The Ultimate Guide to Cross-Channel Marketing
The secrets of successful cross-channel marketing
A well-executed cross-channel marketing solution, informed by actionable data, can lead to explosive growth. It’s the only way to keep pace with consumers’ ever-evolving online habits — and represents a prime opportunity to outperform your competitors.
Consumers have demonstrated it themselves: a study of 46,000 people showed that 73% of shoppers buy from more than one channel.
What is cross-channel marketing?
Cross-channel marketing connects customer experiences across multiple channels to meet customers where they’re at. This helps your customers progressively move through the funnel across various channels like SMS, social media, email, and websites. All these channels work together to deliver a unified message.
If you’re doing cross-channel marketing right, each channel supports and strengthens the others. While you can find some success relying solely on a single channel like email marketing or Google advertising, most marketers are making greater use of cross-channel marketing to increase engagement and profitability.
It makes sense: 45% of customers say they will likely become repeat buyers of brands that personalize the cross-channel experience.
The differences among cross-channel, omnichannel, and multi-channel marketing
Like multi-channel marketing, cross-channel marketing leverages many marketing channels to communicate with your target audience. What separates the two is coordination.
Whereas multi-channel marketing entails connecting in silos with customers using several communication methods, cross-channel marketing is designed to create a cohesive customer journey by integrating all customer touchpoints under one 360-degree marketing strategy and delivering consistent messaging across channels.
Meanwhile, omnichannel marketing is multi-channel marketing and then some. Multi-channel approaches typically focus on leveraging multiple channels to pitch a product or service, while omnichannel focuses on using all channels to reach customers — a more customer-centric approach.
Cross-channel marketing also connects the touchpoints across these channels, meaning these two can work together.
Six reasons to embrace cross-channel marketing
1. Increase customer engagement, retention and conversion rates
Cross-channel marketing is critical to optimizing customer engagement because it enables personalization that ties directly to a customer’s personal communication preferences.
2. Earn a better return on investment for your marketing budget
Businesses using cross-channel marketing see a far greater return on their marketing investment. ASOS was able to generate $77.5 million in incremental revenue working with Simon Data to improve their cross-channel campaigns.
3. Gain stronger brand affinity and mindshare
When prospective customers encounter your brand in multiple places, it lives larger in their minds, which in turn increases brand recognition and brand loyalty.
4. Get (and use) better data
Use data better, then acquire new, better data — it’s a cycle of constant improvement. Cross-channel marketing attribution helps you pinpoint exactly what’s working, so you can automatically do more of it. Spend your resources where they can have the most impact.
5. Turbocharge your brick-and-mortar location
Nearly 75% of consumers investigate brands online before visiting a physical location, and cross-channel marketing campaigns generate about eight in 10 in-store visits. Since the COVID-19 outbreak, online orders with curbside pickup have also increased 208%.
6. Keep up with today’s on-the-go consumers
According to Google, 98% of users switch between devices on the same day, and 90% of multiple device owners switch between devices to complete individual tasks. With cross-channel marketing, you’re able to deliver a consistent message across all these channels, no matter where or how technology is being used.
The challenges of cross-channel marketing
1. Using a customer journey map effectively
Understanding the best opportunities for cross-channel marketing requires a clear picture of the customer journey. The best cross-channel campaigns require an intimate understanding of where your customers shop, browse, and evaluate products. Mapping a customer journey requires lots of iteration, so don’t expect to have a perfect flow figured out when you begin cross-channel campaigns!
2. Fragmented data and platforms
The major difficulty of cross-channel success is having various platforms play nicely. An ideal cross-channel campaign is seamless — a checkout page bounce triggers an email, or a website visit triggers ad retargeting on a social platform. Because these platforms don’t always communicate well, it can be hard to track and manage cross-channel campaigns, leaving you flitting between platforms for success.
3. Choosing relevant channels and timing
Without a 360 view of your customer journey, you’ll struggle to identify the right channels to reach your audience. Cross-channel efficiency requires understanding your problems. Where do users bounce and why? What causes friction, and how can another channel alleviate it? Choosing the wrong channel for your retargeting ads, for instance, results in silence. If you chose Reddit and your audience isn’t on Reddit, you’ll miss opportunities to reach them.
4. Choosing an appropriate attribution model
Your attribution model determines your budget allocation. Marketers who give all credit to a customer’s last touch will focus their budget on the channel that achieved the last touch. That’s why most teams use a multi-touch attribution model that gives some credit to each touchpoint in a customer journey. This helps you justify the channels you use and place focus where it matters.
5. Unified messaging
Each platform has its requirements, formats, and algorithms. Learning to optimize for each one requires lots of experience or lots of personnel, which can result in dissonant messaging. Consistent cross-channel messaging requires a consistent brand voice and established processes.
How to build a successful cross-channel campaign
The best routes to success are carefully charted. You’ll find success in a cross-channel campaign much the same way you would in other marketing campaigns:
1. Define your objectives
Begin with an end in mind. Most cross-channel campaigns are born to use more of your channels effectively or to increase customer engagement. Work with what you already have: audit marketing channels, analyze where they’re failing, and evaluate if cross-channel marketing could help connect their experiences.
2. Map the customer journey
Only 48% of content marketers have a customer journey map to guide their campaigns. Dust off your customer persona and do a touchpoint analysis. Look at which channels serve a persona and identify room for growth.
The customer journey map should be collaborative. CS, sales, PM, and UX teams should have a good idea of the customer journey. Your role may be to see where they all converge for accuracy.
3. Create personalized, consistent content
We mentioned one of the pain points of cross-channel marketing is having a unified message. Cross-channel campaigns are time and resource-intensive (but worth it!), so creating defined workflows for each channel all united with one style guide ensures that anyone on your team serves the cross-channel plan.
When you’re running campaigns for thousands of people with consistent messaging, it can be hard to speak to the individual. This is why you should use software (like a CDP) to personalize content. Many platforms can segment audiences by behavior and serve your unified message while still being personalized and relevant.
4. Measure campaign performance
Data is a marketing team’s most underutilized asset. With the right tools, you can automate a lot of reporting and build dashboards that give you insights in real time. Use these insights to track toward the objectives you’ve established.
5. Optimize the campaign
Lastly, build on your findings! Failure is an opportunity to build on your findings. If you experimented with a touchpoint that yields no results, take that touchpoint out and note that failure should it ever reenter the conversation. Marketing requires rigorous A/B testing.
Example of cross-channel marketing: Panera Bread
With all this in mind, who does cross-channel marketing well? Some of the most effective examples are companies that create whole ecosystems for their customers. Panera Bread uses a multichannel approach to reach customers where they shop.
First off, Panera’s channel outreach is robust. You can be contacted by email, SMS, and mobile app. How do they attract customers to these channels? Ordering online or by app requires that you enter your contact information, which allows them to request you opt into promotional messages.
In addition, Panera captures contact info with its loyalty program. While the MyPanera plan is free, the Sip Club promises free drinks and other promos for a monthly fee:
Manera cross-promotes these programs. If you order in-store, signage advertises the app and rewards program. Push notifications on your phone encourage you to order online and pick up in-store for a discount. Your app activity is tracked to send you personalized deals through SMS.
Altogether, this makes Panera practically inescapable. The frequent updates and notifications expose you to their brand at multiple daily touchpoints. That makes your next lunch choice easy: Panera is top of mind.
Reimagining cross-channel marketing with a Customer Data Platform
So far, we’ve taught you the manual process for cross-channel success. But how do successful companies manage so many moving parts? A customer data platform (CDP) will pave a smooth path for your cross-channel campaigns.
Let’s say, for example, a customer abandons a product in the shopping cart on your site. As part of a cross-channel marketing campaign powered by robust customer data, this customer might automatically receive a text message reminding them to complete the check-out process, as well as an email coupon for an additional 10% off.
After their purchase, you might send them a direct-mail postcard thanking them for their purchase and suggesting other products they may enjoy. Each of these communications is personalized to the individual customer, and tracked to determine what works best. Through ongoing analysis of your ever-expanding data, you can continually hone your targeting and messaging for even more effective future campaigns.
So, how is it implemented? To deliver an optimized cross-channel marketing experience, you’ll need a CDP. With a CDP, you benefit from:
Better customer segmentation based on increasingly detailed customer personas
Want to send an email to women who’ve spent more than $X in the last six months? No problem. Need to focus your campaign on men between 18 and 35 who usually open your emails and are most likely to make a purchase? Easy.
Better customer segmentation comes from focusing not only on who your customers are but what they do. Cross-channel marketing with a CDP allows you to track and measure the way different customers and groups of customers interact with your business, and instantly target them across multiple channels, matching the more free-flowing, organic way that customers actually behave.
Better cross-channel marketing attribution
Companies with better cross-channel marketing attribution achieve 15% to 20% greater marketing budget efficiency by avoiding tactics proven not to work. With a CDP platform, hard data tells you not only what’s working, but which strategies are most effective for each audience.
Better metrics for data analysis
With a CDP, you gain far richer insights into the cross-channel customer journey because you can pull data from a wide variety of sources, including past purchasing history, internet browsing history, social media engagement, and much more. Together, this information offers a clearer, deeper picture of who your customers are, how they’re interacting with your brand, and what will make — and keep — them happy.
With a CDP, this data collection and analysis can be automated and iterative, enabling your cross-channel marketing to perform better and better as your campaigns evolve.
Why industry leaders choose Simon Data for cross-channel marketing
CDPs are emerging as a response to customers’ increasingly interconnected digital lives and ever-expanding expectations of their preferred brands. But of course, not all customer data platforms are created equal.
No data gets left behind
In today’s increasingly competitive and online business environment, the actionability of data separates the average from the rockstar companies. While most businesses have some access to analytics, it’s often spread across several platforms, without integration. Simon Data combines your cloud data warehouse and its native CDP, marketing campaign orchestration engine, and integrated message delivery into a single insight-to-execution platform.
Plays well with legacy marketing technology
By now, many marketers have adopted a multi-cloud marketing stack, and they need a customer data platform that works with what they’ve already built. Simon Data’s CDP expands the functionality of your existing tools and eases future migrations so you can ensure you’re making use of the world’s best data resource, no matter what other tools you’re working with.
Scales quickly
Today’s fastest-growing businesses make the most of online and offline marketing channels, subscription and e-commerce models, direct-to-consumer sales, and brick and mortar — and most lifecycle marketers are stuck with email service providers that only allow for rudimentarily targeted campaigns. Simon Data’s CDP, on the other hand, provides marketers a powerful engine for revenue growth by enabling deep and complex cross-channel customer journeys and leveraging predictive intelligence and experimentation for campaign optimization.