Marketing campaign management has always been a difficult task. It requires careful planning, smart allocation of resources, and a solid understanding of customer behavior.
However, in a world where people use dozens of channels to interact with brands, building and managing successful campaigns becomes that much harder. The main objective of cross-channel campaign management is to simplify and streamline this process using reliable customer data, smart automation strategies, and versatile and user-friendly marketing tools.
In this guide, you’ll learn how to do that using Insider — our AI-native platform for creating personalized cross-channel customer experiences. We’ll also explore real-life examples of cross-channel marketing and campaign management done well.
Organizations like Adidas, Allianz, Samsung, Puma, MAC Cosmetics. and many other industries use Insider to unify their customer data and deliver individualized experiences across 12+ channels.
To learn more about Insider, book a demo with our team or try the platform yourself.
What is cross-channel management and why is it important?
Cross-channel campaign management (sometimes abbreviated as CCCM) is the process of building personalized marketing campaigns across a variety of channels. Its goal is to deliver timely, consistent, and relevant messages to customers across all brand touchpoints.
The process can be complex, especially for enterprise companies that have a massive customer base. It usually requires integrating customer data from disconnected systems, uncovering valuable insights, orchestrating cross-channel campaigns, and much more.
When done well, cross-channel campaign management enables you to meet (and even exceed) people’s expectations at every turn and drive customer loyalty. This is especially crucial today, as customers are:
- Using more channels than ever to interact with brands.
- Expecting a personalized experience with relevant information across all those channels.
In that sense, having a solid cross-channel marketing and management strategy is essential for both improving key metrics (like customer engagement, conversion rate, revenue, and acquisition costs) and keeping a consistent brand image.
The tools you need to build and manage cross-channel campaigns
Complexity is one of the biggest reasons brands struggle with cross-channel campaign management. For example, many marketing teams today use a whole ecosystem of solutions to reach customers, store their data, and analyze it, including:
- Channel-specific software, like email marketing platforms, push notification software, SMS tools, WhatsApp marketing tools, and so on.
- Customer relationship management systems (CRMs) and customer data platforms (CDPs).
- Analytics platforms.
- And more.
All of these tools are essential for successful cross-channel marketing. However, using a different provider for each one creates incredibly complex workflows and siloes off customer data, which prevents you from getting a clear picture of your customers’ journeys.
Another way to approach the process is by using a unified marketing platform built specifically for cross-channel scenarios. In the sections below, we’ll explore how you can use our platform to:
- Lay the foundation for successful cross-channel marketing by unifying your customer data and segmenting your target audience.
- Reaching customers where they’re at and building personalized cross-channel journeys for them from one place.
- Analyzing your results and optimizing your campaigns accordingly.
#1 Data unification
At the heart of cross-channel campaign management is clean and reliable customer data. Like we said, this data is usually scattered across systems, so the first step for most brands is to unify it into a convenient place.
The best way to do that is to use a CDP — a type of software built specifically for aggregating customer data from different sources. For example, Insider’s CDP can unify data from any online and offline source, including CRMs, CMSs, analytics tools, email marketing platforms, marketing automation solutions, social media tools, and so on.
This enables our platform to create detailed, 360-degree customer profiles like the one shown below,
The profiles contain everything you know about each customer — including their purchase history, website interactions, survey responses, channel reachability, and more.
This is the essential foundation for your cross-channel marketing efforts, as you can be sure they’ll always be powered by reliable insights, without missing relevant information about the buyer journey. Plus, the profiles get updated in real-time as customers interact with your brand, making them more detailed and accurate over time.
Note: If you’re interested, we explore this topic in more detail in our article on the 11 main CDP use cases for marketers.
Most CDPs also let you segment your audiences for each campaign. For example, with Insider, you can use 120+ traits and characteristics, including:
- Standard, which includes traits like devices, operating systems, locations, demographics, and more.
- Predefined, which are automatically created audiences, like cart and browser abandoners, leads, mobile app users, people who’ve interacted with your brand on a specific channel, and others.
- Predictive, which include things like likelihood to purchase or engage on a channel, potential customer lifetime value (CLTV), discount affinity, and more. This type of segmentation is possible thanks to our AI-powered intent engine. You can learn more on the topic in our complete guide to predictive marketing.
Once your data is unified, you can begin immediately implementing various useful tactics to improve your customers’ cross-channel experience. For example, you can use NPS score data from your customer service platform to put customers with grievances on a campaign suppression list to prevent contact fatigue and churn.
#2 Cross-channel campaign orchestration and personalization
With the foundation in place, can move on to engaging customers on the channels they’re using with relevant information. However, you have to do that strategically to deliver a cohesive cross-channel journey, instead of just random messages on different channels.
Again, a platform like Insider can help you do that from one place, thanks to its combination of broad channel access, personalization tools, and cross-channel journey builder.
Reach customers where they’re at with personalized content
Insider brings 12+ channels under one umbrella, including on-site, mobile app, email, push notifications, SMS, WhatsApp, and more. This broad channel access and our platform’s personalization capabilities enable you to:
- Show personalized product recommendations across your website and mobile app. Insider’s AI-powered Smart Recommender helps you improve conversion rates and drive revenue by delivering individualized product recommendations to every customer on your site. Phillips used this tool to achieve a 40% increase in conversion rates.
- Add various engaging elements to your site to generate more leads and sales. For example, you can use ready-made templates to add social proof to increase trust, purchase progress bars to stimulate purchase completions, countdown timers to induce urgency, gamification elements to generate more leads, and much more. PUMA used many of these techniques to reduce bounce rates and generate a 27% conversion rate increase.
- Build highly personalized email campaigns. Insider gives you the freedom to completely personalize each email in your campaigns with relevant product recommendations, cart reminders, send-time optimization, and much more. Remix used Insider’s personalized emails and automation capabilities to increase first purchases by 104% compared to the previous quarter.
- Extend your reach to messaging channels like SMS, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger. Insider enables you to send all sorts of personalized messages on these channels, including price drop and back-in-stock alerts, event reminders, and more. For WhatsApp, you can even create end-to-end buying experiences inside the app. Vogacloset used Insider’s WhatsApp functionality to increase their conversion rates and achieve a 30x ROI.
- Target your customer segments with relevant ads across social media and search engines. As we mentioned, Insider lets you build extremely detailed customer segments. Thanks to our integrations with Google, Facebook, and TikTok, you can then target those segments with online ads based on their previous and predicted behaviors. Pierre Cardin used this strategy to reduce cost per acquisition (CPA) by 67%.
Put simply, you can count on Insider to reach customers where they’re at with relevant content, messaging, and product recommendations based on their wants and needs. For a deeper dive into this topic, check out our guide to achieving personalization at scale.
Orchestrate consistent journeys across all channels
Besides reaching customers on every individual channel they’re using, you also need to ensure their journey across all touchpoints is consistent. This is an essential part of the process, as it helps you move from traditional multichannel marketing to a holistic, unified, and personalized cross-channel approach.
Insider lets you do this with Architect — a versatile customer journey builder and marketing automation solution. Architect is an AI-powered solution that you can use to build all sorts of journeys and complex cross-channel marketing campaigns, like:
- Simple email flows that welcome new leads and guide them to their first purchase.
- Price drop or back-in-store campaigns for products that customers have shown interest in.
- Upsell and cross-sell campaigns across email and messaging channels.
- And much more.
The key here is that each journey is personalized to the customer’s needs and preferences. You’re also in full control of how each journey develops by setting action-based triggers, conditions, wait times, and much more.
For example, you can create a cross-channel campaign that automatically sends a personalized email after a customer visits a product on your site. For customers who don’t engage with your email, you can have Insider send a message on another available channel after a certain number of hours or days.
This is all controlled through a user-friendly drag-and-drop editor, so there’s no need to do any coding to set up cross-channel journeys. Additionally, you have plenty of AI-powered features at your disposal that can save you time and effort by optimizing different aspects of your cross-channel campaigns, like:
- Channel selection: The Next-Best Channel feature automatically selects which touchpoint to use, based on each recipient’s behaviors. It’s very useful when you’re not sure how to start or continue a campaign beyond a certain point.
