Modern day marketers have a lot of work to do, with an ever increasing number of ways to reach their prospects and customers. With internet making an enormous impact on consumer interaction and so many channels on offer, the consumers move from one channel to another during the researching and buying process.
Relying on a single marketing strategy limits the growth rate that you can achieve in your business. In such a scenario, cross channel marketing is a great option. Cross channel marketing is leveraging one marketing channel to support another one. It involves implementing the marketing campaigns in different channels like email marketing, mobile marketing, social networking etc. In this way, the prospective customers get exposed to various channels regardless of their locations.
How cross channel marketing helps in improving your ROI?
Email marketing is effective for building relationships with your customers. By using cross channel marketing software, you will be able to track the data regarding the behavior of your customers in the email marketing campaign.
You can also track which link the customers click on the newsletters and what they do in the targeted website. This helps in designing your marketing campaigns in the best ways possible.
Mobile marketing is ideal if your customers do not respond to your mails. Even if they are not responding to mobile marketing, they may respond well to SMS text messaging ads as these are short and straight to the point.
Mobile marketing is useful for alerting your subscribers about discounts, coupons, loyalty programs or contest you are organizing.
Therefore it is advisable for brands to improve their cross-channel marketing. Let us look at some of the reasons why they need to do so.
Cross-channel marketing is used for business objectives that are much more difficult to measure than revenue. It has a major impact on 'enhancing advocacy' as well. Using cross-channel marketing to enhance advocacy could be something as simple as including social media icons on a website or emails. It could also signify something that is as sophisticated as asking happy customers to leave a review on a third-party, industry-specific site.
- Improve customer retention
It is always advisable to retain your old customers. Cross-Channel marketing has a major impact on the customer retention. Abandoned cart emails are one of the most commonly used ways in which brands use multiple channels to improve retention.
Besides this, many marketers also use custom audiences on Google and Facebook to advertise to their existing customer base through search and social advertising.
Consistent messaging across channels is always worthwhile as it results in improved customer experience.
Cross-channel marketing also helps in building user confidence, setting correct expectations, and earning users' trust. Retargeting website visitors with relevant advertising is an effective way of using cross-channel marketing to improve conversions.
Cross channel marketing platform is the solution for companies who have a lot of customers that don’t complete the checkout process on their websites. It helps in understanding the behaviors of consumers better in each channel and learn how to reach out to them.
One can also observe which campaign is showing good performance and which one is not. You can then, put under-performing campaigns to a halt and resume the campaigns that are performing well.
Summary
As channels continue to evolve, the need to adopt a cross channel strategy becomes increasingly important as it gives the enterprises an opportunity to take full advantage of advertising and branding campaigns across many integrated channels.
Additionally, as adoption of new channels increases, the cost of participating in the channel rises, leaving less room to experiment. However, it is not as easy as it sounds. Therefore, the earlier companies start incorporating a cross channel strategy the greater the benefits that they enjoy like improved conversion rates, increased advocacy, and more customer retention.