What’s your excuse for not implementing an Omni-channel Journey?
Updated: Mar 13, 2021
“Our organization cannot do an omni-channel journey because…
- our email addresses come from a CRM and the SubscriberKey is the ContactID
- our mobile numbers are from a legacy platform and cannot be merged
- we are not sure if we have confirmed opt-in for the mobile numbers we have
- mobile originated SMS cannot be matched back to the CRM record
- we integrated SFMC mobile SDK but we cannot match the APP subscriber with the CRM subscriber
We have seen marketers and IT strive for an amazing omni-channel vision with their newly purchased SFMC platform. However, that dream gets de-prioritized with every obstacle that the teams face.
That being said our team has successfully helped many organizations overcome these obstacles and achieve truly scalable omni-channel capabilities.
Three critical issues to be addressed here are:
- Subscriber Identifier
- Compliance
- Preference Management
Subscriber Identifier:
Most organizations struggle with consolidating data and assigning a (for lack of a better term) unique marketing identifier for customer’s communication channel. (No, this doesn’t have to be a CDP).
Cross-functional teams – IT, Marketing, Data and Analytics, etc. should put their heads together to identify a KEY that will serve as a lookup when a customer’s email, mobile number or active APP ID is needed.
This is not as trivial as it sounds. When we at JourneyBlazers conduct discovery – we enable stakeholders to think about these fundamental problems and foundational decisions vs. realizing the problem a year later and needing to reconfigure the platform and redoing the migration.
Compliance and Regulations:
Often, marketers have phone numbers or emails from a legacy system and do not have the consent to send communication over these channels. OR there are multiple redundant flags that can cause confusion – such as do not email / call / message, do not communicate, opt-out of communications. These are situations when it is helpful to sit down with the legal team and to figure out what the right thing to do is.
Let’s take SMS as an example: We had a Financial Services customer who migrated from a legacy platform into SFMC and then had some 2,000 (out of 50,000) customer records with the mobile number field populated. We got together in a room with their legal team and given the situation decided that – a consent solicitation confirmed opt-in email campaign is the best way to get these customers to sign up for SMS.
For a HLS customer the legal team challenged us to determine what push notifications could be sent to shared household devices such as tablets vs. patient’s private mobile device where the app was installed.
Preference Management:
An omni-channel journey implies a robust preference center that is always up-to-date with the subscriber’s selections for opt-ins / opt-downs and unsubscribes across multiple channels. Maintaining complicated preferences can be challenging.
Every-time you execute a journey you have to validate the consent on a particular channel for a particular subscription. If your SFMC implementation involves migrating these consent from legacy platforms, then consolidating them into a central location – mapping them and testing them can be a very intense undertaking.
At JourneyBlazers we have built amazing custom preference centers with quick turnaround times to enable subscription and consent management across multiple channels.
Reach out to learn how we can help you lay a strong and scalable SFMC foundation and help you design omni-channel journeys the right way.