In today’s customer-centric landscape, brands can’t afford to operate in silos. Customers expect a connected experience no matter where they interact—whether that’s in an app, on a website, through an email or in-store. Cross-channel marketing makes this possible, combining data, messaging and timing at each touchpoint to drive higher customer engagement and conversions.
Key Takeaways:
- Cross-channel marketing unifies customer interactions across multiple channels into one cohesive journey.
- A strong cross-channel marketing strategy drives satisfaction, loyalty and conversions.
- Multichannel marketing uses multiple indirect channels, whereas cross-channel combines them strategically.
- Mobile is the centerpiece of a cross-channel marketing strategy.
- Personalization and audience segmentation are key to delivering relevant and timely content to your customers.
What Is Cross-Channel Marketing?
Cross-channel marketing is the practice of engaging customers on their preferred channels—email, SMS, web, app, push notifications and mobile wallets 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.
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. For example, if a retail brand sees a customer browsing a product on Instagram, they can send a personalized email with recommendations, followed by an SMS highlighting an in-store discount to drive purchases.
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
| Multichannel Marketing | Cross-Channel Marketing |
|---|---|
| Channels operate in silos | Channels are connected |
| Inconsistent messaging | Unified messaging |
| Disconnected customer experiences | Cohesive customer journey |
| Ex: A customer gets an email about a sale and a push notification with a different offer at the same time | Ex: A customer views an item online, gets an email reminder, then an SMS with a personalized offer |
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
The Evolution of Cross-Channel Marketing
Cross-channel marketing has evolved with technological advancements and increasing consumer demands. Initially, multichannel was the norm. Brands managed channels (email, web, social) in isolation, leading to fragmented customer experiences and a focus on broad messaging rather than the customer journey.
The proliferation of devices and touchpoints raised the stakes for brands, demanding more fluid experiences that follow customers wherever they go. Marketers began optimizing the entire customer journey, building seamless experiences that guide customers to value with advanced analytics to unify customer data.
Today, cross-channel marketing emphasizes intelligent orchestration. Real-time data fuels hyper-personalized experiences across every touchpoint, anticipating needs and proactively engaging customers with the right message, on the right channel, at the right time.
Looking ahead, emerging channels, such as IoT devices, connected TV (CTV) and voice assistants, expand opportunities for brands to reach new customers and create more connected experiences.
The Desired Outcomes of a Good Cross-Channel Marketing Strategy
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.
Repeatable 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.
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. For example, use a push notification to send an abandoned cart reminder, encouraging customers to pick up where they left off.
SMS
SMS delivers short and timely messages to your mobile users, complementing other channels by reinforcing your message concisely and directly. In practice, you could send a text with a limited-time discount code or a same-day appointment reminder to keep customers informed.
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. Follow up a push notification about a sale with an email showcasing personalized recommendations. This flexibility helps customers reach their goals more quickly, at their own pace and on their own terms.
Web
Given that roughly 3 out of every 4 website visits happen on a mobile device, brands can’t afford to overlook the 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 incorporating story-like content to engage younger generations.
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.
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.
The Benefits of Cross-Channel Marketing
Cross-channel marketing involves every channel working together to create a unified experience for your customers. With a cross-channel marketing strategy, you can drive higher satisfaction, stronger customer loyalty, and more opportunities to convert.
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.
Repeatable 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. Providing personalized experiences with cross-channel marketing can increase conversions by 24% and lead to higher lifetime customer value.
Overcoming Cross-Channel Marketing Challenges
Many brands continue to struggle with creating and executing 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.
Successful brands prioritize aligning the customer journey by goals rather than by channels, breaking down silos and integrating interactions at every touchpoint. They utilize a customer data platform to effectively unify cross-channel data.
Address Bandwidth and Resource 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.
Essential Components of a Cross-Channel Marketing Strategy
A cohesive cross-channel marketing strategy is crucial for creating a seamless customer experience. Here are the essential components of a cross-channel marketing strategy to drive customer engagement and conversions.
1. Unified Customer Profile
A successful cross-channel marketing strategy begins with a unified customer profile, which integrates data from various touchpoints to provide a comprehensive and accurate view of customer preferences and behaviors.
Brands should consolidate customer data from various sources into a centralized customer data platform to make more informed decisions and deliver a seamless, cross-channel experience.
2. 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. AI-powered tools can automatically tailor content to users’ location, behavior and preferences to keep content aligned at each touch point.
3. Integrated Platforms
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. For example, Airship’s customer experience solutions allow brands to coordinate messaging, automate workflows and distribute content across channels.
4. 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 experimental mindset enables the continual optimization of your cross-channel strategies to enhance customer loyalty and satisfaction, while maximizing conversions. For example, leverage AI to gather real-time insights to tailor content at each touch point.
5. 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 with modern analytical techniques, such as multi-touch attribution and predictive analytics, to accurately measure conversion uplift and assess the real impact of your programs.
Best Practices for Cross-Channel Marketing
Successful cross-channel marketing necessitates a clear, strategic approach to engaging with customers across various channels. Here are the best practices for cross-channel marketing:
Map the Customer Journey
Understanding the customer journey is the foundation of effective cross-channel marketing. Mapping the customer journey allows brands to anticipate customer needs and deliver personalized messaging tailored to where customers are on their buying journey.
With Airship’s Journeys AI, you can visualize and automate customer journeys to ensure each customer interaction is timely and relevant.
Segment Audiences Based on Behaviors and Preferences
Not every message is relevant to every customer. Audience segmentation enables brands to categorize customers based on their behaviors and preferences, delivering relevant content and fostering better engagement within each segment.
Use Personalized Messaging Tailored to Individual Needs
Personalized messaging goes beyond greeting a customer by their first name; it requires real-time data, behavioral insights and preferences to deliver the right message at the right moment. This approach makes each interaction feel relevant and intentional.
Leverage Automation for Efficient Campaign Execution
Automation takes the heavy lifting out of running cross-channel marketing campaigns. With automation, you can send messages at the right time across multiple channels without having to do everything manually.
Continuously Optimize Campaigns With Data and Experimentation
Cross-channel marketing isn’t “set it and forget it.” By tracking performance, testing different approaches and experimenting with messaging, you can learn what works best for your audience.
Modern Cross-Channel Marketing Trends
Cross-channel marketing is moving fast. Brands are relying on AI and automation for real-time automation, predictive analytics and personalization to create a unified customer experience across channels. At the same time, privacy-first strategies and cookie deprecation are changing the way customer data is collected and used.
AI-Powered Real-Time Personalization
AI-powered personalization analyzes real-time data to create tailored content for each customer’s activity and location, rather than sending the same message to everyone. For example, if you see a customer viewing a product on your website, you can send an automatic push notification or email with personalized recommendations.
Automation Capabilities
AI automates workflows to free up time for strategy and creative work. For example, AI can automatically allocate budget to high-budget marketing channels or pause underperforming paid campaigns to maximize ROI.
Generative AI Applications
Generative AI allows personalization at scale, from dynamic email copy to in-app messages or social ads. For example, generative AI can create different versions of content without manual intervention.
Privacy and Cookieless Solutions
With growing concerns over data privacy and the decline of third-party cookies, brands must adapt to collect and use customer data responsibly. Capture and manage data through a consent management platform, prioritizing tracking of first-party and zero-party data to create personalized experiences without compromising privacy.
Tools for Effective Cross-Channel Marketing
There are numerous tools available for effective cross-channel marketing. Platforms like Mailchimp help with email campaigns, Google Ads drives paid reach and other automation platforms manage workflows across channels.
Airship goes beyond basic automation by offering advanced audience segmentation, personalized messaging and real-time analytics, helping brands scale effectively.
Unlock More Value From Cross-Channel Marketing With Airship
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.
Unified App + Web Experiences
Our one-of-a-kind Experience Editors empower 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.
Coordinated Channel Messaging
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.
Data Collection and 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.
Real-World Cross-Channel Marketing Campaigns
The following examples offer inspiration from the front lines of customer experience innovation to help you understand what’s now possible with the right tools in hand to bring cross-channel marketing to life.
Carrefour Boosts Content Engagement With Real-Time Updates
As price sensitivity skyrockets, retailers need to keep their customers informed with the most up-to-date information — potentially a make-or-break factor in clinching a sale over a competitor. For global retailer Carrefour, this meant delivering all the real-time information customers needed to check items they needed (or may not know they needed) off their shopping list.
The brand introduced a selection of offers that dynamically adapted to customer location and in-store inventories in real-time across channels, including app, push, message center, email and SMS.
Hawaiian Airlines Streamlines the End-to-End Day-of Travel Journey
With rising customer expectations for frictionless day-of travel experiences, Hawaiian Airlines revamped its customer experience strategy with a unified, cross-channel approach, offering all of the real-time information passengers need throughout their day to feel ready for travel.
From targeted in-app messaging encouraging mobile wallet adoption to real-time flight updates via Live Activities, Hawaiian put customers in control of their own journey and eliminated the far too common friction points that can make or break a travel day.
bol Scales Personalized Product Recommendations
Today, most retailers go beyond addressing customers by first name—the least valued personalization—to deliver more targeted promotions. But many still struggle to do so consistently across channels and at the scale customers now expect.
To create a unique selling proposition for its app, online marketplace bol encouraged customers to share their interests in products and, in turn, receive exclusive alerts across preferred channels when those products were discounted. This was positioned as a unique, app-exclusive feature to attract new users and increase opt-ins.
Getting Started With Cross-Channel Marketing
Cross-channel marketing is simple, but the key is to follow a structured approach. Here’s a step-by-step guide to getting started with cross-channel marketing:
- Know Your Audience: Look at demographic data, past behaviors and preferences to understand who you’re speaking to and what they care about.
- Map the Customer Journey: Understand where and how customers engage with your brand to position your messaging effectively.
- Select the Most Relevant Channels: Prioritize the channels that are most relevant to your audience.
- Develop Consistent Messaging: Create content aligned with your brand’s voice that adapts to each channel, maintaining a unified experience.
- Leverage Automation and AI: Use automation tools to schedule campaigns and take personalization one step further.
- Launch and Monitor Performance: After launching your campaign, track engagement and conversion rates to monitor its performance.
- Iterate and Optimize: Always test and refine your approaches to create a stronger, more efficient campaign.
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.