The 3 Fundamentals of Multichannel Marketing: Part 2 – Customer Intelligence Hubs.

In mylast blog post, I described how touchpoint attribution (measuring the success of marketing programs across multiple channels) is one of the building blocks of cross-channel marketing. Obviously, this kind of marketing intelligence can only be obtained if there’s a repository of data from all channel sources, or a customer intelligence hub (CI Hub for short). This is one of theprerequisites for implementing true multichannel marketing.

CI Hubs have morphed from customer databases, data warehouses and data marts. Some think that CI Hubs evolved because customer relationship management (CRM) applications failed to deliver the promised360-degree view of the customer. And yet, one more theory is that business intelligence (BI) applications were supposed to deliver customer intelligence across multiple data sources but have not succeeded as well. The reality is that none of our evolutionary systems are capable of delivering the bigger objective of consolidated online and offline information in a distributed way for multichannel marketing.

The movement to CI Hubs has been hastened by the widespread adoption of internet protocol (IP) for all application solutions. This, in-turn, drove more services into producing both interactive data sharing and entirely new application data sources. These rapid electronic interfaces and exchanges of electronic data haveand continue to open up new interactive channels to users. As these new channels (such as tablet apps, interactive TV, social media, etc.) are available to the end users, those same channels become available for marketing. The CI Hub of today needs to consolidate information across all these interactive channels and be flexible enough to grow as development of these channels continues to skyrocket.

What is a CI Hub? continues @ http://fifthgearanalytics.com