Cross-Channel Marketing

Cross-channel marketing is the combination of multiple promotional methods to ensure that prospects smoothly progress from one stage of the sales funnel to the next.

In cross-channel marketing, businesses leverage various strategies such as promotional emails, bulk SMS, web push notifications, Facebook Messenger, and so forth. The adopted methods are used in unison so that they complement each other to amplify their overall impact. An interconnectedness among the marketing methods makes it easy to view the strategies cumulatively. This allows a business to calculate and comprehend marketing ROI easily.

Businesses can implement effective cross-channel marketing campaigns using SendPulse. The service offers a multi-channel functionality that enables marketers to send relevant messages to both leads and customers.

Apart from email, SendPulse allows businesses to send their customers promotional SMS, web push notifications, and personalized marketing messages using Facebook Messenger.

Businesses cannot afford to ignore cross-channel marketing. Not when they can use it to:

• Boosts engagement with customers. Cross-channel marketing enables businesses to personalize the various ways they interact with and relay information to both prospects and customers. By sending targeted and relevant marketing campaigns, businesses achieve better response and engagement rates.
• Improves customer loyalty. When businesses leverage cross-channel marketing, they show customers that they genuinely want to meet their needs. The clients, in turn, feel appreciated and delighted with the brand, which makes them more inclined to stick with it over time.
• Tracks their ROI. Cross-channel marketing allows marketers to understand various metrics that make up the success of their marketing campaigns. Businesses can quickly determine CTA impressions and open rates for their email marketing campaigns, opt-in rates for web push notifications, SMS delivery rates, etc.

Cross-channel marketing has a lot of real benefits for a company. Here are some of them:

• Smooth buyer journey. By effectively integrating cross-channel communication in the marketing strategy, businesses get to improve the buying experience of their customers. It will be easy for customers to access support and product information, which makes their cooperation with the brand more pleasurable.
• Effective customer service. Cross-channel marketing enables a company to interact with its customers on several platforms at a time. By sending the right message using the most suitable channel, businesses improve the relationships they have with prospects and customers.
• Improved brand image. Cross-channel marketing yields an enjoyable buyer journey, which goes a long way in generating customer satisfaction. As all marketers know, satisfied customers impact a business’ brand positively as they will highly recommend the company’s products or services to their friends and family.
• A better understanding of customers. With cross-channel marketing, businesses can quickly gather information about their existing customers from several communication channels in one place. After that, companies can use the data to create segmented and relevant offers.

When launching cross-channel marketing, businesses should be prepared to tweak their strategies as well as make suitable optimizations along the way. That said, here is how to start with cross-channel marketing:

Integrate the data

The first thing to do when setting up cross-channel marketing is to unify data within a CDP (Customer Data Platform). For any business, CRM is excellent for handling this data. However, no matter the CDP a company chooses, its marketers should have access to analytics data that reveal all lead touchpoints.

Determine the customer segments

After unifying the data, businesses should understand the different segments within their target audience. Marketers can scrutinize touchpoint data to determine whether there are evident failures, trends, or successes. By assessing customer data and getting a clear picture of the existing segments, businesses will know what channels to prioritize and the type of message that performs best across the various communication channels.

Unify interactions with smart content

Now that your customers are segmented, companies need to customize their content to match the needs of customers. The best way to do this is to use smart content – dynamic messages determined by a particular set of criteria. Simply put, smart content is something like, “if a customer does A, show them B.” With smart content, a business will quickly determine what a customer has done; hence, all future interactions with the client will be based on known touchpoints.

Optimize

To get the most out of cross-channel marketing, businesses need to continuously analyze their strategies to ensure that necessary optimizations are made. Experiments such as A/B testing, use of CTAs, and modification of ads on Facebook Messenger can help marketers gain valuable insights, which in turn enable them to make appropriate adjustments on their marketing efforts for even more effectiveness.

How to Do Cross-channel Marketing with SendPulse

With SendPulse, businesses can step up their marketing efforts across various communication channels. Let’s highlight these methods and how companies can leverage them:

• Email. SendPulse has a comprehensive email service that enables businesses to create and send successful email marketing campaigns. For better performance, make use of personalization, segmentation, A/B tests, and other instruments.
• Web push notifications. Businesses can re-engage with and drive customers back to their site by using this feature. Some of the advantages of using web push notifications by SendPulse include offline notifications, easy personalization, and in-depth segmentation.
• SMS. If a company is keen on incorporating effective text communication into its communication channels, then this feature will come in handy. It allows a business to send marketing SMS campaigns across the globe fast.
• Chatbots. With SendPulse, you can create chatbots for Facebook Messenger and Telegram app. Chatbots help promote products, automate answering users' everyday questions, collect their orders, and register them for events.

It is worth mentioning that marketers can use Automation 360 feature to send triggered emails, SMS, and web push notifications depending on events, variables, and actions that their subscribers take. Doing this amplifies the overall impact of the cross-channel marketing strategies a business adopts.

Cross-channel Marketing Best Practices

Here are the essential things you should do to get the most out of cross-channel marketing:

1. Define the most effective channels for your audience.
2. Choose a professional marketing platform that is integrated with analytics, marketing automation software, and a retargeting tool.
3. Segment the audience wisely to nurture leads effectively.
4. Optimize and develop customer touchpoints.
5. Eliminate departmental bottlenecks that hinder effective coordination of cross-channel campaigns.

Cross-channel Marketing Examples

Below are some brands that run effective cross-channel marketing.

As evidenced by these pictures, KFC implements cross-channel marketing by using email and Facebook advertising, among other methods.

Netflix advertises its products via email and Instagram, among other effective communication channels.

References

1. The article "What is cross-channel marketing and why do you need it?" on Econsultancy sheds light on the differences between cross-channel marketing and multi-channel marketing and highlights the benefits of the first approach.
2. The article "Four Key Principles Of Cross Channel Marketing" on Forbes considers 4 primary keys that help succeed in cross-channel marketing.
3. The article "The Ultimate Guide to Cross-Channel Marketing" on HubSpot defines the term, explains why it's worth implementing and provides tips on how to get started.

Last Updated: 22.03.2023