Allie Kline, Chief Marketing Officer at 33Across, writes in her article on “big data” that the success of a marketer depends on the ability to understand and extract relevant information.

“The power of data is undeniable,” she claims. Her supporting evidence?… “Everyone is doing it.” The problem is that marketer brands are facing a time of transition when it comes to big data and will have to venture out of their comfort zones and take some risks in order to leverage it effectively.

Read her article, “Terrified of Big Data? Think of It as Growing Pains,” for a creative analysis on the marketer’s attitude towards big data and some helpful hints to “gear up for the inevitable change.”

Social Media analysts hold a variety of different opinions when it comes to how brands should leverage the channel for marketing and PR purposes. However, more often than not, they do agree on one thing: Social Media should not be managed in a silo.

The article;“7 Steps to Gain More Fans and Followers Organically,” exemplifies this common opinion and outlines a few ways brands enhance their relations with fans and followers by integrating social media into their overall cross-channel marketing strategy.

However, successful social media integration goes far beyond simply including icons in emails and webpages. What’s beyond? Tracking, centrally capturing, and leveraging social data to drive coordinated, relevant, and ultimately engaging messages.

Read up on HubSpot CEO’s prediction that traditional marketing is on its way to extinction and more on how Boston’s marketing technology companies are leading the revolution that is changing the industry.

Check it out! “Boston is a Hub of Marketing Software, the Next Big Tech Sector.”

Tune in to this article on mobile marketing to learn more about how P.F. Chang’s Digital Content Manager, Jason Miller, was able to captivate Pei Wei customers by targeting them while they were “bored.”

The main strategy: “marketing to the moment.” In other words, incorporating calls to action (texting keywords to short codes) in store signs and table-tent placards to interact with waiting customers. The article outlines how Miller leveraged this tactic in two campaigns and provides additional insight into how the mobile outreach was designed to fit into an overall cross-channel marketing initiative.

What’s the next step? Coordinating content across channels to guarantee consistent interactions with customers.

Social media and email marketing are two distinct channels that most businesses consider integral to their broader promotional efforts. However, not all these companies use the two mediums in conjunction with one another, which could be a pivotal mistake, according to a new survey from Vertical Response.

The report compares companies that simply use email against those that leverage both platforms in an integrated fashion. On average, the campaigns utilizing both channels generated a 28 percent higher interaction rate than those without. This was especially the case with businesses in the music and consumer electronics industries, which had engagement rates of 32.1 percent and 31.7 percent, respectively.

While the music and electronics industries posted the best combined results, organizations in the nonprofits, real estate, marketing and advertising, internet and health and wellness sectors are the most likely to use both email and social media.

"This is really compelling evidence showing those who combine email marketing and social media obtain greater results from their campaigns, especially among small and mid-sized businesses," said Janine Popick, VerticalResponse CEO. "The numbers clearly show that those who broadcast content across multiple online touch points are getting a lot more engagement than those who don't."

Consumers don't just use one channel to communicate with others. According to studies by Harris Poll and comScore, more than 150 million Americans have email and Facebook accounts – obviously, there is some level of overlap there. It's crucial that companies realize this, as not leveraging both platforms will hinder precisely how much they can learn about their customers.

Moreover, the synergy between email and social media can benefit companies in a number of ways. For example, email could be used to direct users to social profiles or websites that could be accessed through Facebook Connect. Meanwhile, social pages can be used to generate new email sign ups.

The two mediums are tied closely – social and email can be used very cohesively, unlike radio ads and search marketing efforts, for example. By leveraging both mediums, companies can learn the most about their customers and create the most effective multi-channel marketing initiatives.

Check out this four step break down of how HP managed to generate significantly higher email open and click through rates by sending more relevant messages to their most valuable audience members.

Consumers are difficult to read – they often say one thing but do another. This can present a huge problem to businesses that are trying to improve their products and marketing campaigns based on the input of their consumers. Knowledge is power, and without that information, companies will have difficulty engaging both new prospects and existing customers.

So if directly asking consumers isn't the best way of gaining their feedback, how can businesses go about doing that? As 1 to 1 Media recently noted, many customers are actually giving companies this feedback – however, they are doing so through their actions, not explicitly.

"Customers don't want to tell organizations what they think, or because they don't know how to best put this information across … This means that organizations have to be alert to the nuances in customer behaviors and interactions to find out what customers aren't telling them, as well as how they can apply this knowledge to improve their business," the news source notes.

This starts at a company level. Businesses need to implement new solutions that are capable of monitoring and recording these interactions and they have to commit to gathering this intelligence. It can't be a haphazard decision made by one person. That said, there are a few ways brands can begin making better use of customer interactions to form better marketing initiatives.

Follow the customer throughout the sales funnel

It's easy to determine the first point of contact with a new customer. However, following that individual as he or she interacts with a business through social media, email or any other channel is much more difficult. That said, it is also crucial to be with that person at every point of interaction.

For example, if a company doesn't realize that the Bob Steve is the same consumer as the Bob S who follows them on Twitter, the business isn't developing a complete customer profile on this person. This will present difficulties when trying to generate relevant offers – if there is no link between the email and social profiles, companies may miss when Bob Steve tweets about how much he loves a specific product.

"… If an organization measures success on a channel-by-channel basis, it might be getting a distorted picture of its customers," 1 to 1 Media adds. "Unless each point of contact is analyzed, companies could be missing out on precious telltale signs of customer dissatisfaction until it's too late."

Use transactional data

Consumers often speak with their dollars and there is no better way to collect information about them then by studying their transaction history. Judging by their purchases, businesses can tell which products or services customers are interested in, their dedication to the brand and their financial status. This, in turn, can be leveraged to create pointed and relevant marketing campaigns designed to better appeal to these individuals.

"Sometimes the best way to understand what a customer is looking for is to pull evidence of what they've done in the past, for example their purchasing history … examining this data can uncover potential problems and opportunities," the news source asserts. "It's also imperative to look at product-specific information that customers might be giving; for example, if a customer's usage of a particular product is on the decline."

The key is getting a complete picture of a customer. By only leveraging one source of information to inform multi-channel marketing initiatives, brands are handicapping themselves.

Marketing campaigns can no longer be separated on a channel-by-channel basis if businesses hope to get the full picture of their customers. While people are likely to have preferred communication avenues, the fact of the matter is that both prospects and existing consumers are likely to engage brands through a variety of mediums, ranging from social media to email.

"Big data" can be intimidating for companies as it may disrupt how they have traditionally garnered information about their target audience. However, citing data from Gartner, ClickZ notes that companies harnessing a variety of channels for information about their customers have a big competitive advantage – it enables them to do things such as social community relationship analysis, persona-based segmentation, behavioral modeling and path to purchase analysis.

One of the best ways to start investing in data analysis is digital marketing attribution.

"Most attribution today is last click, more for the complexity in managing data than from marketer choice. But now that we are tapping big data, attribution analysis can track behavioral insights and better understand and serve customers who are interacting across an expanding universe of multiple channels, touch points and data sources," the website adds.

The sheer number of data sources requires marketers to take multi-channel and multi-touch purchasing cycles into account. A retailer that has both online and physical store components, for example, needs to take into account customer purchase history and in-store intelligence alongside online behaviors through social networks and emails to create a full profile.

The key is observing all these different possible interaction points. To get the best customer profile, businesses need to keep up with customers through each and every step of the sales funnel, from initial interaction to completed conversion and beyond.

Data can be a powerful weapon in the hands of the organization that decides to wield it. Putting the software solutions and practices in place to help manage is a small hurdle to overcome compared to the results that businesses can achieve.

"Empower yourself to think differently, in that the answer is already there – in the data," ClickZ adds. "Automate marketing processes and simplify cross-channel measurements. Facilitate experimentation and iteration to optimize digital channels by using quantitative results as they happen."

Personalized content is paramount to any successful marketing campaign – content that is designed specifically for the person viewing it is more likely to pique their interest and encourage them to take the next step in the interaction, regardless of whether that's filling out a form, clicking an advertisement or visiting a company's website.

It's all about the interaction. Personalized content is more relevant to the individual's desires and needs as it gives them the media they want and warrant. It also reaches them in real-time, providing them with the right message at the correct moment in the buying process. For example, a recent study from Crowd Science found that respondents were 27 percent more likely to engage ads that were relevant to them. This number skyrocketed to 76 percent among Americans older than the age of 55.

Moreover, personalizing content isn't a difficult task with proper solutions in place. Key data pieces, such as demographic and psychographic information, purchase history and dollar amounts per transaction, call center interactions, clicks, form submissions, web site visits and mobile responses, can all be leveraged to better customize media and make it more relevant to the person interacting with it.

By utilizing this information, businesses can create messages that are delivered in real-time to consumers via the most applicable device to their current situation. A person on a mobile device can be targeted with mobile-optimized content, or a person browsing their email can be reached though media personalized for that channel.

Personalized content stems from having in-depth information about both prospects and existing customers. By leveraging a variety of marketing channels, companies increase the breadth of their information gathering tools. Marrying a number of different sources enables businesses to maintain a profile of each and every person they are interacting with, regardless of whether it's a long-term buyer or someone who simply "Liked" a Facebook status.

For example, if a customer is in a store and texts a mobile short code to redeem a coupon, these past interactions will form the base of a company's response. The business with a full profile of the customer will be able to look at a variety of sources to better determine how much the coupon should be worth. Previous transactions and interactions will help companies decide how to create a promotion relevant to that individual.

Activities such as filling out web submission forms, clicking links, "Liking" content on Facebook, sharing media on Twitter and text messaging a phone number are all real-time actions that could be used to trigger a subsequent targeted message.

While they are all channel-specific activities, marketers have the ability to connect these actions to messaging in other channels. The key is responding to the interaction at the right time and through the appropriate channel with relevant content.

For this reason, a flexible cross-channel marketing platform that enables marketers to connect the dots is crucial to success. If the same consumer is triggering responses across multiple channels, marketers need to be able to recognize that all these interactions are coming from one individual and reply in an appropriate fashion.
Consumer interactions can be difficult to track without the right platform in place, especially when the same prospect is active through multiple channels. For example, a potential customer could receive an email and click through to a web form, which he or she fills out using his or her Facebook credentials. Once the form is submitted, they could be driven to a customized website where they could Like or share the featured content, which triggers an email coupon specific to the information they've provided up to that point.

What makes event-triggered messages so effective is that they help marketers engage consumers in a relevant way. They're also a perfect complement to traditional marketing campaigns with messaging designed around specific dates.

Event-triggered messages give marketers the ability to interact with people in real-time when they are specifically looking to be engaged. This generally improves the results of marketing efforts, as businesses are aiming for receptive consumers with laser-targeted messaging based on their interactions. In fact, a survey conducted by EPiServer found that 48 percent of marketers believe personalized campaigns have a better response rate than mass market campaigns.