The Lunch Pail

Integration is one of the marketing buzzwords du jour. Most experts are imploring marketers to integrate everything to achieve dramatic improvements in message relevance, and sales. But, integration is not without difficulty. In fact, when examining the word and its context further, integration is alarming.

The integration challenge becomes even greater when a product or service a company is providing requires a strong measure of relevance to maintain and grow important metrics. For example, if a company has 20 different, specific, stylized products it must be careful not to confuse any segment of the customer base. An organic food company selling vegetarian items and vegan items must be careful about the messages it sends for fear or violating not only customer trust but forcing a customer into a regrettable purchase decision solely because of poor content execution.

The same principle applies to a company like Total Nonstop Action (TNA) Wrestling, one of a handful of new Knotice customers. Their featured performer, Hulk Hogan, divides the fan base between those who love him and those who can’t stand him. Sending pro-Hulk messages to the wrong group violates a key segment’s trust, and it is difficult to earn that trust back. Of course that is one small example of how direct digital marketing works for TNA, but that same principle is applied 100-fold for TNA and any company.

When TNA Wrestling chose Knotice for its email marketing, mobile marketing, and onsite targeting, one clear message resounded – do not violate the trust of loyal fans. The value Knotice provides for TNA – and the value of direct digital marketing in general – is coordinated messages through a variety of channels. Whether the business opportunity is an upsell or loyalty preservation, relevance is key – especially when communicating over the most important digital customer touch points.

Marketers that wish to coordinate their communications across the primary direct digital marketing channels of email, Web, and mobile – like TNA Wrestling is – are not seeking integration. Rather, they are striving for connection, both between delivery channels and with their target audience. The marketing database should never be separated from content delivery. They should always be connected, and not through a loose integration between platform A and platform B. They should be connected because the usefulness of both the content and the data are entirely dependent upon each other. Lousy content renders data useless, and bad data wastes good content. True connection averts the fragmented communications that induce customer churn.