out a catalog.

We have to say, ‘How many of our programs affected this person, and if we added them all up together, does it make sense?’”

Branding and creating a uniform look across the channels also is an important challenge for multichannel marketing coordination. Stack rebranded Fitterfirst in 2002. A new logo was designed with the image of a man on a ski machine to symbolize the company’s balancing products. Stack began using the name Fitterfirst for the catalog and all printed materials in order to work with the toll-free phone number, which had always been 1-800-FITTER-1, and the Web address.

“You want consistency in look and feel across all channels,” he points out. “If a customer receives your catalog in the mail, flips through it and goes to your site to place an order, and your site looks totally different, that’s off-putting to the customer,” says O’Connor. “Your site should reflect the same character and theme, and if possible, the same fonts and color palette as your catalog.”

Coordinate Your Multichannel Efforts: Five Tips

When coordinating your multichannel marketing efforts, take myriad factors into consideration. We pooled several sources to offer tips to help you put all your multichannel ducks in a row. The tips come courtesy of Rory O’Connor, Web developer and president of the Web design firm The White Room; Stephen R. Lett, president of catalog consultancy Lett Direct; John Rogers, vice president of marketing at The Orvis Co.; and Lisa Papageras, e-commerce manager for Universal Screen Arts.

1. Set aside money to try something new.
An effective marketing budget includes dollars earmarked for experimentation as well as dollars for management of current programs, according to O’Connor.

2. Watch the ratios.
Otherwise, says O’Connor, you can get into financial difficulty.

3. Remember that the catalog is the “mother ship.”
“People that started as dot-com companies,” says Lett, “have quickly realized that they need a catalog. They can’t do it all with the Web.”

4. Focus on new channels.
Rogers says he’s been spending more time during the last 16 months on Orvis’ retail channel. “This is due to the fact that retail is the area that up until very recently we had not fully integrated into a comprehensive marketing strategy,” he says. “As metrics, best practices, staff and processes get as robust and institutionalized as the catalog and Web channels, my focus across the three channels will level out.”

5. Look within your operating expenses to see what you’re comfortable with spending on marketing through multiple channels.
“I encourage people to look at the multiple layers of things,” Papageras says, “and to look at what the tolerances are. Measure what’s going out vs. what’s coming in.”

Gail Kalinoski is a freelance writer based in Wappingers Falls, N.Y. You can reach her at gkalinoski@aol.com.