Cross-Channel Marketing: A Beginner's Guide

When building relationships with your customers, it’s important to use cross-channel marketing to focus on each customer’s individual journey to establish the right path to drive engagement and customer satisfaction.

That means going beyond the reach of the go-to marketing channel—email—and embracing all of the channels a customer might interact with, including SMS messages, in-app messages, push notifications, and even direct mail. By developing a comprehensive cross-channel marketing strategy, you can ensure you’re optimizing each marketing interaction based on your customers’ unique interests and preferences.

Here’s a look at what cross-channel marketing is and how to get started.

What is Cross-Channel Marketing?

Cross-channel marketing is a holistic approach to marketing that incorporates all of the marketing channels that a customer might use. Your marketing team should be able to deploy a sequenced marketing campaign that reaches your audiences across all of their preferred channels, with each message being triggered or sent in response to their behavior to ensure that you’re not sending them repetitive, irrelevant messaging.

For example, you might send a limited-time offer in a promotional email. One customer might open the email, click on the link, and make a purchase immediately. With this customer, you can continue updating them on the transaction via email, without moving towards other channels.

Another customer might not open that initial email, however. In this case, you can trigger an SMS or push notification offering the same promotion, increasing the likelihood that the customer will see the offer and respond to it. If they don’t, you can even send a postcard via direct mail to their physical address with a QR code that allows you to track their response.

Once a customer places an order, cross-channel marketing also helps make sure they see your transactional messages alerting them to order status. You can provide shipping notifications and updates across each of your digital marketing channels, so they’ll never miss a message.

Your marketing technology solution should be able to track each customer’s interactions across all of your marketing channels, and automatically optimize future messages towards the channels they prefer. By optimizing your content delivery based on each customer’s unique preferences, you can increase the likelihood of engaging and converting them.

Customizing Your Content

Your cross-channel marketing efforts will be even more successful if you customize the type of content you send in addition to how you send it.

Take advantage of opportunities to segment your customer base according to data like geography, demographics, and behaviors to develop real-time personalized content and offers tailored towards their unique needs and phases in the customer lifecycle. This will help you build trust and brand loyalty.

For instance, if a customer browses a product page for a shampoo, but doesn’t place an order, their action can trigger an automated abandoned browse email that features the shampoo they looked at and other haircare products they might enjoy. If they don’t open the email, you can follow up with similar offers across SMS and push notifications, enabling them to view the offer on the channel they prefer to engage with.

By developing personalized content streams based on the user segment as well as on which products they’ve previously viewed or purchased, you’ll be able to deliver best-in-class marketing messages that will resonate with your customers.

Why Cross-Channel Marketing?

Google found that 90% of customers use multiple devices during the course of researching and making a single purchase. They might browse products on your website from a laptop computer, but complete the purchase while using a tablet or mobile device.

That means it’s important to develop cross-channel marketing strategies that recognize your customers’ varied methods of consuming content, and optimize your messaging approach based on their preferences and needs.

By developing a cross-channel approach that meets every customer with content that’s customized for their unique needs and platform choice, you can develop highly personalized campaigns that are more likely to result in engagement and conversion. Embracing cross-channel marketing will help you connect with your customers in the way that suits them best, with real-time, responsive content that’s triggered by their own actions.

Choose the Right Marketing Automation Platform

To develop a cross-channel marketing approach that helps you personalize your customer interactions, embrace technology that allows you to get a 360-degree view on each customer.

A comprehensive cross-channel marketing platform, like Iterable, will help you integrate all of your marketing data in one, centralized location. You can use demographic information, transactional data, and historical and real-time behavioral data to get a robust picture of each customer and their stage in the customer lifecycle. These customer profiles can be used to deliver personalized cross-channel marketing campaigns that can be triggered by real-time brand interactions as well as planned events.

Your marketing platform should include an easy drag-and-drop workflow builder, so that you can set up templates that include different fields for dynamic content, and different cross-channel messaging sequences based on each user’s response. You should be able to segment your audience members all the way down to the individual level, providing them with a personalized marketing experience at scale.

Try out cross-channel marketing today with a best-in-class marketing platform like Iterable to see your brand grow.