What is Cross-Channel Campaign Management?

Cross-channel campaign management refers to the practice of managing your brand’s marketing campaigns across a variety of marketing channels, resulting in a seamless and cohesive experience, regardless of which channels your customers choose to engage with.

Customers today typically engage with multiple marketing channels when they’re considering making a purchase, often including a combination of digital and in-store channels. In fact, Marketing Week found that while 15 years ago, the average consumer engaged with a brand across two marketing channels while making a purchase, today, they use an average of six, with 50% regularly using more than four. And 90% of customers say that they expect to receive consistent brand interactions across all the channels they use.

It’s essential for your brand to prioritize developing an integrated approach to cross-channel campaign management. Here’s a look at how to do it.

What Channels Are Customers Using?

First, it’s important to look at how customers are typically interacting with your brand, or how they’d prefer to interact. Today, it’s rare that a customer will make an in-store or online purchase without first researching the products beforehand.

Some of the channels they might choose to engage with include:

• Social Media - Your brand’s profiles on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social media platforms can serve as a key point of engagement for your followers, promoting unique brand content and offers.
• Email Marketing - Email marketing is one of the oldest, but still one of the most effective forms of marketing. It generates $42 on average for every dollar spent, providing one of the highest ROIs amongst marketing channels. Because customers open emails on both desktop and mobile devices, it provides an opportunity to engage with them wherever they are.
• SMS Marketing - SMS marketing is a highly engaging form of marketing communication, with engagement rates anywhere from six to eight times higher than email. They can be a great follow-up to emails in a cross-channel marketing campaign.
• Push Notifications - Push notifications appear on users’ mobile device lock or home screen. If they have a brand’s app installed and notifications enabled, push notifications can yield a click-through rate seven times higher than email marketing.
• In-App Messaging - In-app messaging is another marketing strategy that can achieve great results. Airship found that in-app messaging typically receives eight times the direct response rates of push notifications.
• Direct Mail - Don’t forget about good old-fashioned direct mail. Circulars, coupons, catalogs, and other types of print mail can help your brand stand out from all the digital clutter. As much as 90% of direct mail campaigns get opened, versus just 20 to 30% of emails.

In cross-channel campaign management, you need to make sure your brand messaging is aligned across all of these mediums, as well as any additional channels you might incorporate.

Managing a Cross-Channel Marketing Strategy

To effectively deliver a cross-channel marketing strategy, your brand should use a best-in-class marketing automation solution, like Iterable, which can integrate all of your marketing data into one centralized location for better cross-channel campaign management. From there, you’ll be able to develop detailed workflows that you can use to launch personalized campaigns to reach all of your customers across the channels they prefer, with cohesive and consistent messaging throughout.

Your cross-channel marketing solution should:

• Customize workflows to include the channels customers most frequently engage with. Your solution should optimize your channel delivery based on the channels each segment interacts with. For instance, if one group of customers rarely opens emails but always reads SMS messages, your campaigns can default to SMS messaging as the first point of contact and eliminate email marketing from the mix.
• Launch real-time triggered campaigns based on customer interactions. If a customer engages with your brand through one of your channels, you should be able to launch a real-time campaign to help convert them or enhance their customer experience. For example, if a customer is looking at products on your mobile app, you can send them a promotional offer via in-app messaging, knowing they’re more likely to see it immediately. If they don’t redeem the offer, you can follow up later with a push notification or an SMS message.
• Personalize the content of your messages based on user behavior, purchase history, and demographic data. When you launch a campaign, you can increase engagement by ensuring that the content is customized to each specific user. That might mean including their name in the message and/or subject line, customizing send time based on their region and typical open time, and including curated product recommendations that are similar to products they’ve purchased in the past. All of these elements will help you build trust and show your customers that you understand them.

Summarizing Cross-Channel Campaign Management

Today’s brands know that cross-channel campaigns are essential for driving engagement through the full customer lifecycle—all the way from initial awareness to education to conversion and, finally, the post-purchase cycle. By adopting a streamlined solution that enables you to reach, track, and analyze your customers across all of your various marketing channels in one centralized location, you’ll be able to deliver a seamless customer experience and gain access to rich data insights to help you boost revenue and customer retention.