What is Cross-Channel Marketing and Why Should You Implement It?

To have an effective marketing strategy, you must understand your target audience and how they interact with brands to make buying decisions. In an all-digital world, consumers are bombarded with ads from businesses competing for their attention. How can you stand out? By observing where your potential customers are receiving information that influences their purchasing decisions.

Cross-channel marketing addresses this need by meeting your customers where they are. What exactly is cross-channel marketing? Cross-channel marketing is combining your separate marketing channels to create a logical progression for your target audience. The content on all of your channels needs to work together to provide context to the different messages your audience receives as they go from one channel to another.

However, being successful at cross-channel marketing involves more than just publishing content on your marketing channels. You must seamlessly align your content to create a unified experience, but it is worthwhile for brands to do so. Here are the top three benefits of cross-channel marketing:

1. Increased engagement. The average consumer sees so many ads in a day that they have gone “ad-blind” and are quick to block out all product ads and emails. Take a moment to reflect on your experience as a consumer. You may open your email in the morning and immediately delete all marketing emails without even reading the subject line.

However, if you can position your brand as a trusted source on a specific topic that is relevant to your audience, they will be much more receptive to an email or ad about that topic. Additionally, marketing campaigns that don’t have relevant content have an 83 percent lower response rate than campaigns with content tailored to a targeted audience. With cross-channel marketing strategies, you can monitor your customers’ interests and behavior on different platforms to implement personalized campaigns based on their actions.

2. Better insights. Cross-channel marketing will enable your team to not only execute powerful marketing strategies but also unify your data within a customer data platform. This will ultimately generate more meaningful insights into customer behaviors. Higher quality insights lead to greater opportunities to improve your sales, marketing and customer service for your customers. When you act on these insights, you are sure to delight your customers with a stellar customer experience. From there, you can continue to grow your customer base, and the possibilities are endless.

3. Increased customer loyalty. Cross-channel marketing enables your customers to choose how they want to get to know your brand. With multiple customer touchpoints, your customers have the opportunity to select which channel they prefer. Additionally, the more touchpoints you have, the more data you can collect to further improve your customers overall experience. By providing a top tier customer experience, your customers are much more likely to stick around. When you earn your customer’s trust by communicating that you genuinely want to help them through your marketing and customer service efforts, you will not only produce loyal customers, but brand advocates as well.