In order to be effective, multichannel communications require significant customer insight, coordination and accountability. This includes identifying the best targets, adapting to ever-evolving message delivery options, reaching markets with ever-increasing velocity, and generating measurable Return on Marketing Investment in the short and long term.

To accomplish this, marketers must drill deeply into customer knowledge to identify and prioritize market differentiators, carefully consider all possible touch points and their integration, shape each message to maximize the appropriate communication stream, recognize the distinct differences and individual preferences of customers, and understand that different communications do not necessarily share the same objective.

In short, marketers must have a multichannel process that can adapt to maximize customer value on every level, and deliver ROI for every campaign.

One approach has been highly successful for both business and consumer applications in virtually every sector.

This process involves four distinct steps:

Understand every customer and the most effective way to segment.

The starting point is to closely examine individual customer and prospect groups to identify segments of opportunity that best match the organization’s objectives.

It may be important to focus on most valuable or most growable segments. Or, defining segments by demographics or lifestyles may yield the greatest results.

In addition, marketers must become familiar with every aspect of the customer experience. This is achieved by learning both the behavioral drivers and motivational factors effecting purchasing decisions and attitudes.

This new depth of knowledge allows for more clearly definable and applicable segmentation models for marketing efforts.