What is Cross-Channel Marketing?
Today’s consumers expect brands to meet them with seamless, unified experiences wherever they choose to interact — email, SMS, web, app, push notifications and even mobile wallets. Cross-channel marketing empowers brands to satisfy this demand by engaging customers on their channels of choice with integrated and personalized experiences that guide them to value.
Unlike fragmented multichannel approaches, cross-channel focuses on creating seamless journeys that adapt to customer preferences. Imagine a customer browsing a product on your website; they then receive a personalized email reminder, followed by a timely SMS with a special offer. This interconnected experience is the essence of cross-channel marketing.
Why is Cross-Channel Marketing Important?
Digital evolution is relentless. Your customers move across an ever-growing number of channels, platforms and devices within hours — sometimes even minutes. According to Salesforce, customers use an average of nine touchpoints to engage with companies. And, they expect you to deliver consistent, unique value everywhere.
A cross-channel marketing strategy helps you reach customers in a way that matches how they consume content today — carrying their context and preferences across channels and destinations.
There’s tremendous value in this approach. You can reinforce your messaging, scale data collection and guide customers to take high-value actions across apps, websites and even physical locations. As growth-focused teams face more pressure to prove ROI, cross-channel marketing empowers you to allocate resources and efforts where they will have the most impact.
Cross-Channel Marketing vs. Multichannel Marketing: Know the Difference
Marketers have coined different terms to refer to digital customer engagement strategies. You’ve probably heard these terms and maybe even used them interchangeably. Many do. But there are fundamental differences to note between cross-channel marketing and multichannel marketing:
- Multichannel marketing uses multiple indirect or direct channels to connect with customers, but each is approached independently without any messaging and strategy coordination. Many brands take this approach to simplify their martech stack, but it can create siloed, fragmented and disconnected experiences.
- Cross-channel marketing integrates strategies and messages across multiple channels to create a cohesive and unified customer experience. For example, a customer who views a product on your website may receive an email reminder about the item, followed by a targeted SMS message.
Multichannel vs. Cross-Channel Marketing
Why Mobile is Central to Cross-Channel Marketing Strategy
Mobile is where your customers live, with the average mobile user spending 56% of their day browsing the internet on their smartphone. If you aren’t designing your cross-channel marketing strategy around mobile-first customers, you’re missing out on a big opportunity to maximize engagement and conversions. Key mobile channels include:
Push Notifications
Push notifications are central to capturing customers’ attention on today’s most valuable and visible real estate: smartphone lock screens. More importantly, notifications offer the simplicity, immediacy and relevancy that today’s consumers expect.
SMS
SMS delivers short and timely messages to your mobile users, complementing other channels by reinforcing your message concisely and directly.
While push notifications and SMS are ephemeral — highly visible but quickly buried on smartphone lock screens — email provides a repository for customers to search for specific brand communications whenever they want. This flexibility helps customers reach their goals faster, in their own time and on their own terms.
Mobile Wallet
Built directly into mobile phones without the need to download an app or visit a website, mobile wallet enable brands to deliver value and convenience — coupons, e-tickets, loyalty cards and other related offers — to customers on their smartphone lock screens.
Web
Given that roughly 3 out of every 4 website visits happen on a mobile device, brands can’t afford to overlook web as a primary conversion destination. Deliver personalized and engaging experiences at scale with a mobile-friendly web experience. Consider introducing embedded content that doesn’t disrupt the browsing experience or incorporate story-like content to engage younger generations.
Mobile App
As the other primary destination for customers, your mobile app should offer a centralized place for taking high-value actions — browsing content, referring friends, sharing feedback, making purchases and more. Guide customers through the app lifecycle with custom onboarding experiences, automated personalized notifications, in-app messaging and offers, native surveys and more.
How Does a Cross-Channel Marketing Strategy Support Business KPIs?
Higher Customer Satisfaction
Cross-channel marketing significantly boosts customer satisfaction by delivering a consistent, personalized and seamless experience across all touchpoints. By integrating customer interactions across various channels, brands can scale first-party and zero-party data collection to deliver more timely and tailored messaging, while helping them achieve their goals faster. The end goal is to make customers feel valued and understood, leading to greater satisfaction and increased customer lifetime value.
Sustained Customer Loyalty
Seamless and personalized customer experiences are the cornerstone of brand loyalty today. The best way to achieve this is by empowering customers to proactively share what they want and need, as well as how and where they want to be engaged — via Preference Center, for example. This has become more imperative as reliance on third-party data dwindles, and brands embrace first- and zero-party data strategies. You can deliver messages when and where your customers will be most receptive to it, tailoring content to their specified interests and needs. This approach fosters stronger connections, builds trust and paves the way for long-term loyalty.
Repeat Conversions
Cross-channel marketing helps you stay top-of-mind for customers through targeted messaging and experiences. With insight into how customers are engaging with your brand across channels, you can meet them where they are with tailored messaging and offers to guide them to value. Capitalizing on these moments of attention with experiences that address their unique needs and preferences will maximize conversions.
Overcoming Cross-Channel Marketing Challenges
Many brands still struggle to create and execute an effective cross-channel marketing strategy. Let’s break down some common challenges and how you can address them.
Break Down Channel Silos
Customers expect brands to show them they know them everywhere they interact. But, according to Airship and EMARKETER’s recent “State of Mobile Strategy” report, 47.5% say multiple teams or an agency manage the various components of their mobile strategy. With channels often managed by different teams, brands struggle to build a single source of truth and deliver unified interactions that consider all previous engagement. The result is disjointed experiences that don’t move customers toward a set objective. Winning brands will focus on orchestrating the customer journey by goal, not by channel, to break down silos and weave together interactions at every touchpoint.
Address Bandwidth and Resources Constraints
Creating high-quality, personalized content at scale for multiple channels can be overwhelming, especially as consumer preferences and behaviors evolve daily. Marketers and product owners are also often reliant on developers to implement and adapt app and web experiences that support cross-channel marketing efforts. No-code capabilities and generative AI unlock the organizational agility necessary for your entire team to create, deploy and optimize cross-channel messaging and interactions to maximize results.
Build a Framework for Data Collection and Enrichment
According to Mckinsey, 71% of consumers prefer a personalized experience from their favorite brands — not just in one channel, but everywhere they choose to engage with a brand. As reliance on third-party data dwindles, personalizing the end-to-end customer experience has become more challenging. Data privacy regulations have placed a keen focus on collecting zero- and first-party data via owned channels and destinations. Marketers need a framework for collecting and applying customer data in their customer experience strategy to keep pace with evolving practices.
What Defines a Successful Cross-Channel Marketing Strategy?
Unified Customer Profiles
A successful cross-channel marketing strategy starts with a unified customer profile, integrating data from different touchpoints to offer a robust and accurate view of preferences and behaviors. Brands should consolidate customer data from different sources into one centralized platform to make more informed decisions and to deliver a seamless cross-channel experience.
Consistent Messaging
Consistent messaging is critical in cross-channel marketing. Content in each channel should be contextually-connected and work together to move customers toward a common goal, while being tailored to the nuances of each channel.
Integrated Martech
Storing and accessing customer data in different channels can make your cross-channel marketing efforts feel disjointed. Invest in a martech stack that can collect, manage and distribute data at the volume and speed required for decision-making and customer experience delivery today. This means prioritizing interoperability for data, orchestration and emerging AI capabilities.
Experimentation
What works for one marketing channel may not work for another. Embrace a culture of experimentation to optimize the end-to-end customer experience and learn what resonates most with your audience. Adopting an experimentation mindset allows for continual optimization of your cross-channel strategies to boost customer loyalty and satisfaction, while maximizing conversions.
Holistic Measurement
Like with any marketing strategy, measurement is key to evaluating the success of your marketing efforts. With cross-channel marketing, your brand has access to a holistic view of customer interactions across different touchpoints to review trends and patterns of customer behavior. Go beyond engagement metrics, leveraging control groups to accurately measure conversion uplift and assess the real impact of your programs.
How Airship Can Enhance Your Cross-Channel Marketing Strategy
Airship is the only customer experience platform empowering growth teams to create, test and optimize hyper-personalized and unified experiences across channels and destinations. Here’s how we help the world’s leading brands master cross-channel marketing to increase loyalty, customer lifetime value and revenue.
Journey Orchestration & Content Creation
Airship’s Journeys AI leverages responses to natural language prompts and their stated goals to instantly create a journey map and content for cross-channel messages and interactions. What used to take several hours, if not days, now takes moments, providing a head start on the creative process with complete journeys to easily edit and perfect. You can focus your time on experimentation and refinement, rather than creation. Journeys AI significantly accelerates time to value and scales customer insights through memorable experiences across channels and destinations.
Channel Coordination
The Airship Experience Platform offers brands a centralized place to build, coordinate, and send messages across all channels. You can choose the right channel coordination for your goals based on cost, performance or recent user behavior — optimizing for reach while reducing investments. It’s essential for creating meaningful, coordinated customer experiences and unlocking maximum value from every message. You can create a flexible channel strategy that not only meets your goals and delivers value for your customers, but can be easily adapted for maximum impact.
No-Code App and Web Experiences
Our one-of-a-kind Experience Editors empowers your entire team to easily create, deploy and optimize high-value experiences to drive opt-ins, user registrations, purchases, feature adoption, reviews, survey responses and more across app and the web — no coding or app updates required.
You can reach customers wherever they are and convert them using owned channels, reducing paid media spend and delivering the connected experiences that customers want.
Data Collection & Enrichment
Collect valuable zero-party data with Surveys, Forms and Preference Centers to gain deeper customer insights. Seamlessly sync customer data from your martech stack — external feeds, CDPs, data warehouses and data lakes — to create comprehensive user profiles.
As brands increasingly embrace AI to accelerate content creation and implement experimentation at scale, reliable and accurate data has become an imperative. To effectively harness the value of AI, brands need to train and optimize algorithms with data they can trust to represent their audience now and in the future. Airship’s Data Collection and Enrichment solutions enable you to create even more refined segments and deliver the most tailored content.
Experimentation & Measurement
Quickly test messages and experiences on small customer segments, receive real-time feedback and then launch the best ones to engage all your customers. With Airship’s Experimentation Hub, you can bring together all your experiments and tools in a single dashboard, including A/B & Multivariate Tests, Feature Flags and Holdout Experiments. Anyone in your organization can use it to visualize, test and optimize experiences.
Hawaiian Airlines: A Cross-Channel Marketing Success Story
You don’t have to take our word for it. The success of our customers’ cross-channel strategies highlights the value of this approach.
Consider Hawaiian Airlines, Hawaii’s largest and longest-serving airline. The brand set out to transform the customer experience with a unified, omnichannel strategy, delivering real-time information to travelers when and where it matters most. The goal? Improve customer satisfaction, drive greater adoption among new customers and increase retention.
The brand partnered with Airship to:
- Grow App Usage with Wallet: To drive engagement and improve customer satisfaction, Hawaiian Airlines launched Google Wallet boarding passes so they could reach all customers with highly visible, day-of-travel notifications.
- Deliver Targeted In-App Experiences to Boost Push Opt-Ins and Wallet Adoption: With an in-app automation campaign targeted to customers on Android devices, the airline educated about the feature and promoted its usage. It also launched a Scenes campaign, highlighting the new “Ready to Board” alert to encourage push opt-ins.
- Elevate Day-of-Travel with Live Activities: To convey real-time information to travelers, Hawaiian Airlines implemented Airship’s Live Activities feature during an internal IT hackathon. It was the first airline to launch Live Activities — taking only two weeks from inception to go-live in the app.
The Airship Experience Platform helped Hawaiian Airlines achieve a:
- 13% increase in year-over-year audience engagement
- 6.5X increase in customers registering on first app open
- 26% increase in Google Wallet adoption
- 23% increase in notification opt-in rates
Unlock More Value from Cross-Channel Marketing with Airship
We would love to hear about your priorities and conversion goals, and discuss how we can help you take your cross-channel marketing efforts to the next level. Book a meeting with our team of experts today.