Book review: Akin Arikan’s Multichannel Marketing
It’s so refreshing when you find people who ‘get it’.
Multichannel Marketing: Metrics and Methods for On and Offline Success, the new book by Akin Arikan, is a thorough and practical exploration of the topic, with enough how-to’s and advice for all on and offline marketers to reap the benefits of multichannel marketing.
Akin sums up his mission perfectly:
Close your eyes. Visualize a multichannel analytics dashboard with charts, gauges, and funnels. We see the complete status of marketing initiatives. We see what customers desire of us next and where there is opportunity for greater efficiency. Meanwhile, leads and service alerts are distributed through the system to the right people at the right time for prompt action.
This is great.
My first main take-out from the book is Akin’s compelling argument about why direct, brand and online marketers can no longer work in isolated silos.
In many large organisations we deal with, these people aren’t even talking to each other, let alone sharing customer data. If they work as a team, as Akin proposes, they get to know where to concentrate effort for each customer.
Secondly, Akin reveals what each group is tasked to do, techniques they use and how they measure their success. Reading this, you see that each group has valuable experience to share, and it reminds me of how we recently took a well-established direct marketing technique, propensity scores, and applied it to email marketing.
The good news for marketers is that Akin delves deep into measurement techniques and insights that can be used to assess the impact of one channel on another, and on the organisation.
I recommend that every marketer – brand, direct or online – get a copy of Akin’s book.
Read it from cover to cover. Seek out your colleagues in the other channels, make friends with them and get them a copy of the book too. Then keep your copy handy for quick reference every time you plan a new marketing campaign.
Akin’s book is on a topic close to our hearts. We’ve written about cross channel and multichannel marketing in these blogs:
I really really good book indeed. I would certainly recommend it to web analysts as well, if they want to know where their profession is heading to.