Cross Channel Marketing Is The Next Big Thing You Don't Know About...Yet

Cross-channel marketing is a process of combining diverse marketing channels in a way that produces a logical advancement for the targeted persona to headway from one stage to another.

In simple words, the channels should work in sync to provide proper context to particular personas as they move from one channel to the next.

Under Armour is one good example of cross channel marketing,

See how did they leverage cross channel marketing by aligning with consumer behavior?

They built an app that allows its users to scan bar-codes in-store and access the product information. The scanning and browsing data is then collected and stored to re-target customers and ultimately boost engagement and earn loyalty.

Why Use Cross Channel Marketing in your upcoming business marketing strategy?

In this digital era when brands are constantly competing for the customer’s attention, it becomes very crucial to know about the customer’s persona that you wish to target instead of just exploring the blind alley.

It becomes quite difficult to know from where the customer is grasping the information to make certain decisions along with the insights on how they want to receive the information.

So to resolve this matter in question, a cross channel marketing approach is adopted. It helps to meet the customers at their place and in the format that catches their attention.

Execution of cross channel marketing strategy results in:

• Boosting engagement with individual leads that are targeted using personalized content.
• Betters customer loyalty
• Individual metrics evaluation for each channel within overall ROI

Factors to consider before implementing a Cross Channel Marketing: 

As every approach has positive and negative factors here are some that need to be looked before implementing a cross channel marketing campaign:

1. Break down silos:

One of the major barriers to consider is the silo mentality around the delivery systems and people involved in these areas.

It affects the customers because silos prevent marketing enterprises from providing a distinctive cross channel marketing experience.

Cross-channel marketing takes a widened perspective and a complete view of what exactly your marketing is willing to achieve. As mentioned above, different departments work together and strive to maintain consistency and coordination in cross-promotions across different mediums.

Hence, all the teams need to be dedicatedly involved to provide a seamless experience to the user, regardless of the platform. 

2. Plan you strategy for multiple touch-point opportunities:
   
   Diverse customer touch-points are created with cross channel marketing. Grab the opportunity by collecting and analyzing customer data to further optimize your marketing.
   
   Touch-points are of distinct forms such as email, SMS, web push, push notification, IVR, in-app, web overlays and more.
   
   Make sure for each touch-point that a customer passes through is there is a clearly planned strategy and is implemented well.
   
3. Uniformity in content:
   
   Having content that can be used across different channels is a blessing. It helps in maintaining consistency and even proves to be cost-savvy.
   
   For example, a blog post can be re-purposed as a part of a white paper. Content from the landing page can be used for sending emails. Once it is known what your users want, you can serve them content via distinct mediums and in multiple forms but with consistency in the intent.
   
   It leverages consistency and helps in enhancing the user’s experience even if he moves from one channel to another.

Benefits of implementing cross channel marketing:

Below are the points that make cross channel marketing worthy of being a part of your next marketing strategy:

- Keep your users hooked:

There is success wherever you put the effort in, but putting the right amount of effort in the right places helps you implement things effectively and achieve outputs efficiently.

Efforts put in communication via one channel will surely bring a certain level of result, however, it also binds you to that particular medium. 

For instance, sticking to communication via emails, considering the fact that a huge amount of people check their emails as soon as they wake up. Possibilities are that they will just ignore it, as they have gone Ad blind. Consider it on a personal level, we also tend to delete such marketing and sales emails.

Rather what should you do in order to get better results? 

Personalized content via diverse channels such as SMS, in-app notifications, web overlays, etc. and at different times in a day helps reach out to customers better and even triggers them to take action. Hence, it boosts engagement.

A study by Jeffrey Vocell stated that CTAs leveraged with personalized content perform 202% better than the generic CTAs.

Below is an example, to show how Swiggy connects a user via customized content across different channels. 

The first image shows the push notification sent by Swiggy to lure a user into ordering lunch.

And the images below show how Swiggy connects via email to boost engagement.  

This keeps the customer hooked to your brand.

- Build your loyal fanbase with personalization:

Increased engagement via the creation of customized content improves the brand experience for a customer, it positively impacts the sense of delight. 

In business, one thing you should learn by heart is that a delighted customer is a loyal customer. And this combination gives rise to a robust marketing tool: Transforming a customer into a brand ambassador.

Giving customers a reason to keep coming back after good customer experience, the customers would put their trust in the brand to invest in more services or upgrade from the same enterprise even at a higher cost.

As an enterprise, one thing to be sure about is to have a genuine motto of offering help to your customers. They are smart enough to understand your intent.

- Every single conversion matters...

Every other marketing approach ends up with ambiguity in metrics and doesn’t accurately define that by which platform did the customer gets converted into a lead. Whereas, cross channel marketing approach breaks down silos and provides quantifiable results.

For instance, consider a marketing campaign that involves a single-channel or multi-channel approach, your teams via different channels such as email marketing team focused on achieving CTA impressions or email openings; whereas, the social media team focused on achieving likes or impressions.

The content team analyzing blog views. Everyone is involved in showcasing their own efforts.

Now, on the generation of a lead, each of these channels will fight to prove their role to take the credit for it. With the integration of all these channels, we can accurately map the touch-points that later helps in actually identifying how a viewer got converted into a lead and further became a customer.

Hence, cross channel marketing helps in improving ROI as well as accurately defining the source of the lead.

Final Words

By taking advantage of cross channel marketing, you can implement robust marketing campaigns and also by blending the data you get insights to coordinate the campaign according to the customer’s behavior.

Leveraging the data you can create greater opportunities to cater to the marketing, sales, and customer service communications.

With this information and data, one can easily plan and frame marketing strategies that help to provide a delightful and flawless customer experience at each touch-point that the customer passes through.

Hence, from here you decide where you want to go or maybe grow.