Consistency or Complementarity? Optimizing Multi-channel Selling Based on Online Click-Through Data

Adaptive selling has been seen to increase sales performance and influence tactics provide means to exercise it. However, adaptive selling has only been studied in single-channel contexts. Multi-channel contexts offer particular opportunities to improve adaptive selling by providing information about customers' information processing styles in one channel that can be fed into another channel. In a field experiment, 138 customers were first approached by email and then by phone by professional salespeople of a financial services provider. Based on online click-through data about each customer's proneness to a specific influence tactic, the salespeople used either a consistent or a complementary tactic in the phone call. Contrary to general belief, the results indicate that the use of complementary influence tactics in different channels outperforms the use of consistent influence tactics. The study thus contests the generally accepted notion of consistency in marketing communications and provides evidence of channel-specificity of persuasive messages.