Cross-channel Marketing

What is cross-channel marketing?

Cross-channel marketing is a marketing campaign that engages with the customer across multiple devices (tablets, phones, desktop) and through multiple channels (email, push notifications, in-app messaging).

How do cross-channel campaigns work?

Cross-channel campaigns work by taking data from across multiple platforms and leveraging this to produce a marketing message that speaks to many different kinds of customers on various levels. This data can be used to help different channels and devices interact with each other, and therefore be used to power mobile marketing automation.

Using the Leanplum analytics platform, marketers can procure data on different types of customers based upon their demographic, user lifecycle stage, localization, technology enrichment and in-app behaviors. By collecting this data on a large scale, they can then create customer segments based upon shared attributes, for example, women aged 25-35 in certain geographical areas, or men who generally convert more often on certain days of the week.

This data can then be used to drive triggers for mobile marketing automation – for example, if marketers have information on when certain customers are likely to convert, then they can create automated cross-channel campaigns to target them during these key moments.

Using mobile personalization to its full potential

When customers are targeted based upon their own personal behaviors, they are far more likely to convert. For example, they may have historically converted when they were alerted to a product sale via an email campaign. Marketers can then use this information to target them on a more personal level, such as a push notification addressing them by name to remind them of a sale two or three days after the email campaign has been sent out.

Case study: co-ordinating email with mobile app engagement

In a 2018 Mobile Marketing Trends Report, Leanplum revealed that emails increase app engagement by 300 percent when combined with push notifications. The reasons for this were predominantly that email was found to encourage users to return to the app and re-engage, thereby targeting them at a key stage in the customer lifecycle – beyond the customer acquisition point, but before they have had a chance to go “dormant” or worse still, delete the app.

The study also found that users were conducting 40 percent more weekly sessions when they have opened email messages.

What are the advantages of cross-channel campaigns?

The above mentioned case study is just one example of how marketers can reach customers at multiple touchpoints, engaging with them not only via different channels, but also different devices. For example, they may read a promotional email on a desktop, before being prompted to re-engage with a mobile app thanks to a push notification.

By targeting customers via a multitude of channels and devices, marketers can ensure that not only are their messages being seen, they are being personalized and driving better engagement, thereby increasing conversion and customer retention rates.

What do cross-channel campaigns mean for marketers?

Of all the stages in the customer lifecycle, acquisition is the easiest. Customer retention is far costlier and considerably more challenging. Cross-channel campaigns increase engagement through personalization and help to give marketers better data to power further campaign decisions.