Multichannel Data 
Integration: Drowning in Data?

Social
Social media is by far the fastest growing area for data collection. This isn't simply about getting people to friend you on Facebook or follow you on Twitter. It's about listening to what consumers in the marketplace are saying about your brand, products or services. Social media monitoring is the lesser known sibling of social media marketing, but it provides retailers with the ability to adjust marketing communications based on what consumers are saying on social sites.

Each of these touchpoints offer valuable opportunities to collect relevant information on consumers that will enable you to send more targeted communications to them across all channels.

Now that you know what you want to collect and where you want to collect it, where should you store it? How do you access it? This is where technology comes in. Although technology itself won't generate results, without it you'll be flying blind and won't be able to take full advantage of all that great data you've collected. So what do you need?

Technology
Build a channel-agnostic marketing solution. Assuming you already have the tools in place to collect data, the emphasis now should be on establishing a marketing infrastructure that isn't limited by the types of data that can be stored.

Establishing a marketing environment that allows for effective offline and online data integration, combined with access to a single view of a consumer across all touchpoints is fundamental to executing a cross-channel marketing strategy. This will ensure that you're able to execute marketing from a single environment, allowing you to make informed decisions on how campaigns should be developed across channels, and the impact they have on your business.

Without this type of environment you won't be able to establish a clear view into how channels work together to drive revenue for your business — a key factor in multichannel data integration.

Ensure that your environment can support the integration of data across all channels. This includes traditional address standardization and hygiene, as well as pro-
cesses to handle email-only processing and nonindividual identifiable online data. If you're building a new environment to support all these channels or are simply adapting your current environment, ask your database marketing provider about its experiences managing multichannel databases and its processes for digital data integration.

Lastly, pick tool sets that can access and execute on your data. You wouldn't choose a rake to shovel snow, so make sure you don't become channel myopic. Select a tool set that includes analytics, campaign management and reporting. This will allow you to best analyze, execute and report on your marketing initiatives across all channels. This type of environment will provide for the greatest efficiency, in addition to the ability to gather learnings unattainable for channel-specific solutions.