How to improve your cross-channel marketing strategy

Cross-channel marketing is a customer-focused marketing strategy that aims at providing personalized experiences to customers, regardless of where they are interacting with your enterprise across different marketing channels. The strategy helps increase customer engagement, create brand awareness, and build customer loyalty over time. But to enjoy such benefits, you must get it right.

You should understand your target customers to ensure you create a targeted strategy that will impress them throughout their customer journey. And, of course, you should count data and analytics to help you make informed decisions on what to do at every stage of the journey. 

Steps to improve cross-channel marketing

1. Focus on data.

Without a doubt, knowing your data is critical when making marketing decisions at every customer journey stage. You must focus on collecting, analyzing, and understanding data about your target customers for the best results — and you’ll need to determine which data points are essential for personalization across multiple channels.

With these in mind, you’ll want to segment your target audience based on their purchasing behaviors, geographic locations, and demographics. And to develop a message that resonates with a specific segment of your audience, you’ll also need data on age, income, and more. 

Although you can use various tools to record, consolidate, and analyze customer profiles, consider focusing on a good customer relationship management platform to provide all the essential data you need about your customers, including how you acquired them, and a reporting program that aggregates your cross-channel marketing efforts into one dashboard.

Also, focus on growing your cross-channel audience by using:

• Smart web forms
• Social media
• SMS promotional campaigns
• Mobile app messaging

2. Determine the right channel mix.

While you can use various channels to interact with your customers along the journey, start with those your target audiences already use for their communications. Consider mobile devices for:

• Email
• In-app messaging
• Push notifications
• SMS and MMS
• Social media

3. Create relevant and intelligent cross-channel moments.

Providing relevant and intelligent experiences to your customers will help you earn customer loyalty. You can achieve that by using personalized post-purchase messages, such as thank-you notes. Also, giving your customers loyalty points and rewards is an excellent way of appreciating them, which will likely make them come back for more next time.

You also can smartly tailor your promotions and promotional messages to make customers want to buy and use your products. Your messages should be friendly, not pushy.

4. Maximize triggered messaging.

Many successful brands leverage abandoned carts and abandoned browser triggers to reach out to target customers and persuade them to purchase. Top brands will use the triggers to personalize further and drive urgency. You can take the strategy a notch higher by using low inventory and high views on the product in the cart and low inventory for favorite or browsed items.

You should also alert the customers via email or notification through the app when some of the products they are interested in are back in stock. Also, reminding your audiences of a price drop for products they have viewed before or added to the cart will likely make them buy the item(s) soon. 

Here’s a quick roundup of popular triggered emails:

• Abandoned shopping cart
• Abandoned browsing
• Back in stock
• Birthday
• Confirmation
• Low inventory
• Loyalty rewards
• Milestone
• Onboarding
• Personal event reminder
• Special offers
• Welcome

5. Test and optimize.

Don’t be afraid to try new channels and campaign strategies until you come up with the right channel mix and messaging that works for your customers. Use data analytics and reporting tools to see the results of your cross-channel marketing strategy. Fine-tune your approach to make it more targeted and personalized based on your data analytics, audience interests, and responses.

Getting started 

If want you to jump-start your cross-channel marketing, you have come to the right place. Leading brands like Revolve, Eddie Bauer, and 1-800 Contacts use Cordial to execute an intelligent cross-channel marketing strategy.

To learn more about cross-channel marketing strategy, schedule a demo with us today.