What Is Multichannel Marketing?

In 2006, Scott Neslin and his co-authors defined multichannel customer management as the design, deployment, coordination and evaluation of the channels through which firms and customers interact. The goal is to enhance customer value through acquiring, retaining and developing customers.

In 2015, Peter Verhoef, P. K. Kannan and J. Jeffrey Inman described the move from multichannel to omnichannel retailing and summed up the difference in a table: - Channels: multichannel management covers interactive channels only, such as the shop, the website and direct marketing. Omnichannel adds mobile devices, social media and mass media such as TV, radio and print. - Separation: in multichannel management the channels are separate and do not overlap. In omnichannel management they are integrated. - Objectives: multichannel sets objectives per channel, such as sales per channel. Omnichannel sets cross-channel objectives, such as the overall customer experience and total sales.

The same authors define omnichannel management as the synergetic management of the available channels and customer touchpoints, so that the customer experience and performance across channels are optimised. They start from the view that channels interact with each other and are used simultaneously. They also note that omnichannel management is sometimes called cross-channel management.

Neslin and his co-authors identify five challenges of multichannel management: integrating data, understanding customer behaviour, evaluating each channel, allocating resources across channels and coordinating channel strategies.

Evaluating channels and allocating budget leads to attribution, which decides how much of a conversion is credited to each interaction. In Google Ads, data-driven attribution is the default model for most conversion actions. Google no longer supports the first click, linear, time decay and position-based models and has moved the conversion actions that used them to data-driven attribution. Apart from data-driven, only last click remains.

These reports have a limit that matters in a multichannel strategy. Google Ads shares credit among interactions with ads from the same advertiser on Google, so the physical shop, email and campaigns on other platforms are left out. To compare channels with each other, methods such as marketing mix modelling or incrementality tests are used. Attribution models, data-driven attribution and these two methods each have their own entry in this glossary.

If each channel is measured only by its own sales, you cannot see what it contributes to the sales of the others. Verhoef and his co-authors start from the view that channels do not work in isolation: they influence each other and customers use them at the same time.

The word omnichannel does not solve this on its own. What marks an omnichannel strategy, according to Verhoef's table, is integrated channels and objectives set for the whole. Without customer data shared across all channels, which is the first challenge Neslin and his co-authors name, that integration cannot be measured.

• Bring together the customer data from all channels before comparing their performance.
• Decide what role each channel plays in the customer journey, not just how much it sells.
• Set at least one objective shared by all channels, such as total sales or the overall customer experience.
• Use data-driven attribution for Google ads and a method such as marketing mix modelling or an incrementality test to compare different channels.
• Coordinate messages and offers across channels, the fifth challenge named by Neslin and his co-authors.

• Calling a strategy omnichannel when it has separate channels and objectives per channel.
• Judging each channel only by the sales credited to it.
• Taking the Google Ads attribution report as a measurement of all channels, when it only shares credit among Google ads.
• Comparing old reports built on first click or linear models with current ones without allowing for the fact that Google no longer supports those models.
• Opening a new channel without first deciding how it will be evaluated.