Connect with your audiences across various channels and platforms with one single tool.
Image courtesy of Pixabay.
Cross-channel marketing is an effective way to reach your audiences where they’re most active. Whether that’s on social media, through email, SMS messaging, or another channel — they can all work together with a cross-channel mindset.
By creating a seamless experience from one interaction to the next, you can quickly move people through the purchasing journey towards completing a purchase. This will allow you to continue growing and nurturing your audiences to increase engagement, revenue, and loyalty.
More and more companies are starting to see the benefits of cross-channel marketing and are adopting the mindset.
If you’re one of those businesses looking to add cross-channel experiences to your 2022 goals but aren’t sure where to get started, you’ve come to the right place.
In this article, we’ll take a look at a few things you’ll want to consider when looking for a cross-channel marketing platform, give you a list of 10 platforms to consider, and send you away with a few tips to make the most out of your 2022 cross-channel strategy.
Here’s a quick overview of what we’ll cover:
- What to look for in a cross-channel marketing platform
- The ten best cross-channel marketing platforms
- Two tips to level up your cross-channel marketing strategy
What to Look for in a Cross-Channel Marketing Platform
When it comes time to start looking at cross-channel marketing platforms, there are a few things you’ll want to make sure your tool has.
Whether your focus is on customer insights, cross-channel integrations, analytics, and reporting, or something in between — you need to consider it all. You may also wish to consider the industry you are working in and see if there is an option out there that is specifically geared towards what you do. For example, businesses that help people get loans to buy homes may wish to take a look at something like this mortgage marketing software that is equipped with all that is needed to ensure that customers have a great experience at every stage of their interactions with you.
Settling for a less than ideal cross-channel marketing tool will put you back in the same place you’re at right now within a few years. You’ll find that as your business grows, the tools available to you just don’t quite fit the changing needs of your business.
That’s why you should dream big when looking to invest in a new marketing platform. If all goes well, you’ll be seeing continued growth and will need something that can keep up with your needs.
In this section, we’ll take a look at a few of the essential things you’ll want to look for in a cross-channel platform. While this isn’t a complete list, it will give you a great starting point on some of the most important foundational elements.
Make Sure You Have Easy Cross-Channel Connections
First and foremost, if your goal is to reach customers across multiple channels and create comprehensive experiences, you need a platform that can handle this.
While this might seem obvious, it’s essential to choose a cross-channel marketing platform that provides you with the ability to reach audiences on various channels. When looking at new platforms, don’t forget to think about the future state of your marketing strategy and consider those things as well. Image courtesy of News Engine.
Many marketing automation platforms available today have a singular focus. Whether that focus is email, text marketing, advertising, or other channels, some tools just don’t cut it when looking to do cross-channel marketing.
You need a tool that allows you to connect and manage various channels from one central location. A tool that has behavioral triggers and dynamic capabilities that integrate from one channel to the next to create a seamless experience from one to the other.
The channels you need to look for will depend on what your goals are and where you’re trying to reach your audiences, but may include things like:
- SMS and MMS messaging
- Paid advertising
- Social media
- Apps and mobile push
- Website experiences
Having a platform that makes it easy to integrate your marketing efforts across various channels will make your job much easier. You’ll be able to gather customer data from one platform to the next, schedule messages to send, and build customer journeys that interact with each customer based on their real-time behaviors.
Understand the Segmentation and Audience Management Tools
The next thing you’ll want to look for in a cross-channel marketing platform is how robust the segmentation and audience management tools are.
Depending on how you plan to connect with your audiences, these tools can make or break the success of your cross-channel marketing campaigns.
That’s because, without the right customer insights, you could be sending content that is irrelevant to your audiences — resulting in low engagement and even lower conversions.
Several benefits come with segmenting your audiences. It all works because of audience segmentation, from making it easier to create custom marketing messages to enabling better tracking and control of campaigns. Image courtesy of Adamant Links.
Knowing who your audiences are will not only allow you to react to their real-time actions and behaviors, it will also help you to group similar audiences and predict future behaviors. Doing this will make it much easier for you to reach larger audiences at scale and provide them with the content they’re interested in.
It’s been shown that 77% of marketing ROI comes from segmented, targeted, and triggered campaigns. Without the right tools, you won’t know how to segment or manage your audiences to achieve higher ROI.
Cross-channel marketing is all about knowing your audience, tracking their behaviors, and reacting to those behaviors across the various channels they’re engaging with. Choosing a cross-channel marketing platform that doesn’t have the tools you need to understand your audiences will result in lower-performing campaigns.
Don’t Settle for Something Without Robust Personalization Capabilities
If you’re not incorporating personalization into your cross-channel marketing campaigns, you’re missing a huge opportunity. Considering that 80% of customers expect a personalized experience from the brands they engage with, not thinking about personalization could be a big detriment to your campaigns.
Personalization is a highly effective marketing tool that your customers want you to be using. Knowing that personalization appeals to 90% of people, it’s something you don’t want to ignore when looking for a new cross-channel marketing tool. Image courtesy of Startup Bonsai.
Luckily, most cross-channel marketing platforms do provide you with some level of personalization. The challenge is finding one that gives you the personalization you’re looking for.
When considering personalization for cross-channel marketing, you need to look at what that personalization looks like across each channel.
Does that personalization go beyond simply incorporating the customer’s name in the email subject line? Are you able to easily incorporate dynamic content into social advertisements? Or pull recently viewed products into your SMS messages?
These are all things you need to think about and consider as you look into purchasing a new cross-channel marketing platform. Don’t settle on what you think you’ll do tomorrow. Dream big and find a platform that can continue to grow with you as you do.
Get the Tracking and Analytics You Need for Continuous Improvement
Access to the proper tracking and analytics within a cross-channel marketing platform is essential. Without this information, you’ll never know how your campaigns are performing, what audiences are most engaged, and how you can continue to improve your efforts.
Tracking and analytics are essential to the success of your cross-channel marketing efforts. Without these insights, you won’t know who your customers are, what they’re most engaged with, or how each of your messages is performing. Image courtesy of Pixabay.
There are a variety of different types of tracking and analytics you’ll want to consider as part of your cross-channel marketing strategy, such as:
- Customer tracking and analytics to understand their wants, needs, interests, and behaviors to develop and share the right content
- Campaign tracking and analytics that help you know if your campaigns are successful or not
- Channel tracking and analytics to pinpoint where customers are more active and what channels produce the highest engagement rates
But it doesn’t stop there. With the right marketing platform, you can track and analyze so many different parts of your cross-channel efforts. The more you learn from this, the better you can optimize your efforts to drive better results and ROI.
The 10 Best Cross-Channel Marketing Platforms
Now that you know what to look for in a cross-channel marketing platform, it’s time to start gathering a list of your options.
At first, this might seem like an overwhelming task — but it doesn’t have to be.
By keeping your current goals and future growth plans in mind, you can quickly sort through the various platforms available and start to weed out those that won’t cut it. And, to help you get started gathering that list, we’ve compiled a list of the ten best cross-channel marketing platforms available.
If you’re looking for a full-service cross-channel marketing platform — look no further than Listrak. This platform has everything you need to manage multiple marketing channels, leverage personalization, and make the most out of every customer interaction on any channel.
The Listrak platform makes it easy for you to connect with your customers across various platforms. Whether they’re most active on social, SMS messaging, email, or all of the above, you’ll have the insights you need to reach them at the most opportune times. Image courtesy of Listrak.
Platform Highlights:
- Unified customer data that is collected from every interaction across the entire customer journey from one platform to the next to provide you with a full 360° view of your audiences
- Behavioral triggers that are designed to drive conversions and automatically engage your customers based on their real-time actions such as replenishment messages, abandoned cart emails, or welcome campaigns
- Predictive technology and AI recommendation capabilities created to help you provide your customers with the most relevant content at the right time and elevate your personalization efforts
- List growth and management tools to help you continue growing your subscriber list and improve conversions
With this tool, you can manage the following marketing channels: email, text message marketing, social, push, web, and direct mail.
Pricing: The Listrak platform has customized pricing that is based on the needs of your business. You’ll need to contact a representative to learn more about what that pricing will look like for you.
The Oracle CS Marketing is a comprehensive, integrated marketing platform that will allow you to manage your cross-channel marketing campaigns from one centralized location. Having all of your customer insights in one central location will allow you to create meaningful campaigns that reach audiences at the right time.
The Oracle CX Marketing platform gives you all the tools you need to create complex customer journeys designed to engage customers at the right time with the right message. Having the ability to build and automate workflows will make reaching your audiences easier and drive more effective results. Image courtesy of Oracle.
Platform Highlights:
- Unify and understand customer data across various channels, transactions, and more to gain deeper insights and see a complete picture of the entire customer experience
- Deliver personalized experiences at the right time by knowing who your customers are, where they’re interacting with the content, and when the perfect moment to reach them is
- Improve customer loyalty and retention by building reward programs that consider real customer data, such as shopping behaviors, preferences, and more
- Make the platform work for your business, and how your customers engage with content through B2B and B2C focused solutions
Pricing: The Oracle CX Marketing platform has customized pricing that is based on the needs of your business. You’ll need to contact a representative to learn more about what that pricing will look like for you.
Sailthru is a cross-channel marketing platform that helps businesses create personalized, cross-channel marketing experiences that engage with customers where they’re most active. This platform will provide you with everything you need to create a comprehensive digital experience.
Platform Highlights:
- Efficiently manage campaigns and connect with your customers through journey-based triggers, transactional emails, and more
- Create personalized messages that build stronger customer connections and encourage them to convert
- Use predictive technology to target your customers with more personalized content to know what to send and when to send it before your customers even know they need it
- Create customized journey’s that have cross-channel triggers and provide you with real-time insights into how your customers are engaging with your content
Pricing: The Sailthru platform has customized pricing that is based on the needs of your business. You’ll need to contact a representative to learn more about what that pricing will look like for you.
With this tool, you can manage the following marketing channels: email, web, and mobile.
MarinOne is a cross-channel marketing tool that will help you to identify new opportunities, maximize return, and unify campaign data into one centralized platform. With the customer insights you need to create high-performing campaigns, this tool will help you achieve your cross-channel marketing goals.
MarinOne will provide you with everything you need to know how your campaigns are performing and who your audiences are. That will allow you to understand what works, what doesn’t, and what opportunities there may be. Image courtesy of MarinOne.
Platform Highlights:
- Connect the entire customer journey and reach your audiences across various marketing channels to drive higher engagement and conversion rates
- Tap into machine learning technology to automatically identify opportunities within your digital marketing campaigns
- Identify opportunities with the help of valuable insights that allow you to understand the impact of your efforts and prioritize those with the most success
- Create automated workflows that have flexible rules and use dynamic technology to move customers through your campaigns and towards converting
Pricing: Marin Software has customized pricing that is based on the needs of your business. You’ll need to contact a representative to learn more about what that pricing will look like for you.
With this tool, you can manage the following marketing channels: display, paid search, social, eCommerce, and apps advertising.
Resulticks is a marketing automation platform that allows businesses to use data to create customer-centric cross-channel campaigns. With the ability to communicate with your customers on various channels, then collect and analyze the data you receive — this tool will help you create better campaigns.
The Resulticks platform will provide everything you need to integrate all of your efforts and connect with your audiences across various channels. Having the power of AI technology at the center of your marketing will allow you to improve your efforts into the future. Image courtesy of Resulticks.
Platform Highlights:
- Get to know your customers better with omnichannel audience data management tools that help you to understand individual data and achieve a single, real-time customer view
- Create cross-channel campaigns that always provide customers with relevant content with the help of AI-powered orchestration capabilities
- Integrate personalization into your marketing campaigns easily to improve individualization and build stronger relationships
- Track and analyze the data you collect to improve efforts like segmentation, lead scoring, and customer journey mapping
Pricing: There are three plan options available, including the Startup Plan, the Pro Plan, and the Enterprise Plan. To learn more about pricing for each, you’ll need to speak with a Resulticks representative.
With this tool, you can manage the following marketing channels: email, mobile messaging, push notifications, social, digital assistants, paid media, and more.
MoEngage is a customer engagement platform that allows you to reach customers throughout their journey across various touchpoints. This platform has everything you need to not only connect with your audiences on multiple channels but also scale up your marketing efforts.
