Multichannel Approach: Interview with Claritas SVP Quinn Jalli

Marketing. It used to be such a nebulous and subjective discipline. But no longer.

As measurement tools and marketing strategies evolve, the move towards a multichannel approach has gained momentum. Unfortunately, we see marketers taking a fragmented approach to this. Yes, identifying the right audience is key. Of course, executing campaigns across multiple channels is essential. No doubt, deploying the tools and analyzing how campaigns perform is mission critical. The problem is, oftentimes each of these 3 important areas are approached in a siloed manner. Let’s face it – we’re all trying to achieve basically the same thing. We want to pinpoint potential customers more precisely and engage them one-on-one more effectively, using the right combination of channels. Simple, right? The process can be.

To learn more on this topic, we interviewed Quinn Jalli, SVP of Email Products at Claritas and noted thought leader in the digital marketing ecosystem. Quinn is recognized for his strong track record in helping clients across all major industries, adopt and transition digital channels into their overall marketing, delivering immediate and continuous ROI. Additionally, he has vast expertise in the digital privacy field, having served as Chief Privacy Officer at several previous companies and played an active role in the development and implementation of the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003.

Question: The focus today is on multichannel marketing. So, can you start us off by just explaining what is meant by multichannel marketing and why this approach can be advantageous over a single channel campaign strategy?

Quinn: Sure. Multichannel marketing really amounts to executing your campaigns through various avenues with the objective of reaching your customers and prospects, how and where they want to engage with you. Let’s face it, that is what is expected these days both by consumers and businesses.  I mean the average American has access to more than 10 connected devices in their household, according to Statista. and they want to engage with you whenever they are ready to, on whatever device – or devices – they choose. The trick is really understanding what those channels are and how to best use them together to reach your best customers and prospects most effectively.

To dive just a little deeper, it’s really not about executing campaigns across a single channel, or just employing a bunch of different channels. It’s about pinpointing potential customers more precisely, engaging them one-on-one more effectively, and continually optimizing to turn them into loyal, paying customers more efficiently. Optimizing might be the key word here – you must continually evaluate and tweak campaigns to get it right and evolve as your customers evolve. Focusing on a single channel is usually just not realistic to improving your chances of conversion, especially when we look at that stat I mentioned earlier.

And the benefits go way beyond just sales and customer acquisition. Employing a well-executed multichannel campaign can significantly increase your brand awareness, increase your leads and data for future campaigns, and even improve customer good will as you simplify their customer journey.

Question:  What do you think are the most prevalent elements that prevent marketers or advertisers from delivering on the goal of true multichannel campaigns? 

Quinn: A lot of resources focus on “best” practices, which is extremely helpful in creating a go-to-market plan. But what about the things we’ve all been guilty of doing that make our jobs harder than they already are? They won’t be on your best practices list, so you might not even know to avoid these pitfalls. I have spent the better part of the last ten years working with clients on customer acquisition programs, and I see three things that have the potential to prevent them from delivering on the goal of a true multichannel strategy:

 Siloed Campaign Learnings: One of the hallmarks of a multichannel campaign is shared learnings across the different mediums; however, many marketers fail to aggregate their learnings and adjust accordingly. That is a failure to avail themselves of one of the key advantages of a well-executed multichannel campaign.

PRO TIP:  Conduct regular “knowledge transfer” meetings with all relevant teams– sales, marketing, campaign tracking, etc. – to ensure focus remains on the most successful areas and messaging is based on consumer feedback.

 Failure to Optimize Audiences. While the best multichannel campaigns will touch every audience member in multiple channels, not every member will be touched in the same channel – for instance the same social media channel. You have to look at the make-up of your target audience and assess what is the right mix of channels to reach the most people at the right time.

PRO TIP:  Measure effectiveness/performance throughout the campaign. End of the campaign analysis is important but does not allow for vital in-flight adjustments that could potentially avoid wasting budgetary dollars on non-performing channels.

Disregard for campaign timing. If campaign amplification is a prime benefit of multichannel campaigns, then a failure to coordinate email, social and display campaigns will undermine one of the very reasons marketers engage in this type of strategy.

PRO TIP: Research first! Determine the best channels, and the best times for reaching your ideal audience. Then work to strike a balance of placing ads in multiple channels and with a cadence that makes sense. Too many ads at once risks buyer “turn-off”, while too much time in-between ads may not provide the brand awareness and messaging “memory” you seek.

Question: Expounding on those thoughts, how do you know which channels work and which don’t, so you don’t waste your advertising budget?

Quinn: That’s a great question! First of all, you need to spend the time upfront defining clear KPIs and objectives with your team or your client. Exactly what is it you are trying to achieve and how are you measuring success? For instance, is it driving people to your website, reducing cost-per-acquisition, launching/gaining awareness of a new product, or maybe even garnering newsletter sign-ups? What makes sense as a success measure? It can and probably will be a combination of things.

Next. you have to refine your audiences to focus on the best prospects that perform in channel. When you don’t have your buyer personas defined for the channels you are using, you might be getting people’s attention, but not actually closing the sale, or whatever action you’re hoping to come out of your marketing efforts. You need to spend the time and the research to employ the right channels that target the right potential customers. then you can shift away from channels that are underperforming based on your audience mix. That is where the optimizing and refining the campaign comes in. Adjust your channels and social mix to reflect the audience(s) that represent your best prospects.

That is really the beauty of multichannel. When done correctly, these elements can be built in!

Question: What other best practices do you recommend for delivering successful marketing campaigns that drive action?

Quinn: Well, unlike most providers, at Claritas we don’t approach building strategies in siloes – we recommend a full spectrum marketing approach. What I mean by that is what we internally refer to as IDO:

Identify: Ensure the right audiences are identified leveraging thousands of demographic and behavioral insights.

Deliver: Know more about how to engage with these audiences – well, really each person – online and offline. Campaign channels should be chosen based on audience preferences of when, where and how they choose to engage.

Optimize: I know I have mentioned this before but go back and find out about what’s working and improve what isn’t. Campaigns should be measured using an accurate and scalable attribution and incremental lift methodology, so you know exactly what’s working and, perhaps more importantly, what isn’t.

Question:  Is that what distinguishes Claritas from its competitors?

Quinn:  Yes, but more importantly, it creates a competitive advantage for our clients. We have one of the industry’s largest databases of active, mailable emails addresses along with the knowledge of how to reach the right inboxes with accuracy and scale. We use a proprietary process for the sourcing and validation of our addresses to ensure compliance and accuracy for both email execution as well as accurate linkages to devices and channels.

Perhaps most importantly, our multichannel solutions are flexible and can be customized to fit the needs of our clients. We have helped a lot of clients with full IDO campaigns, but there are companies out there that don’t need us to do all of it. Our multichannel campaign execution solutions are flexible. We can handle execution for some channels and then work to help them seamlessly execute others.

We can also do things like retarget anonymous website visitors. Sometimes your best future customers are prospects already visiting your site, you just don’t know who they are. We can help with that, turning visitors into pipeline.

We even have data append and hygiene services to ensure a company’s database or CRM is current and accurate. I have been in the industry long enough to know this is something that is an issue at a lot of companies, and it sometimes falls to the bottom of the list – but is vital to future campaign success. Especially as more companies seek to focus on their own first party insights due to the evolving privacy landscape. If your database is “dirty,” well, you know what they say – garbage in, garbage out!

Question:  What do you think the big campaign execution trends are for 2023 and how do you see Claritas evolving to stay ahead of these trends?

Quinn: Well, there are a lot of things we could talk about here – the metaverse, CTV/OTT etc., but the one thing that could impact our ability to effectively conduct some of these strategies, is the growing trends in privacy rights.

First of all, digital advertising and multichannel marketing aren’t going away any time soon. It drives the availability of free and open content. The goal is to create an efficient marketplace of mutually beneficial exchanges. Consumers access content information, in return for just a little bit of information about or for themselves. That helps the market improve its knowledge of how to provide better consumer experiences. It’s a win-win.

But things are evolving, and you need a partner that is willing to make the time and resource investment to stay informed, ahead and compliant. That is an imperative. Claritas has as much of a commitment to privacy compliance as we do in investing in our superior data and measurement platforms. We help our clients succeed without additional worries around data privacy and compliance issues. I could go on, but we’ve released a ton of content around this topic, including a recent episode of our podcast, The Marketing Insider.

We hope this article has helped as you think through your own marketing strategies, whether that’ s for your own brand or your clients’. We won’t pretend to have all the answers or be the silver bullet in everything. However, we have been around for over 50-years due to continually and successfully advancing our solutions and approach to meet the industry challenges of today, while preparing for the ones ahead. Throughout that journey it’s been with one goal: to help our clients do the same.