A positive customer experience is vital for growing your brand and improving your ROI (return on investment). Cross-channel marketing helps you not only understand your customers better but also serve them better. Discover how to create a successful cross-channel marketing strategy and the benefits of doing so.
Cross-channel marketing involves promoting your brand’s consistent messaging across multiple digital marketing platforms, including social media, web, email, blogs, text notifications, apps, and more. An effective cross-channel strategy must also involve passing data and metrics between these different channels and having them “communicate” with each other. That is what creates a seamless, personalized user experience across all platforms.
An effective cross-channel strategy looks like this: A customer visits your website and views your products. Specifically, they view phone cases for the latest iPhone. Then, the customer leaves your website without making a purchase, which triggers your email system. Right then, the same customer receives an email from you with photos of the iPhone cases they were viewing. This is an example of cross-channel marketing because your web platform and email software “communicated” to send a personalized marketing message to the customer.
Implementing a cross-channel strategy is a great place to start if you’re looking for ways to increase your ROI. There are four key benefits of this type of marketing that lead to more engagement and sales.
First and foremost, cross-channel marketing enhances the customer experience because it personalizes the experience. In the example above, because the channels “communicated,” a customer received a personalized email featuring products they showed an interest in.
90% of marketers use personalization and, in doing so, significantly increase their profitability because customers are more likely to engage with personalized content than general advertisements. In fact, nearly 45% of customers say they are likely to become repeat customers when their shopping experience is personalized. Simply put, effective cross-channel marketing efforts increase personalization, and personalization improves ROI.
Wherever your target audience looks for you, they should be able to find you. A cross-channel strategy makes that happen. When you promote your business across socials, web, email, text, and more, you expose your brand to more people and naturally increase brand awareness. With more awareness comes more engagement, which leads to an increased ROI.
Keeping your audience engaged with your brand is essential, especially when you’re looking for ways to improve your ROI. Rather than showing up in an email inbox with a general message every few months, a cross-channel strategy keeps you in front of your audience on various platforms with consistent messaging relevant to them. This increases engagement and will help you build trust with your audience. Rather than waiting for your audience to find you, find and interact with them to encourage increased engagement. Produce great content frequently to give your audience more reasons to keep coming back.
When you promote your brand across various channels, you can gain valuable data and insights about your audience and their behaviors. The information collected gives you a better idea of the type of content and advertisements your audience deems most engaging. With this information, you can tailor your cross-channel marketing campaigns to better connect with your audience and target them in ways that are proven to be successful.
For example, you can collect data on where the email was opened — a desktop or mobile device if you send an email. With this information, you learn more about your audience’s preferences. You can even segment future emails based on this information, giving those who open emails on a desktop a tailored experience, as well as those who open emails on a mobile device.
Because one of the most important aspects of a successful cross-channel marketing campaign is a streamlined experience, you need to create consistency. When a customer interacts with you on any platform, everything from your voice and tone to your look and feel to your brand principles and content marketing strategies should be consistent.
The other important aspect of developing a successful cross-channel campaign is timing. When your audience receives their personalized messages plays a significant role in how effective they are in improving your ROI. You want to send notifications when a customer is active. In the example of the customer shopping for iPhone cases, they received a personalized email with photos of the products they viewed as soon as they left the website without making a purchase. Setting up automated processes will help you reach the right customers with the correct personalized messaging at the right time.
For more information about cross-channel marketing, check out these five examples of multi-channel marketing campaigns:
Last updated on September 15th, 2022.