If you’re a marketer, think back to when you were a kid. You probably had favorite toys and clothing brands that you loved to play with and wear. Now imagine if those brands could remember all the things you like, want, or need. Imagine if they could tailor their marketing messages to fit your specific needs in real-time.
That’s the promise of multichannel marketing: creating personalized experiences across channels that reach customers wherever they are. In this blog, I will take you through what multichannel marketing is. Let’s dive into how you can leverage a customer data platform (CDP) for more personalized customer experiences across all channels.
With the emergence of new channels, such as social media and online video, marketers have had to rethink their approach to marketing. In particular, they need to implement multi-channel marketing strategies that will allow them to reach customers through multiple touch points. The reason for this?
The customer journey is not as simple as it used to be. They will interact with you on a multitude of occasions, and across different platforms. So you need to make sure you deliver what it takes to create a personalized experience consistently across all your engagements with them.
Multichannel marketing is simply the use of multiple channels (physical or digital) in the process of reaching potential customers. A company might use its own website and physical stores to market its products, or it could partner with another company that owns one or more of these channels.
Multichannel marketing is the practice of increasing customer engagement and satisfaction through the use of multiple channels, including email, websites, social media, and mobile applications. When you combine cross-channel marketing with a consistent brand image across platforms, you can achieve several benefits for your business:
A customer data platform (CDP) is the hub of your multichannel marketing strategy. It’s where you’ll collect information on both your marketing, product, and customer data. From there the CDP will then analyze and organize it to fuel personalization across channels. Think of it as the brain of your e-commerce operations, the one thing tying it all together.
CDPs are designed to make it easy for marketers to access all their customer contact and marketing data in one place. They’re optimized for search, social media advertising, email marketing, website personalization, and more. On top of that, many CDPs offer software-as-a-service (SaaS) so that you don’t need additional hardware or software licenses. Yyou can get started right away with the service provided by your vendor partner. With Custimy.io it only takes 10 minutes to set up all you need to get started.
A CDP lets you aggregate all the information from every interaction with each person who comes into contact with your brand across multiple channels into one central location. All, so that you can easily see which messages resonate best with whom based on their specific profile attributes such as location or purchasing habits. You can do this without having to manually input this information each time! In turn this allows you to provide even better experiences tailored specifically towards individuals’ needs. This ultimately leads them becoming more loyal customers and increasing your profits.
Cross-channel attribution is the process by which marketers are able to attribute sales to the various channels that contributed to it. This means that if a customer had interacted with your product in one way. They might have been influenced by another marketing channel to make a purchase. Cross-channel attribution is important because it allows marketers to understand how their marketing efforts are contributing to sales. And they need to know how they can improve their strategy moving forward.
With a customer data platform (CDP), this is possible because all of your customer’s interactions. Whether it be on social media or browsing their favorite blog—are recorded and stored in one place. With this information at hand, you can go back through historical data and see what specific things led up to a sale in order to better optimize future strategies across multiple channels
As a marketer, you know that one of the biggest challenges in your daily work is creating a consistent, personalized experience for each customer. You’ve likely tried to solve this problem by using multiple data sources. Including point-of-sale (POS) data, website analytics, and email open rates all to build your own view of each customer.
But even if you can pull all that information together into one place. There’s still no automated way to personalize experiences based on what you learn about them.
So why should marketers care about having a single view of the customer? Because it gives us the ability to apply intelligence across channels at scale. With this, we can reach our customers with personal messages wherever they’re located or on whatever devices they’re using.
Marketers who have already achieved this goal tell us it’s worth it. A single view allows them to go from simply reacting quickly when their customers have questions or concerns about their products/services during moments of need. Instead, now marketing teams are able to provide proactive support before users ever reach out via social media channels like Twitter or Facebook Messenger.
It helps them achieve more sales opportunities through cross-sell/upsell techniques throughout every step in the purchase journey process.”
That’s what we mean when we say “multichannel”. It’s not a single channel but an integrated approach to using the right channels at the right time, in ways that are personalized and relevant to customers. So, if you want to get started on this customer-centric journey, check out our blog post on how to improve your website experience with personalization and create an effective multichannel marketing strategy.