Email Marketing Tips to Power-up your Cross Channel Strategy
What is cross channel marketing strategy?
Cross-channel marketing is a customer-centric digital marketing method that aims to provide customers with a consistent and uniform experience across multiple digital platforms. As interaction with customers occurs simultaneously across different mediums, it helps the brand to create customer journeys across different channels.
This customer-focused digital marketing technique is used by B2B and B2C marketers around the world to provide an integrated experience across all paid, owned, earned media, and digital experiences. Cross-channel marketing can be a little intimidating but is one of the most powerful ways to design your marketing strategy and implement data to achieve your goals.
Cross-channel marketing combines multiple methods to promote the brand and ensure that leads smoothly progress into prospects from one stage of the sales funnel to the next.
How does cross-channel marketing work?
A cross-channel marketing strategy creates a coordinated customer journey for your target audience. Markets synchronize channels to design a message that leads the customer from one channel to the other, addressing his pain points through every step of the sale journey. This engagement at different touchpoints assists the brands to offer a personalized experience, leading to increased customer loyalty and eventually more sales.
Did you know?
Cross channel marketing is similar to multi-channel marketing.
Both enhance customer communication using different digital channels. They also pass data between channels to create a seamless customer experience, creating a ‘cross-over’ between the channels. This makes multi-channel and cross-channel marketing quite on the same lines.
In other words, a multi-channel marketing campaign might not be cross-channel as it might not deliver a uniform message and intent to solve pain points, but a cross-channel campaign is always multi-channel.
A study of 46,000 people showed that 73 percent of shoppers buy from more than one channel.
Why is cross-channel marketing important?
Today, as consumers are getting more digitally inclined and more connected via technology than ever before, it has become important for brands to reform their approach.
Brands are finding it challenging to cut through the noise and reach the right consumers at the right time. Cross-channel marketing allows brands to seamlessly communicate with consumers across multiple touchpoints leading to higher conversions and sales.
This is how cross channel marketing helps-
1. Optimize the customer journey
Cross-channel marketing helps brands to apply a holistic view of the customer journey to boost sales. It’s been shown that cross-channel campaigns can improve marketing budget efficiencies by 15 to 20 percent, simply by making marketing a reflection of customer actions.
A marketer must be where the customers and prospects are. In an increasingly connected world, cross-channel marketing ensures that marketing messages aren’t fragmented. Rather a unified message goes a long way in establishing a brand across niche as well as global markets.
2. Boost customer/brand engagement
Multi-channel customers are integral to any business. Informative and interesting interactions build an emotional connection between consumers and brands which often decide if an ideal target will convert into a paid customer. If you want to drive profitable engagement, you have to put your brand in places where your customers are looking for you.
Cross-channel marketing enables you to use strategic insights to encourage people to interact with your brand, which is going to help build engagement.
3. Build a brand story for better relationships
Cross-channel marketing assures additional visibility, allowing marketers to create a stronger brand presence and also drive customer loyalty.
For example, Apple has brick & mortar stores, a clean website, TV commercials, and digital ads. By sticking to a consistent style and messaging, they can maintain a consistent look and deliver a uniform message simultaneously.
Tips to creating a cross channel marketing strategy
Create buyer personas
The buyer personas are the representation of your ideal customer. The personas are made after a lot of research and data from existing customers. The main aim of making client profiles is to understand or relate to a target audience if you want to market your products and services in the right way. With a buyer’s persona, you will get a better idea of the audience’s needs, desires, preferences, behaviors, buying habits, pain points, and preferred modes of communication.
Use channels that work well together
Since it is a must to use at least two or more channels for digital marketing. Cross channel marketing is the ability for brands to connect with their customers on a variety of different communication channels such as email, social media, SMS, mobile apps, and more.
You need to understand that not all channels go with each other. So, you need to choose channels through which your audience interacts the most with your brand. The channels that complement each other such as – retail store/mobile, TV/mobile, computer/TV, or computer/mobile.
Unify your data
With the help of a customer data platform (CDP) to store and analyze data, drive those follow-up ads, and ensure they appeal to a customer. Having a 360-degree view of your customers, then you can combine your third-party data, second-party, and first-party data in CDP will help you to capture, track and analyze your leads’ touchpoints. By doing this, digital marketers can create successful campaigns, reach goals and target strategies unavailable for the rest of the competitors in the niche.
Provide specific content to specific buyers’ journey
A customer journey usually has many touchpoints and every touchpoint requires a different type of content. So, this includes designing content specifically for individuals based on their consumer habits. So that means that your content strategy must align with the journey your customer takes.
For example, when a customer abandons their cart, you can send out an email that offers them an exclusive deal. While the client who subscribes to your newsletter or purchases your product gets a thank you email.
Invest in email and social media marketing
Email and social media are two of the most crucial channels that anyone needs to invest in because they allow you to take advantage of visuals to interact with your audience. They can also help your company engage directly with their target audience which may not be possible with other channels. With email and social media campaigns, you can increase your brand awareness and conversation rates. You can also do a paid promotion on social media platforms and direct more traffic to your website.
Provide good customer support
According to a study over 76% of customers said that it’s easy to switch brands to find ones that match their expectations. Your customer support must be enough so that it solves all their problems related to your brand or its products and services. Otherwise, there is a high chance of customers moving on to another brand that provides better customer support. To ensure that you don’t lose out on customers, you have made a customer support team available at all times. This will not improve their satisfaction, but also build a trustworthy relationship as they will feel respected and valued.
Use email marketing to power up your cross-channel strategy
Email continues to outperform other marketing channels by a long way, at least in the B2B sector. To attract a larger audience and make your marketing a hit, you can analyze the results of your email marketing campaigns and use the insights to fuel your cross-channel strategy.
This is how you can utilize your email marketing campaigns to boost cross-channel strategy-
Step 1- Plan an email marketing campaign based on data
Great emails require a solid foundation. Hence, it is important to fine-tune your email pre-send process, including-
- Plan your emails – You should decide your email goal, objective, content, and also the audience you want to reach out to.
- Create curated content – Make sure to add a human touch to your content and personalize, if possible, this will help you build a relationship with your target audience.
- Add Graphics design – Add email graphic elements to your email, this can also include images videos, gifs, or memes, adding them will make the email more attractive.
- Coding and development – Make your emails accessible to the recipients or they may not take the intended action.
- Setting up email service provider – There are several email service providers with their own unique capabilities, choose the one that best fits your needs.
- Test your emails – A/B test your email to remove errors like display issues, typos, broken links, and inbox placement.
- Get feedback or reviews on emails – You can also send test emails to your friends and family before sending the campaigns, the feedback you get will help you to design better emails.
Step 2: Utilize data-driven insights to improve future email campaigns
When you run an email marketing campaign, ensure to track and analyze the activity. You can also request your email service provider for engagement metrics using different tools like Google Analytics. With the right analytics insights at your disposal, you can uncover strategic data which will help you-
- Segment your target audience– To check if your emails are reaching the right audience, analyze the open rate and other vital factors of the email marketing campaign. This will help you understand if you are targeting the right audience or not. You can also tweak your targeting strategy and look into the people who did engage. You can convert this audience into your prospects.
- Implement a content strategy– Analyze the emails that have generated a good response. You can use those as a template or reference to deliver a similar type of marketing content and nurture them with the appropriate information in the next step.
- Design and development– Emails that include interactive design elements and layouts get your audience clicking. Gamification in emails, emails with CTAs, and other clickable icons that lead to the different online presence of the brand are highly in vogue now. The design also matters depending on which server your reader is loaded. For example- emails sent on Gmail versus the emails sent on Outlook must have different layouts for a personalized touch.
Step 3: Share the marketing insights with your employees
By sharing the insights, you derive from your email campaigns to different marketing teams, you enable them to understand the target audience. Fuel your company’s cross-channel strategy with these insights. You can also implement routines like the ones mentioned below to amp up your cross-channel marketing strategy. You can implement routines such as –
- Increasing the accessibility of email reporting dashboards
- Share insights from your campaign learning
- Set up recurring meetings with the decision-makers across marketing channels
Here is an example to understand the importance of email marketing for cross channel marketing-
At Litmus an email design trend got great engagement in their fortnightly newsletter. When this information was shared with the social and advertising teams, they created social and paid media campaigns on the same blog post. Various snippets from the blog post were shared across social media platforms in the form of videos, photos, memes, and other information. This doubled the average click-through rates in those channels!
Step 4: Increase the size of your email list
You can increase the size of your email list with exclusive social media groups because it will increase company interactivity with their prospective customers. This can help boost your company’s engagement and develop a trustworthy relationship with your leads. Emails and social media platforms allow a greater degree of interactivity. One of the ways you can do this is by offering your email readers an opportunity to join an exclusive Facebook group, where they can access extra valuable content.
You can start by referring two or more additional people to your subscriber list first. While the others will follow them and subscribe over time. This way you can grow your overall subscriber list but you’ll also establish another platform customers can use to engage with your brand. It’s a win-win from both an email marketing and social media channels standpoint. So next time remember to use them both together for your advantage
Endnote
Remember, as you reach out to your customers across multiple marketing channels, you have the option to offer them a consistent experience. Nurture them with the right message in the right way to get the maximum benefits.
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