GUIDE

The Ultimate Guide to Cross-Channel Marketing

The Secrets of Successful Cross-Channel Marketing

A well-executed cross-channel marketing solution, informed by actionable data, can lead to explosive growth. In fact, it’s the only way to keep pace with consumers’ ever-evolving online habits — and represents a prime opportunity to outperform your competitors. Consumers have demonstrated it themselves: a study of 46,000 people showed that 73% of shoppers buy from more than one channel.

What is Cross-Channel Marketing?

Like multi-channel marketing, cross-channel marketing leverages a multitude of marketing channels to communicate with your target audience. What separates the two is coordination. Whereas multi-channel marketing entails connecting in silos with customers using several communication methods, cross-channel marketing is designed to create a cohesive customer journey by integrating all customer touchpoints under one 360-degree marketing strategy and delivering consistent messaging across channels.

If you’re doing cross-channel marketing right, each channel supports and strengthens the others. While you can find some success relying solely on a single channel like email marketing or Google advertising, the majority of marketers are making greater use of cross-channel marketing to increase engagement and profitability. It makes sense: 45% of customers say they are likely to become repeat buyers of brands that personalize the cross-channel experience.

Six Reasons to Embrace Cross-Channel Marketing

1. Increase customer engagement, retention and conversion rates

Cross-channel marketing is critical  to optimizing customer engagement because it enables personalization that ties directly to a customer’s personal communication preferences.

2. Earn a better return on investment for your marketing budget

Businesses using cross-channel marketing see a far greater return on their marketing investment. ASOS was able to generate $77.5 million in incremental revenue working with Simon Data.

3. Gain stronger brand affinity and mindshare

When prospective customers encounter your brand in multiple places, it lives larger in their minds, which in turn increases brand recognition and brand loyalty.

4. Get (and use) better data

Use data better, then acquire new, better data — it’s a cycle of constant improvement. Cross-channel marketing attribution helps you pinpoint exactly what’s working, so you can automatically do more of it. Spend your resources where they can have the most impact.

5. Turbocharge your brick-and-mortar location

Nearly 75% of consumers investigate brands online before visiting a physical location, and cross-channel marketing campaigns generate about eight in 10 in-store visits. Since the COVID-19 outbreak, online orders with curbside pickup have also increased 208%.

6. Keep up with today’s on-the-go consumers

According to Google, 98% of users switch between devices in the same day, and 90% of multiple device owners switch between devices to complete individual tasks. With cross-channel marketing, you’re able to deliver a consistent message across all these channels, no matter where or how technology is being used.

Reimagining Cross-Channel Marketing with a Customer Data Platform

Let’s say, for example, a customer abandons a product in the shopping cart on your site. As part of a cross-channel marketing campaign powered by robust customer data, this customer might automatically receive a text message reminding them to complete the check-out process, as well as an email coupon for an additional 10% off. After their purchase, you might send them a direct-mail postcard thanking them for their purchase and suggesting other products they may enjoy. Each of these communications is personalized to the individual customer, and tracked to determine what works best. Through ongoing analysis of your ever-expanding data, you can continually hone your targeting and messaging for even more effective future campaigns.

So, how is it implemented? To deliver an optimized cross-channel marketing experience, you’ll need a Customer Data Platform, or CDP.  With a CDP, you benefit from:

Better customer segmentation based on increasingly detailed customer personas

Want to send an email to women who’ve spent more than $X in the last six months? No problem. Need to focus your campaign on men between 18 and 35 who usually open your emails and are most likely to make a purchase? Easy.

Better customer segmentation comes from focusing not only on who your customers are but what they do. Cross-channel marketing with a CDP allows you to track and measure the way different customers and groups of customers interact with your business, and instantly target them across multiple channels, matching the more free-flowing, organic way that customers actually behave.

Better cross-channel marketing attribution.

Companies with better cross-channel marketing attribution achieve 15% to 20% greater marketing budget efficiency by avoiding tactics proven not to work. With a CDP platform, hard data tells you not only what’s working, but which strategies are most effective for each audience.

Better metrics for data analysis.

With a CDP, you gain far richer insights into the cross-channel customer journey because you can pull data from a wide variety of sources, including past purchasing history, internet browsing history, social media engagement, and much more. Together, this information offers a clearer, deeper picture of who your customers are, how they’re interacting with your brand, and what will make — and keep — them happy.

With a CDP, this data collection and analysis can be automated and iterative, enabling your cross-channel marketing to perform better and better as your campaigns evolve.

Why Industry Leaders Choose Simon Data for Cross-Channel Marketing

CDPs are emerging as a response to customers’ increasingly interconnected digital lives and ever-expanding expectations of their preferred brands. But of course, not all customer data platforms are created equal.

No data gets left behind

In today’s increasingly competitive and online business environment, the actionability of data separates the average from the rockstar companies. While most businesses have some access to analytics, it’s often spread across several platforms, without integration. Simon Data combines a native CDP, marketing campaign orchestration engine and integrated message delivery into a single insight-to-execution platform.

Plays well with legacy marketing technology

By now, many marketers have adopted a multi-cloud marketing stack, and they need a customer data platform that works with what they’ve already built. Simon Data’s CDP expands the functionality of your existing tools and eases future migrations so you can ensure you’re making use of the world’s best data resource, no matter what other tools you’re working with.

Scales quickly

Today’s fastest-growing businesses make the most of online and offline marketing channels, subscription and e-commerce models, direct-to-consumer sales, and brick and mortar — and most lifecycle marketers are stuck with email service providers that only allow for rudimentarily targeted campaigns. Simon Data’s CDP, on the other hand, provides marketers a powerful engine for revenue growth by enabling deep and complex cross-channel customer journeys and leveraging predictive intelligence and experimentation for campaign optimization.

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