How to Create a Cross-Channel Marketing Campaign

Cross-channel marketing is an ideal way to develop stronger connections with your customers. This strategy is designed to provide all of your customers with a consistent brand experience wherever they choose to engage with your brand. Each channel should provide a sequenced interaction that aligns to the customer’s unique journey.

Let’s take a look at what cross-channel marketing is and how to build your first cross-channel marketing campaign.

What is Cross-Channel Marketing?

Cross-channel marketing refers to marketing campaigns that are integrated across a variety of marketing channels, both digital and offline. This might include email, social media, SMS messaging, push notifications, and direct mail.

Cross-channel marketing can be highly personalized, down to the individual user level. By creating 360-degree customer profiles from all of your different technology tools, including your CRM, e-commerce solution, point of sale solution, and others, you’ll be able to understand exactly how to connect with each customer, with personalized messaging designed to appeal to them on the channels they prefer to use.

Why Use Cross-Channel Marketing?

Cross-channel marketing empowers your brand to build uniquely customized, consistent experiences for each of your customers, showing them exactly the content they want, when and where they want it. Your cross-channel marketing sequences can be customized to fit each specific customer’s journey and preferences, increasing their likelihood of conversion and ongoing brand loyalty. It helps you drive engagement at every stage of the customer lifecycle, from an initial welcome message sequence to customized promotions, through to abandoned cart notifications and re-engagement cycles.
By taking a cross-channel approach to reaching your customers, you’ll be able to heighten your connection with them throughout their journey.

Now that we know the “why,” let’s look at the “how.”

Setting Up a Campaign

While you can set up cross-channel marketing campaigns based on site-wide promotions, one of the strengths of a platform like Iterable is the ability to send out personalized content based on real-time triggers.

You can choose your marketing channels based on a customer’s history and behavior. For example, if one customer frequently opens email marketing messages, your campaign may default to prioritizing email for that customer. However, if the customer is near one of your stores, a push notification using geofencing on mobile will mean you’re more likely to engage with them on the spot.

Triggered/Automatic Workflows

You can use Iterable’s drag-and-drop workflow builder to set up templates that will go out to segmented groups based on their customer data and behavioral triggers. Each workflow will include a number of variables for messages to send and channels to send them on, with the specific action determined based on the customer response at each point in time. The templates can also include dynamic content fields, so that you can automatically generate variable content such as the customer’s name, location, and products they’ve previously viewed or ordered.

As one example, let’s say a customer who’s signed up for your email list, downloaded your app, and opted in to SMS messaging visits your app and clicks on a link to a sale on jeans, then a specific pair of jeans, but doesn’t place an order.

Because the customer is actively using your app, your cross-channel marketing campaign might start out with a push notification promoting the sale and including a deep link to add the jeans to their shopping cart, with the customer’s size already filled out.

If the user doesn’t respond to the offer, your sequence can follow up across their other marketing channels, including email and SMS messaging, incorporating additional product recommendations using your platform’s Catalog feature to fill in dynamically generated content. If the customer doesn’t respond to the digital offers, you can follow up with a direct mail coupon.

Choosing a Cross-Channel Marketing Platform

To successfully set up a cross-channel marketing campaign, you’ll need to use a best-in-class cross-channel marketing platform, like Iterable. By using a solution that can centralize data from all your data sources, you’ll be able to set up streamlined workflows for sequenced multi-channel messaging that’s triggered by your users’ real-time actions.

Your solution should include a simple drag and drop workflow builder so that your marketing team can set up campaigns without relying on design or engineering support. It should also enable you to set up A/B testing to validate the success of different variables, which you can then use to optimize the rest of your campaign once you’ve completed your test.

With a cross-channel marketing platform, you can also segment your audiences in detail, down to the individual level, so you can vary your campaign template and include custom, dynamic content, based on each user’s previous brand interactions and known preferences. The sequence should include messaging across all of the marketing channels that the user engages with. That will help you create a consistent experience for every customer that resonates with their individual needs and preferences, leading to more brand loyalty and higher customer lifetime value.