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Cross Channel Marketing Meaning and Strategy Examples

Cross-channel marketing involves communication using different channels, and also entails passing data between channels to create a seamless customer experience. In this case, customers can ‘cross over’ between channels.

Brands adopting a cross-channel approach can offer their customers a more personalized customer experience.

You can take the information learned from every interaction a customer has with a brand and ensure that this information is carried through to future interactions on other platforms. This provides clear benefits to both the brand and the consumer.

For the consumer, this informative approach quickly equates to a more intuitive online experience. People will find that the brand proactively suggests products and ideas they like and uses data on past behavior to interact with them in the manner they prefer. Consumers will enjoy a seamless experience as they move between different devices and find that their overall impression of a brand is much improved.

For the brand, there are other important benefits to this strategy. Not only does this tailored approach help brands to convert more customers, but it also means spending less money per conversion. Using what a customer has already told a brand about their preferences can communicate with them in a more specific and targeted way. The chances of making a sale will therefore be dramatically improved.

Data is crucial in a cross-channel marketing strategy. The best strategies make full use of data to ensure that customers experience their brand in a consistent and clear way, no matter which channel they’re using. Interactions improve significantly as a result.

Cross-channel marketing means communicating with users while having each channel interact with each other. This “interaction” can come in many different forms. Let’s look at a few.

  • Cross-channel messaging campaigns, where a single campaign flow controls multiple channels. For example, when a user triggers a given event in a mobile app, they might be entered into a message campaign and receive a ping by either email or push notification, depending on the campaign’s settings. 
  • Consolidating analytics to develop a holistic view of your audience. Cross-channel analytics lets you collect data from several different sales channels and then consolidate them into a single data set. This could be useful for planning future campaigns based on past performance. 
  • Personalized messaging featuring data from other channels. For instance, if you have a retail app, you might want to deliver product recommendations for items similar to your customers’ most recent purchases. A cross-channel approach would take all recent purchases into account, including those made in brick-and-mortar stores.

Each channel interacts with the others in some way and in some cases, it might involve passing data back and forth to establish a unified data set for analytics. Also, it might involve pulling data from a central source and changing the campaign flow accordingly. The cross-channel approach to marketing means that no channel operates in a vacuum. Every message sent across any given track is informed by events that were triggered on the other media.

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