Present Multichannel Marketing Landscape

Multichannel marketing is a multi-billion dollar industry that is projected to grow by leaps and bounds in the coming decades. As the Head of Client Marketing and Digital Channels at Citibank Singapore, what are the major industry trends that businesses can leverage to bring value to their customers and boost their company bottom lines?

Companies can focus more efforts on unifying their customer engagement for online and offline channels through a combination of gamification and personalization. Personalization is often misunderstood to be 1:1 in understanding. This is only true if we can all have a true 360 view of who we are targeting. But the truth is, even for our customers, this is not yet achievable in most, if not all companies for various reasons, including privacy and regulation.

Personalization to me that is more attainable in today’s context can be knowing the location of where your target customers are spending most of their time, be it online or offline, and ensuring to deliver a relevant and contextual message or offer to them at that time. A step further is to also understand their buying behavior and profile with your company and incorporate that consideration in your message and offer.

Add gamification into the mix by providing an activity or platform that, based on your understanding of them, they would be interested to participate in online, preferably within your platforms. Ensure you promote this in your offline channels so you can measure success as well. This is as simple as a QR code or unique promo code included in your touchpoints, so you know which channel is most effective when you run that messaging or promotion.

Gamification is not new, though interest in it has been exacerbated due to the rise of the metaverse and the use of NFTs. There are many ways to conduct gamification, especially if you already have an app or digital platform on which your customers are engaged with you on.

In a world that is permeated with established companies and nascent startups focused on designing effective marketing campaigns for increasing customer connections and addressing their pain points, how do you identify the crucial strategies that can help businesses successfully navigate the evolving multichannel marketing landscape?

Never stop understanding your prospects and customers both in terms of what they say and how they act.  Apply customer-first design thinking in the development of your touchpoints, campaigns, and messaging to them. What they say about what they do versus what they actually do when it comes to a decision point, can sometimes be conflicting, so I personally believe it’s key to understand both sides of the story through two fronts.

The first front is customer research and user testing throughout their journey with you, before, during, and after launch. I often find companies try to shortcut this approach by engaging their internal stakeholders to give their opinions on their views towards a certain product, feature, or journey but the fact is, employees who are with the company will have some level of biasedness in their views. Never skim on research and never stop talking to your prospects and customers alike.

" Spend Time Being a Normal Customer and Employee of your Own Service or Product to Understand Their Pain Points as the View from the Top is Always Different "

The second front is understanding and analyzing what they actually do with you and how they respond to your campaigns, offers, and products. Measurement of their time spent on your platforms is equivalent to how much time they spend browsing at your store, what they are looking at, and what they do – do they drop off or do they come back after a period of time and check it out again. This is also where A/B testing paired with user testing is useful, so you have a better perspective of whether it is the offer itself, the way the offer is being communicated, or even the steps they need to understand to make the purchase that makes the difference.

Complement that understanding with their overall relationship with you which includes what they have purchased previously and what they have stopped purchasing. Add this to the insights you have from your user testing and research about their current life stage, needs, and pain points for a more holistic view of your customers, so you can be truly customer-centric in your approach.

What according to you are some of the innovations in multichannel digital marketing that can help businesses enhance their inbound and outbound marketing and increase their customer reach?

Though not new-new it’s a combination of a good loyalty program and multi-channel communication platform that supports in-app, geo-targeted messaging and seamless onboarding.

Without naming names, there are several in-app and multi-channel rewards or points-based loyalty programs out there that also allow for geo-targeting or location-based targeting. For example – serving up promotions you can redeem when you are within the vicinity of the merchant on their program list and companies can use that to target prospects to sign up quickly too for their service. Thus, the seamless onboarding part of the journey is equally critical, especially in mobile-enabled onboarding journeys.

With that, companies can add personalization and gamification in their approaches too to encourage customers to spend more with them by serving up contextual offers with limited-time promotions to capitalize on their FOMO (fear of missing out) based on their location and what they are looking at offline and online.

Before your stint at Citi, what are some of your experiences that empowered you to deliver high-end marketing transformation, develop robust go-to-market strategies, and build high-performing marketing teams for organizations?

My last few roles before I joined Citi have all been highly transformational, meaning that I have had to restructure, reshape and even rebuild teams, processes, and budgets (sometimes from scratch) in a short time.

And with each stint, I learned something new as well, that enabled me to apply my knowledge to the next company I joined and so on. I honestly think this would not have been possible if I had remained in the same company and position for years.

I have also had the good fortune of working with great leaders, especially from the business side in my various roles and seeing their side of the world. Also working closely with the C-Suites and working on their communications have also helped shaped my thinking and given me more confidence in my own leadership of my teams. This includes learning to work with different skill sets and mindsets, which have all helped shaped me to be a better people manager.

On an ending note, what is your advice for other senior leaders and CXOs working in the multichannel marketing segment?

Stay connected to both your customers and employees on the ground with more ground-up initiatives, 360 feedback programs, mystery shopping, or user testing sessions. Spend time being a normal customer and employee of your own service or product to understand their pain points as the view from the top is always different. It’s easy to forget sometimes how you got here after so long, but you’ll be surprised what you can still learn from some of the new joiners and more junior members of the workforce in terms of new ideas and ways of doing things better for your customers.