Can Marketing Campaigns Induce Multichannel Buying and More Profitable Customers? A Field Experiment

One of the most intriguing findings in the multichannel customer management literature is the positive association between multichannel purchasing and customer profitability. The question is whether this finding can be put into action. That is, can a firm develop a marketing campaign to increase multichannel purchasing and hence average customer profitability, and if so what are the key factors that enable success. We design and implement a randomized field experiment to investigate this question. The field experiment tests four marketing campaigns that vary in the communications message and the provision of financial incentives. We find that the multichannel/profitability relationship is actionable. A properly designed marketing campaign increases the number of multichannel customers and increases average customer profitability. That campaign's message emphasizes the benefits of multichannel shopping but does not rely on financial incentives. Moreover, we use propensity score matching to show that, after accounting for self-selection, multichannel customers are more profitable than they would be if they were not multichannel. A post-test analysis suggests that the multichannel/nonfinancial incentive campaign succeeded in inducing customers to become multichannel because it decreased customer reactance and increased perceived behavioral control.