Multi-channel marketing aids you in interacting with and driving customers in taking action with the help of different direct and indirect channels of communication i.e. direct mail, email, mobile, etc.
With targeted messaging across touchpoints, multi-channel marketing seeks to deliver qualified conversion and sales.
Difference Between Multi-Channel Marketing and Cross Channel Marketing
Multi channel marketing uses multiple channels to engage users.
It helps a business to convey cohesive messaging to interact with the end-users.
On the other hand, cross-channel marketing creates a holistic experience for the customers by leveraging data gathered from touchpoints across online and offline channels.
This is the only difference that you need to know when it comes to cross-channel marketing vs multi-channel marketing.
3 Multi-Channel Marketing Examples
With so many communication channels available today, you can’t be at all the places at the same time.
One of the most important benefits of multi-channel marketing is that it allows you to meet customers at their preferred communication platform.
Since a customer goes through 7-13 touchpoints before making a purchase, multi-channel marketing is absolutely mandatory for marketers to be successful today.
This blog will remain incomplete without some of the best examples of multi-channel marketing:
Seamless Product Experience Rebecca Minkoff
The global fashion brand Rebecca Minkoff combines online and offline marketing strategies that help the customer to have a seamless product experience irrespective of time, device used, geography, etc.
According to Emily Culp, SVP eCommerce and Omni-channel Marketing, modern marketing should empower one to ‘select the service level that she wants, when she wants on the device that she wants. It is all connected.’
End-to-End Journey by Apple
Apple, the leading multinational technology company, has been successfully creating a seamless customer experience across all the channels.
It all starts at the brick-and-mortar stores where potential buyers can actually have an interactive experience with the merchandise.
Once the product is purchased, Apple continues to build a relationship with iTunes GarageBand, iMovie, etc.
Wish You Were At Topshop
Topshop, a British multinational fashion retailer made use of a brilliant multi-channel marketing strategy in its Wish You Were At Topshop campaign.
It used Instagram and iPad to engage customers and create user-generated content.
After receiving freestyle and make-up sessions, shoppers were invited to create and share a digital postcard using Instagram.
These are some of the best examples of multi-channel marketing.
Now that you have understood what multi-channel marketing looks like, let’s go through the benefits of multi-channel marketing.
5 Benefits of Multi-channel Marketing
Increased Conversion and Proven ROI:
Do you know a multi-channel digital marketing strategy can help you to improve your ROI up to 300%?
With multi-channel marketing, you engage with your customers at every stage of the buying process.
This means that you are making yourself more visible to your customers than you would do through a single channel of communication.
As you utilize multiple channels, you will be able to not only increase conversion but also have customers who spend more.
Improved Engagement
Do you really care about all the PPC ads that you come across or all the marketing emails that you receive? Probably not.
Because they are not relevant to you. The benefit of using cross channel marketing platform is that it allows you to relevant and personalized content across channels.
Multi-channel marketing drives audience engagement because you can create personalized CTAs with content that is relevant to the audience of each channel.
This is one of the most important benefits of multi-channel marketing.
Quick Response to Customer Demands
With your presence across multiple channels, you get to stay in touch with customers.
This helps you to get to be aware of the current trends as well. In addition, your customers have more opportunities to engage with you.
This way you get to nurture your customers better and improve customer satisfaction as well.
Valuable Customer Insights
A multi-channel marketing system allows you to collect valuable data about customers.
The unified dashboard in multi-channel marketing paves the path for you to understand the behavior of your audience who is scattered across different channels.
This helps you in improving your target in the future.
Cost-effective Strategies
If you are looking at multi-channel marketing vs omnichannel, you will realize that multi-channel marketing allows you to be cost-effective.
This happens primarily because of the accurate insights that you receive from different channels.
This plays an integral role in ensuring better returns in no time.
Multi-channel Marketing Statistics
Difficulties in Running Multi-Channel Marketing Campaigns
No matter what are communication platforms you choose, there will be challenges of multi-channel marketing.
According to The Holmes Report, marketers face a number of challenges in running multi-channel marketing campaigns. Some of these challenges are:
- Lack of resources and time to develop and execute multi-channel marketing channel campaigns
- Lack of investment in tools necessary for running multi-channel marketing campaigns
- Lack of comprehensive understanding of the nitty-gritty details of how to develop and execute multi-channel marketing campaigns
Some of the challenges that need to be addressed while running multi-channel marketing campaigns include:
- Consistent Branding and Messaging Across Channels: Keeping branding and messaging consistent is one of the challenging tasks when it comes to multi-channel marketing. When you have a number of channels to take care of, you need to have an understanding of each of these channels and the audience’s behavior on those channels.
- No Funneling to One Medium: Even though your business prefers to get users through one funnel, a multi-channel marketing model requires you to work on other mediums along with the one you prefer. Whether you want to use SMS Marketing or lead magnet, you will have to encourage cross-sales.
- A Little Overwhelming: Running multi-channel marketing campaigns can be overwhelming. With a number of channels and so less time, it is definitely a daunting task to manage cross-promotions. It requires to be a good coordinator.
- Time Devotion: Since multi-channel marketing gives you more, it demands more time from you. As you manage a number of marketing channels, you will have to set them up, run campaigns, get insights, and target the audience again. This is easier said than done. However, with multi-channel marketing software on your side, all these become easy to achieve.
How to Create Effective And Best Multi-channel Marketing Campaigns?
Now that you know both the benefits and challenges of multi-channel marketing campaigns, it is time to have a look at the strategies on how to create effective multi-channel marketing campaigns.
Before getting started with the strategies, here are two points that you should look at:
- Companies with multi-channel marketing usually observe a 9.5% growth in YOY annual revenue
- Running multi-channel marketing campaigns help you to reduce cost per contact up to 7.5%
To create an effective multi-channel marketing strategy, you need to follow these four steps:
Start With A Defined Goal
Even though the idea is to make more sales with multi-channel marketing, you should never start without a clear and defined goal.
- How do you want your brand to be perceived by your audience?
- What are the unique selling points of your business?
- What is the ROI that you are looking at?
- What are the metrics that you need to measure?
Prioritize Your Marketing Channels
With so many channels available, you can’t pursue all of them. It is best that you identify the best ones and rank them according to your priority.
Depending on the number of channels, you will have to allocate resources as well.
You need to decide whether you are planning to run missed call marketing and other options as well.
Here are some of the key points that you would want to do before coming up with the channels to be present in:
- Reach out to your target audience
- Build relationships with industry influencers
- Learn about the resource requirements for each medium
- Run an assessment of the potential cost
Create Contextual Conversion
Once you understand the importance of multi-channel marketing, you will soon realize that contextual conversation is what you need to leverage multi-channel marketing.
To be able to create a contextual conversation, you will need to ask yourself:
- What kind of content is your audience interested in?
- What kind of engagement is your audience expecting?
Using Marketing Automation Tools
Multi-channel marketing becomes much easier when you have an award-winning marketing automation tool.
Such tools not only help you to reduce your time and effort but also to collect feedback.
These tools will also help you with multi-channel marketing attribution which is essential for understanding what goes behind assigning values to touchpoints across the customer journey.
Adapt to Current Trends
As you use hybrid channels and multi-channel marketing, you will need to adapt to the current marketing trends.
This happens because achieving cultural significance matters when you want to accelerate the adoption rate.
Top 4 Multi-Channel Marketing Tools
- Teleduce by Corefactors: Teleduce by Corefactors is an integrated sales and marketing tool that comes with robust features such as email marketing, SMS marketing, landing page, cloud telephony, interactive voice response, missed call solutions, etc. In addition, you will have access to customer success managers and analytics as well.
- Buffer: Buffer is one of the best tools when it comes to managing social media accounts. Having been a popular platform among businesses, it can be accessed via web and mobile app as well.
- Brand24: Brand24 is one of the social media listening and monitoring tools that brands are using today to respond to customers and have an insight into social media networks. In addition, you will be able to find keywords that you need to use to get maximum traction.
- SnapApp: SnapApp is one of the multi-channel marketing tools that businesses are using today to engage with their customers. It lets you create interactive content pieces.
- Uniqode: Uniqode (formerly Beaconstac) is a popular choice amongst businesses when it comes to digital business cards for contactless networking. With a user-friendly card creation process, it enables contactless sharing via Apple Wallet or Google Wallet passes.
Its integrated analytics feature allows you to monitor the effectiveness of your cards, facilitating seamless networking paired with measurable success. Brands can elevate their professional interactions by sharing their contact info, website URLs, portfolio, and more with a simple scan.
Are you already doing multi-channel marketing?
What are the platforms that you are using to engage with customers?
If you aren’t using any multi-channel marketing platform, it is time to use Teleduce.
Experience the only integrated sales and marketing platform that helps you to sell 27x faster.
