Even though email continues to lead the marketing efforts of several businesses across the globe, it is not the only medium out there. Other marketing channels, such as SMS, are slowly but surely beginning to make their presence felt too. Hence, as a business, if you truly want your brand to scale the pinnacle of reach and visibility, it is important that you embrace a marketing approach that eliminates silos and focuses on delivering seamless customer experiences. In other words, hop right away onto the bandwagon of cross-channel marketing. If you are looking for someone to help you out in your email marketing efforts, you can hire an email marketing agency like Email Uplers to be your extended team.
And if you have already today we will be sharing with you a few tips that will breathe new life into your efforts. Read on to find out!
Keep Email At The Forefront
There’s a reason why email is the darling of businesses and marketers alike. A 3800% ROI and 4 billion user base are just the beginning of those arguments. Keeping email as the driving force of your cross-channel marketing efforts lets you steer traffic effortlessly to your remaining channels. All you have to do is embed their links in your emails and newsletters. Moreover, email can be used to implement personalization at scale. How, you ask? Courtesy of list segmentation- a practice where marketers divide their subscribers into different sections or “segments” based on various parameters such as age, occupation, gender, location, interests and preferences, past purchases, browsing history, and position in the sales funnel. This enables businesses to greet their customers with hyper-personalized and targeted messages, paving the path for increased engagement and interaction, and ultimately, higher sales.
For instance, take a look at this personalized email by Honey.
Another exciting prospect is triggered emails. As the name indicates, triggered emails are sent to your subscribers when they satisfy a certain pre-set condition or “trigger”. What this lets you do is send your customers the right message at the right time. Receiving a welcome email upon completing signup, a confirmation email immediately after completing a purchase, and a thank you email post submitting a feedback form are all examples of triggered emails.
Here’s one by Ipsy.
Step Into Your Customers’ Shoes
The only way you will ever be able to deliver the perfect experience is when you navigate the customer journey through their lenses. Marketers get so occupied with crafting the journeys that, more often than not, they overlook this invaluable practice. This exercise helps you identify all possible roadblocks and resistances and resolve them at the earliest. Besides improving the journey, it will also give you the opportunity of discovering other creative ways of obtaining customer information. For instance, say your present signup form is failing to generate a good number of leads. Now there might be multiple underlying reasons- lack of incentive, presence of too many input fields, absence of a strong headline, and the like. Only when you put yourself in the customers’ shoes, will you be able to arrive at the right conclusion.
Revolve Your Strategy Around Data
In 2000, a customer registered about 1-2 touchpoints with a brand before completing a transaction. In 2015, that number had already increased to 3-6. The conclusion of these arguments is that customer journeys are becoming more and more complex with every passing day. At present, the only way you can assert your dominance over your competitors is by keeping data at the core of your cross-channel marketing strategy. First, you need to focus on obtaining customer data in a compliant manner and then leveraging it to amplify the interconnectedness between your various marketing channels at play. Fortunately for you, collecting customer data now has become far more convenient compared to what it used to be a couple of decades ago. Since your audience interacts with you across multiple devices and platforms, you have the opportunity of gleaning valuable fragments of data pertaining to their identity, behavior, interests, and other such parameters. So what if the last couple of years have witnessed a severe crackdown being imposed on mining third-party data? It wasn’t a completely ethical means, to begin with. The future lies in gathering zero and first-party data and leveraging them to improve the performance of your campaigns.
Wrapping It Up
Cross-channel marketing is the future; the sooner you make the shift to it, the better will be your brand’s prospects in the long run. Implement the techniques used above and see your business soar to extraordinary heights of success!