Multichannel Marketing: Know Your Customers and Integrate Channels Accordingly

Brian Beitler, vice president of customer marketing for multichannel retailer Bath & Body Works, often spends quality time inside one of the company’s 1,600 stores, asking customers what they’re looking for, why they’re at the store and if they come away satisfied; he similarly monitors the marketer’s online customers. During a presentation at last week’s e-Tail conference in Washington, D.C., he offered six key pointers on what multichannel marketers should know about their customers and how to leverage that data across channels.

1. Know your customers like your best friends.

2. Know each customer’s value and the value of his address, e-mail and preferences. “Set up a process to be able to do that,” Beitler said. “Once you do that, the power is unbelievable.”

3. Reward customers for shopping multichannel. Break down silos at your company, he said. “Drive [customer data] across your marketing channels to maximize customer value.”

4. Integrate your brand experiences across channels and leverage their respective strengths. “What does e-mail do for you that print can’t?” he asked. “You can take the same message and use it across different channels, but that’s not integrating.” Your message needs to be adapted appropriately for each channel, catalog, Web and store, he noted.

5. Translate best practices across channels quickly. Leverage your direct space to learn what drives your business.

6. Leverage your customers’ love of the brand to sell even more customers. They will sell to other customers.