Cross-Channel Engagement

Harvard Business Review reports that 73% of customers use multiple channels during their shopping journey. Across those channels, your customers expect personal experiences with your brand. You’ve got their data－use it to engage with them on a new level.

Unfortunately, most organizations don’t have an effective cross-channel marketing strategy due to disorganized internal processes and a lack of support from their technology platforms. Regardless of how much effort they are putting into their campaigns, these inefficiencies create a poor experience for customers.

What is a Cross-Channel Strategy?

Marketers use a handful of outlets－at minimum－to reach their customers, including:

• Email
• Social media
• Web (website, paid ads)
• Mobile (SMS, push notifications, apps)

Most marketing teams are using a multi-channel strategy, leveraging two or more of these channels, but not focusing on creating consistent messaging from one to the next.

Cross-channel, or omnichannel, marketing takes multi-channel a step further. While multi-channel strategies leverage more than one platform, cross-channel strategies use them cohesively, using data to discover how they relate to and impact one another. It also means applying customer engagement as the focal point of the channel-to-channel approach. Organizations that use a thorough cross-channel strategy achieve a 91% higher year-over-year increase in customer retention, according to Aberdeen Omni-Channel Customer Care Research.

With the right technology in place, executing a powerful omnichannel strategy is possible.

Connecting the Dots to Engage Across Channels

In a lot of cases, an organization’s departments are siloed, working independently, leveraging different platforms and not sharing information with one another. Boston Consulting Group found that 80 percent of companies have inadequate cross-functional coordination. The result is a conflicting and disjointed experience for customers. When they have an interaction with your brand with no acknowledgement of previous interactions, it sends the message that you don’t care to understand them or provide them with a pleasing experience. The more seamless you can make the experience from one channel to the next, the more gratifying it will be for your audience. Thunderhead reports that 89% of customers have an improved opinion of businesses that remember previous interactions.

Technology offers holistic customer data, allowing you to offer interactions that take into account a customer’s individual experience with your brand, from previous purchases, to content engagement, to customer service conversations. All marketing channels are integrated in one solution, with data gathered in the same place, so marketers can create journeys based around customer engagement across touchpoints. Machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities are also being applied for marketing processes, as they use touchpoints to identify the most impactful way to engage your customers, automating responsive one-on-one conversations and journeys based on behavior and demographics.

In sum, crafting personalized campaigns for customers delivers more relevant and compelling content that will spur more loyalty across your customer base. You just need the technology to support your strategy. Brands that use data and technology to personalize customer conversations see a revenue increase of six to 10 percent.

Effective cross-channel engagement is possible; understanding your customers and using that understanding to create meaningful journeys is the first step, followed by getting the right tools in place. Maropost automates marketing processes, leveraging data to maximize efficiency across the journey and provide a personal experience for every customer.

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