If pop culture has taught us anything, it’s that everything is a fashion statement—sweatbands, anyone? With the popularity of smartphones and music streaming, a 24/7 soundtrack has become an emblem of this generation’s cultural prerogatives—and along with it, headphone fashion.
The audio equipment industry is expected to become an $11.3 billion market by 2017. To make a bit of noise in the industry, digitally savvy audio equipment brands connect with consumers through many different channels simultaneously.
Beats Electronics is a great example. The athletes and hip hop stars featured in Beats video spots are just one part of a massive marketing operation behind the Apple-owned audio brand. Beats uses Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and other platforms to keep thousands of conversations about music and life going at the same time. And all that social data is combined with data pouring in from Beats’ streaming music offering—which has now been incorporated into Apple Music.
The challenge for Beats, and just about all other major brands these days, is figuring out the best path forward based on data flowing in from so many different channels. At the end of the day, cross-channel marketing isn’t about how many channels you have. It’s about how well you can overlay all the different marketing tracks, if you will, to get a coherent feel for each customer—rather than just a bunch of fractured signals.
And let’s remember that cross-channel isn’t just about social networks. For online retailers, the most important channels of all are the channels where their products are actually sold. Using Facebook and Twitter to drive people to a brand site is great, but the brand still has to take visitors all the way through the checkout process—the customer journey at its finest. That’s where cross-channel can make a big impact.
For Skullcandy, an audio equipment brand especially loved by action sports enthusiasts, cross-channel marketing means not only perfecting its many brand sites, such as skullcandy.com and astrogaming.com, but also making sure its products pages on Amazon and eBay are fully optimized. The challenge for Skullcandy—and all retailers that sell products across a diversity of sites—is in understanding exactly which features of a given site are driving—or standing in the way of—sales. In other words, determining which channel is most effective and how that success can be applied to another channel that is currently less effective.
Take, for example, this marketing puzzle Skullcandy faced: The brand’s data from Adobe’s Marketing Cloud revealed that visitors to astrogaming.com were visiting the checkout page three times more per order than visitors to Skullcandy.com, but were not completing their purchase. Skullcandy needed to immediately determine why visitors to its Astro Gaming site were struggling to complete their purchases.
A deeper dive into the data revealed the culprit: an easy-to-miss mandatory check box on astrogaming.com. With the problem identified, Skullcandy turned to Adobe Target (part of the Adobe Marketing Cloud), which allowed the brand to test different approaches to the agreement box so that the user experience could be streamlined. These tests ultimately resulted in an entirely new, entirely more efficient checkout process.
Among the fascinating lessons of testing is how much difference a small change can make. Skullcandy, which regularly tests its checkout processes on different sites, found that a button with a hover state delivered a lift of 15 percent in revenue per visit. “The beauty of Adobe Marketing Cloud is that we don’t have to guess,” says Ben Meacham, manager of web analytics and testing at Skullcandy. “It provides us the data we need to keep improving our site.”
Skullcandy’s success in selling products across different marketing channels is a testament to the brand’s forward thinking. But it’s also a reminder that cross-channel marketing can’t begin and end on social channels. If you’re not driving sales, then your cross-channel efforts aren’t succeeding. Period.
