Interactive Marketing Exposed

According to a new report from Forrester Consulting to understand how interactive marketers use customer data to drive communications, develop promotions, and deliver consistent customer experiences, speed of response resonates loudly with interactive marketers.

Realtime customer insights and engagement across all channels are "the game." Given the velocity and frequency of customer interactions, interactive marketers are denied the luxury of timedelayed analysis and response. Forrester defines the term interactive marketing as: The use of addressable channels like email, search, display advertising, social media, mobile, or online video to sense and respond to customer need. Through indepth surveys, Forrester found that interactive marketers continue to struggle with customer data management issues. Although established channels such as email, website, display, and search are actively measured by interactive marketers, leveraging collective customer insight across channels remains a distant reality for many.

The study yielded these key findings:

• The need for speed resonates loudly with interactive marketers. Marketing technology, listening across both digital and social channels, and advanced data management capabilities are foundational capabilities to address this need
• Integrated campaign management is a strategic imperative, and extends into the need for greater collaboration across interactive marketing teams
• ROI continues to haunt interactive marketers, as they struggle with organizational and budgetary barriers that hinder progress toward a more customer-centric and dialogue-focused approach to campaign management
• Marketers continue to execute and measure campaigns in isolation from each other without a full view into customer activities across multiple channels. As a result, marketers still rely on using interactive channels to push messages versus encouraging customer dialogue
• Interactive marketers struggle to execute effective crosschannel programs. Measurement and analytics capability is influenced by poor data collection, lack of data integration, and disparate data sources