The silos often created by having multiple product lines within several divisions can make it tough for an company to deliver a consistent message while speaking relevantly to individual customers. ING faced this situation with its seven product categories across banking, asset management, and insurance-and an overabundance of competing direct marketing from within its own organization.

"People get chaotic messaging from our bank," says Martin de Lusenet, program manager at ING. "We are shouting to our customers and they can't hear us anymore."

Instead of turning up the volume further, Amsterdam-based ING is dialing down its direct mail and focusing on improving its online interactions through personalization. It's also using those interactions to create consistent messaging across channels.

ING mined its data warehouse to score more than 100 million potential offers, so when an opportunity arises it can present prospects with those that are the most appropriate matches. It uses Unica's Interactive Marketing solution to serve online offers. The tool uses predictive and behavioral analytics and a centralized decisioning system to guide ING in how to treat customers. Now, when visitors to ING website click on banners and hyperlinks, they're presented with relevant information and recommendations. "We now have a mechanism in place to make it possible to do all kinds of propositions in a fast way," de Lusenet says.

Messages are also synchronized across all the channels. For example, if the system determines that a customer may be interested in opening a savings account, he's presented with the same offer whether it's through email or on the website or both in succession. "And when we show an offer five times and the person doesn't react we also take it into account and show another offer," de Lusenet says.

Despite the cross-channel improvements, de Lusenet says that the marketing department itself still operates in a decentralized manner, resulting in the bank's marketers creating their own marketing programs in siloed channels-a challenge ING is working to correct. In early 2009 ING plans to introduce a centralized marketing operations hub and a new integrated organizational marketing strategy. Customers will also be able to choose their channel preference. "The result will be fewer [but more relevant] offerings for the customers," de Lusenet says. "I'm convinced about that because our current direct mail is like a factory and we're not getting results."

By moving past the blast method of marketing and leveraging customers' preferences and past behaviors, ING can determine the best marketing message to deliver in the most appropriate channel at any given time. That makes the company not only a multichannel marketer, but a cross-channel one, too.