15-minute guide to multichannel marketing

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15-Minute Guide to Multichannel Marketing Communications A guide for engaging prospects and customers in digital conversations 1 5 - M I N U T E G UI D E

Foreword As a business professional who regularly uses marketing communications to reach prospects and customers, you know time is a precious commodity. When you need information, you need it in a form that can be assimilated quickly—forget mind-numbing detail and get to the point. With that in mind, we’ve developed a series of 15-minute guides to essential topics in customer communications management. This guide focuses on the challenges of creating and delivering personalized marketing communications across multiple publishing channels. In about 15 minutes, we’ll take a look at the creation of multichannel marketing communications, the role of content and data management, and how software can be used to automate and manage various production and delivery processes. We think you’ll agree it will be 15 minutes well spent.

Table of Contents Introduction: Maximizing the opportunity of marketing in the digital age..................................................3 The nature of marketing communications............................................................................................3 Supporting the sales cycle through multichannel marketing.................................................................4 Modeling a unified marketing communications infrastructure...................................................................5 Integrated content and data management...........................................................................................5 Fit-for-purpose design tools.................................................................................................................5 Scalable, multichannel content generation..........................................................................................6 Secure content archiving.....................................................................................................................6

Enterprise integration.........................................................................................................................6

A multichannel marketing communications use case................................................................................6

Challenge...........................................................................................................................................6



Solution.............................................................................................................................................7



Implementation..................................................................................................................................7

Benefits and business impact ............................................................................................................8 EMC Document Sciences solution for multichannel marketing communications.........................................8

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Introduction: Maximizing the opportunity of marketing in the digital age The rise of the Web as a sales and marketing channel, as well as the “pull” versus “push” customer interaction model it supports, enables companies to engage prospects and customers in digital conversations that drive the sales process, develop meaningful, long-term relationships, and harvest a mother lode of rich marketing data. An obvious and simple example of this approach is ad placement based on search engine optimization (SEO). Every web user is familiar with initiating a search on Google or Yahoo!, which returns a list of related websites plus sponsored links ranked by the relevance of purchased keywords. Users can explore these options by clicking on the sponsor’s link and visiting its website, where relationship-building through interactive marketing really begins—or ends—depending on the quality of the user experience. Moreover, for savvy companies that learn to leverage social media, sites like Facebook and Twitter make the Web even more commercially attractive. Twitter feeds and Facebook fan pages move organizations even closer to the conversational give and take that makes one-to-one marketing possible. But the opportunities these conversations generate—and the rich marketing data they provide—substantially raise the communications bar for companies that want to convert opportunity to revenue and brand loyalty. So the question becomes how best to effectively use marketing data to produce personalized communications that move the needle. Companies that master this skill will enjoy a tremendous competitive advantage over those that do not.

“Our analysis shows that good customer experience correlates highly to loyalty—especially when it comes to consumers’ plans for making additional purchases. When we examined how this might affect the annual revenue of individual companies, we found that customer experience quality could cause a swing of $242 million for a large bank and $184 million for a large retailer.” Bruce D. Temkin, Forrester Research, “The Business Impact of Customer Experience”

The nature of marketing communications Marketing communications come in a variety of forms—promotional offers, product descriptions, introductory letters, event invitations, case studies, competitive comparisons, service announcements, and so on. And, regardless of their form, they are meant to accomplish at least one of the following objectives: • Inform prospects about a product or service • Encourage prospects to purchase a product or service • Facilitate engagement and procurement • Reinforce the brand personality of a product or service • Build long-term brand recognition and customer loyalty

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To accomplish these objectives, communications must be accurate, understandable, and persuasive. A failure in any area can mean lost sales or tarnished relationships. Understandably, many organizations focus their communication efforts on persuasion. Yet research has shown time and again that accuracy and ease of comprehension are often far more important. The most effective way to communicate with prospects or customers, while ensuring accuracy, ease of comprehension, and persuasiveness, is through vehicles that are customized to the preferences of the recipient. Customized content connects more effectively with an individual’s interests and is typically faster and easier to understand. That alone is persuasive. Customization also applies to various delivery channels: print, e-mail, web, or mobile device.

Supporting the sales cycle through multichannel marketing Marketing channels are information and fulfillment delivery mechanisms. For some types of products and services, face-to-face engagements may be the only way to move through the sales cycle. Generally, the bigger the expenditure, the more in-person contact is necessary. For others, the entire sales cycle—from generating initial interest to closing the sale—can be accomplished entirely over the Web. Many products and services require a hybrid approach—multiple channels. As such, the sales cycle is supported by face-to-face meetings, virtual meetings, print collateral, e-mail communications, customer information portals, and web-based ordering and tracking. Primarily web-based marketing and sales efforts have distinct advantages, including low cost per sale and virtually unlimited scalability. For these reasons, many companies have augmented their traditional marketing and sales channels with a web-based, e-commerce channel. They’ve found that even when an entire sales cycle cannot be automated via the Web, a major portion often can be, increasing sales efficiency while reducing costs. An e-commerce channel can use a wide range of prospect and customer touch points including personalized e-mails, web landing pages, social media networks, customer service wikis, streaming video, and 3D product demonstrations, and product review forums. All of these communication options can help an organization stay in tune with its customer base, which increases retention and repeat business. To complement a multichannel marketing effort, collateral must be customized by prospect-selected criteria such as language, desired technical level, and product options. Such on-demand customization delivers relevant, high-impact, cost-effective materials that can be read offline, shared with others, and printed locally as needed. As a result, multichannel marketing can give prospects and customers unprecedented control over the buying process while enabling businesses to: • Boost response rates • Build relationships that become more profitable over time • Capture richer, more descriptive customer data But effective multichannel marketing demands a unified communications infrastructure, one that can deliver customized, channel-specific communications that leverage common data, design, and production resources. Serving each channel via separate technologies and content infrastructures is simply too costly. 4

Modeling a unified marketing communications infrastructure A unified marketing communications infrastructure, which must be able to generate, manage, and deliver outbound and inbound multichannel communications, should provide five major capabilities: • Integrated content and data management • Fit-for-purpose design tools • Scalable multichannel content generation • Secure content archiving • Enterprise integration

A research study conducted by the Rochester Institute of Technology found that when you add an individual’s name to a printed page, response rates go up 44 percent. When you add a name and color, response rates go up 135 percent. Lastly, when you add a person’s name, color, and customize the content to the interests of the person named, response rates go up more than 500 percent. Rochester Institute of Technology Digital Printing Study

Integrated content and data management Marketing communications must accurately represent product and service capabilities while conforming to corporate branding guidelines. To maintain brand consistency and ensure compliance with regulatory mandates, marketing content should be managed centrally and stored in a secure repository. The repository should be easy to navigate and search, and support versioning and rendition management for virtually any content type including text, rich media, audio, and video. It should also be able to manage the customer data that drives content personalization and seamlessly integrate with production systems.

Fit-for-purpose design tools The ability to generate thousands or millions of personalized marketing communications with specific customer information and content demands sophisticated design tools. These tools are used to create templates that incorporate business rules governing design variables, customization parameters, and the use of customer data. In this way, master templates can produce a virtually unlimited number of unique instances. A unified communications infrastructure integrates the power and ease-of-use of popular desktop tools such as Adobe InDesign and Adobe Dreamweaver with rules-based, dynamic content assembly of complex marketing content in a variety of formats. Leveraging familiar tools reduces the learning curve among designers and business users, streamlines high-volume production, and reduces the role IT must play in servicing the infrastructure.

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Scalable, multichannel content generation The heart of a unified marketing communications infrastructure is its document generation engine, which performs three tasks: content assembly, composition and formatting, and distribution to multiple channels. Its composition and formatting capabilities must support a broad set of electronic and print output formats, including PDF, HTML, AFP, PostScript, PCL, and plain text. The document generation engine must also be equally capable of meeting the needs of high-volume batch production or individual realtime requests—and integrate tightly with the organization’s web infrastructure. To meet the scalability demands of e-commerce, the engine’s platform must be service oriented and web based. Many traditional document generation software tools use a highly optimized batch technology, which cannot scale to service high-volume, high-concurrency, on-demand requests. Scalable generation engines are based on service-oriented architectures such as Java Enterprise Edition or the Microsoft® .Net framework which include this capability.

Secure content archiving Every marketing communication sent to a prospect or customer should be automatically archived for legal, regulatory, and customer service purposes. Using content metadata, a rules-driven document generation engine will enforce archiving and records management policies that determine access rights, retention, and disposition.

Enterprise integration Organizations must be able to integrate document personalization and generation services in existing enterprise applications, making personalized communications services callable from business workflows to generate content in real time or queue them for batch processing. To enable easy integration with enterprise systems such as customer relationship management (CRM), and enterprise content management (ECM), a unified communications infrastructure should include a comprehensive set of web services and Java APIs.

A multichannel marketing use case The Storebrand Group is a leading player and innovator in the Norwegian finance market, providing financial services for 1.2 million customers. The company maintains four branded lines of business: Storebrand Life Insurance, Storebrand Investments, Storebrand Bank, and Storebrand Skadeforsikring (property and casualty insurance).

Challenge A robust and efficient customer communications management process is essential to the success of Storebrand’s business. Yet the company has in excess of 20 different administration solutions and data sources across its business units. There was little cooperation between business units and, consequently, a great deal of content duplication and production inefficiency.

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For example, each business unit sent out direct mail separately, which meant wasted personnel resources and runaway paper and postage costs. With 1.2 million customers, the company might send out 4.8 million pieces of direct mail and correspondence in any month. Consistent branding was also a challenge—each Storebrand division had a separate identity. What Storebrand wanted was a consolidated communications approach that would unite its services under one visual identity, improve the quality of customer communications, support upsell and cross sell efforts, and reduce costs.

Solution Storebrand did not want to reengineer each process or line-of-business solution. Instead the company imagined a platform that would sit in the middle of different data sources and administrative solutions, controlling output to all Storebrand’s internal and external marketing channels. This platform would also need to integrate with Storebrand’s online customer applications and web services— providing e-distribution capabilities—and be Java EE compliant to fit Storebrand’s core IT strategy. After evaluating options with solution partner viaDoc, Storebrand selected the EMC® Document Sciences® xPression® software suite.

“Perhaps the best result of the implementation is that, in addition to achieving our initial aim of integrating all of the company’s different systems and data sources to improve internal processes, we have also literally changed the face of our relationships with our customers across all departments.” Terje Ravnsborg, IT Manager, The Storebrand Group

Implementation In its market, Storebrand is considered an IT pioneer and innovator. So it was no surprise that Storebrand decided to go to market with its new system using only electronic documents. Nevertheless, during implementation, the company produced a 14-page hardcopy sample document outlining some of its insurance products. The pages were highly complex with intricate cut-outs and different paper types in the same booklet. It proved to be an enormous success for Storebrand. “Testing this process literally changed the face of Storebrand,” remarked Terje Ravnsborg, IT Manager of Storebrand. “Customers called the company just to say how much they liked the document!” With xPression, Storebrand improved its customer experience and gained an unexpected edge over its closest competitors. It was clear that xPression was the right solution for the company. “Time to market was an important factor for us, and xPression gave us this capability, along with an easy-to-use solution that integrated smoothly with our existing systems,” said Ravnsborg.

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Benefits and business impact The first and most obvious benefit of the new system was a reduction in the time and cost required to produce customer direct mail. It also enabled Storebrand to maintain a consistent brand identity, respond more quickly to market changes, and cross-sell the company’s products to customers far more effectively. “The internal efficiencies at Storebrand were tangible very quickly,” noted Ravnsborg. “Most of the customer communications are now managed via one system, and all expertise and competencies are now shared by a team of people rather than in individual silos.” In 2006, when the Norwegian Government introduced a directive that required all employees to have a pension plan in place by the following January, Storebrand was able to demonstrate its superior capabilities. The company was inundated with requests for new pension policies, but, with its new unified communications infrastructure and self-service website, Storebrand agents and customer service representatives had access to the documents they needed and could produce the policies immediately. “Sixty percent of all our new business comes via our website, and xPression enables us to process and personalize new policies on screen, bar code them, and distribute them to customers quickly and efficiently, with a full record of the customer’s history with us,” Ravnsborg explained. “Perhaps the best result of the implementation is that, in addition to achieving our initial aim of integrating all of the company’s different systems and data sources to improve internal processes, we have also literally changed the face of our relationships with our customers across all departments.”

EMC Document Sciences solution for multichannel marketing communications Customer communications management (CCM) software is the foundation technology for a unified communications infrastructure. The award-winning, highly acclaimed xPression software suite from EMC Document Sciences enables organizations to automate the creation and delivery of highly personalized, customized, interactive marketing communications on-demand and in high-volume batch for delivery via print, web, e-mail, and mobile devices. It ensures the use of consistent, relevant, and approved content by combining variable data with digital assets through powerful content assembly logic, delivering the ability to reach the right customer with the right message in the right format at the right time. The suite seamlessly integrates with existing corporate systems, secures business critical content through rules-based archiving, and uses familiar authoring and design tools from Adobe. xPression is everything progressive organizations need to drive customer loyalty and sustain competitive advantage through superior multichannel marketing. For more information, please visit www.docscience.com/xpression.

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