A guide to cross-channel campaign management strategy

Cohesive customer journeys are important across all types of media. Whether you’re trying to offer a seamless selling experience with an omnichannel approach or trying to offer a united message across a variety of marketing channels, it’s a strategy that takes planning and management.

Cross-channel campaign management (CCCM), as defined by Forrester, is a tech solution that “supports customer data management, analytics, segmentation, and workflow tools for designing, executing, and measuring campaigns for digital and offline channels.”

That is a mouthful, but here’s what it really means: CCCM gives you control over managing your cross-channel campaigns and allows you to meet and exceed your target KPIs.

The benefits of cross-channel campaign management

The greatest advantage of cross-channel campaign management lies in your ability to offer scalable customer marketing experiences that feel more specific to the customer. Here are some other concrete benefits you can achieve with cross-channel campaign management.

Optimize your marketing budget

Customers view your message and product across channels, even moving from online to offline seamlessly. By using a cross-channel approach, you can use your budget more effectively, getting more conversions for the same investment.

Cross-channel campaigns can increase budget optimization by 15 to 20%, which is a huge benefit to you and our organization.

Grow engagement

Customers who engage with your brand across multiple channels have been shown to be more engaged and spend more money. This shows how important it is to reach your customers where they are using a variety of different methods.

Build better relationships with a stronger brand

The more times customers see your brand and interact with it, the stronger their connection to your brand becomes. With a consistent design, style, and brand message, your brand becomes more than messaging—it becomes an experience. And once the customer is familiar enough, they’ll seek out the experience and share it with others.

What is an example of cross-channel communication?

To better illustrate how cross-channel campaigns work, let’s look at an example featuring Starbucks, everyone’s favorite coffee slinger.

Starbucks’ loyalty program might be one of the most used on the planet, and for good reason. The program offers coffee addicts the ability to use their rewards in-app, online, and in-store, and allows for a seamless buying experience. Their mobile app also offers special points boosters to give loyal Starbucks visitors the chance to earn more points.

Their loyalty program’s success has grown on the back of their consistent brand messaging across media channels and in-store. And has allowed Starbucks to also gather invaluable first-party data on its customers. This leads to even more personalization, but using the cross-channel data to give customers what they really want: more coffee!

What is the difference between cross-channel and multi-channel?

While people will sometimes use the terms interchangeably, there are two distinct differences between cross- and multi-channel campaigns.

Multi-channel campaigns are not connected campaigns.

The benefit of a cross-channel campaign is that the messaging is all part of one whole. A follower may hop from one of your social channels to another, and instead of seeing the exact same ad, they will see a message that is part of the whole campaign. Multi-channel campaigns are not connected this way and while the messaging is used on many channels, the same follower could end up seeing the same message.

Multi-channel campaigns do not have a single database.

When running cross-channel campaigns, the customers and audience segments you’re going to target all come from a single database or data source. A multi-channel campaign may have audience segments coming from a variety of sources. You might have one target for your Facebook audience and another for your Twitter audience, but no visibility on how many of those targets overlap on both channels.

However, it’s important to note that multi-channel and cross-channel campaigns are not at opposite ends of the spectrum. All cross-channel campaigns are multi-channel campaigns. But not all multi-channel campaigns are cross-channel campaigns.

Cross-channel campaign marketing strategy tips

To execute a successful CCCM strategy, there are a few things you’ll need to pay attention to.

User personas and customer profiles

Truly understanding your target audience is the key to a successful campaign. The good news is that the customer profiles you’ve built using your customer data can be applied to cross-channel campaign marketing. However, you’ll want to be sure that you don’t just “set and forget” these campaigns. Use first-party cookie data and other sources, like transactional data, to keep your customer profiles up to date.

Clear data and metrics

On top of using up-to-date data for building your customer profiles, you’ll want to keep a close eye on the campaign’s performance. As with any marketing, some messaging and some channels will resonate more than others. It’s important to get a handle on what’s working and what’s not so that you’re not wasting time, effort, or money in the process.

Identify the person in charge

Since CCCM is multi-faceted, it’s critical to set a clear leader for the campaign. They should be the one who sets the overall cross-channel campaign management strategy by analyzing the data and metrics and then making changes as necessary. They will more than likely rely on a larger team that can provide the insights they need, but a set leader will make it easier to manage changes, especially across multiple platforms.

Finally, this person should come with an agile and dynamic mindset. The key to successful CCCM is to stay nimble and make changes when necessary.

The customer data you need for your cross-channel campaign

To get the most out of your cross-channel campaign, you need a data source that brings all of your customer data together in a single location. This is what Lytics does all day, every day for brands just like yours.

Don’t let disparate customer data hold you back from truly successful cross channel campaign management. By working from a centralized customer data platform (CDP), Lytics can provide your company with the solid foundation to build a successful cross-channel campaign.