Katie Morley
Apr 23, 2024
Katie Morley
Apr 23, 2024
Marketing campaign management has always been a difficult task. It requires careful planning, smart allocation of resources, and a solid understanding of customer behavior.
However, in a world where people use dozens of channels to interact with brands, building and managing successful campaigns becomes that much harder. The main objective of cross-channel campaign management is to simplify and streamline this process using reliable customer data, smart automation strategies, and versatile and user-friendly marketing tools.
In this guide, you’ll learn how to do that using Insider — our AI-native platform for creating personalized cross-channel customer experiences. We’ll also explore real-life examples of cross-channel marketing and campaign management done well.
Organizations like Adidas, Allianz, Samsung, Puma, MAC Cosmetics. and many other industries use Insider to unify their customer data and deliver individualized experiences across 12+ channels.
To learn more about Insider, book a demo with our team or try the platform yourself.
What is cross-channel management and why is it important?
The tools you need to build and manage cross-channel campaigns
How leading brands use cross-channel marketing and campaign management (3 examples)
How leading brands use cross-channel marketing and campaign management (3 examples)
Cross-channel campaign management (sometimes abbreviated as CCCM) is the process of building personalized marketing campaigns across a variety of channels. Its goal is to deliver timely, consistent, and relevant messages to customers across all brand touchpoints.
The process can be complex, especially for enterprise companies that have a massive customer base. It usually requires integrating customer data from disconnected systems, uncovering valuable insights, orchestrating cross-channel campaigns, and much more.
When done well, cross-channel campaign management enables you to meet (and even exceed) people’s expectations at every turn and drive customer loyalty. This is especially crucial today, as customers are:
In that sense, having a solid cross-channel marketing and management strategy is essential for both improving key metrics (like customer engagement, conversion rate, revenue, and acquisition costs) and keeping a consistent brand image.
Complexity is one of the biggest reasons brands struggle with cross-channel campaign management. For example, many marketing teams today use a whole ecosystem of solutions to reach customers, store their data, and analyze it, including:
All of these tools are essential for successful cross-channel marketing. However, using a different provider for each one creates incredibly complex workflows and siloes off customer data, which prevents you from getting a clear picture of your customers’ journeys.
Another way to approach the process is by using a unified marketing platform built specifically for cross-channel scenarios. In the sections below, we’ll explore how you can use our platform to:
At the heart of cross-channel campaign management is clean and reliable customer data. Like we said, this data is usually scattered across systems, so the first step for most brands is to unify it into a convenient place.
The best way to do that is to use a CDP — a type of software built specifically for aggregating customer data from different sources. For example, Insider’s CDP can unify data from any online and offline source, including CRMs, CMSs, analytics tools, email marketing platforms, marketing automation solutions, social media tools, and so on.
This enables our platform to create detailed, 360-degree customer profiles like the one shown below,
The profiles contain everything you know about each customer — including their purchase history, website interactions, survey responses, channel reachability, and more.
This is the essential foundation for your cross-channel marketing efforts, as you can be sure they’ll always be powered by reliable insights, without missing relevant information about the buyer journey. Plus, the profiles get updated in real-time as customers interact with your brand, making them more detailed and accurate over time.
Note: If you’re interested, we explore this topic in more detail in our article on the 11 main CDP use cases for marketers.
Most CDPs also let you segment your audiences for each campaign. For example, with Insider, you can use 120+ traits and characteristics, including:
Once your data is unified, you can begin immediately implementing various useful tactics to improve your customers’ cross-channel experience. For example, you can use NPS score data from your customer service platform to put customers with grievances on a campaign suppression list to prevent contact fatigue and churn.
With the foundation in place, can move on to engaging customers on the channels they’re using with relevant information. However, you have to do that strategically to deliver a cohesive cross-channel journey, instead of just random messages on different channels.
Again, a platform like Insider can help you do that from one place, thanks to its combination of broad channel access, personalization tools, and cross-channel journey builder.
Insider brings 12+ channels under one umbrella, including on-site, mobile app, email, push notifications, SMS, WhatsApp, and more. This broad channel access and our platform’s personalization capabilities enable you to:
Put simply, you can count on Insider to reach customers where they’re at with relevant content, messaging, and product recommendations based on their wants and needs. For a deeper dive into this topic, check out our guide to achieving personalization at scale.
Besides reaching customers on every individual channel they’re using, you also need to ensure their journey across all touchpoints is consistent. This is an essential part of the process, as it helps you move from traditional multichannel marketing to a holistic, unified, and personalized cross-channel approach.
Insider lets you do this with Architect — a versatile customer journey builder and marketing automation solution. Architect is an AI-powered solution that you can use to build all sorts of journeys and complex cross-channel marketing campaigns, like:
The key here is that each journey is personalized to the customer’s needs and preferences. You’re also in full control of how each journey develops by setting action-based triggers, conditions, wait times, and much more.
For example, you can create a cross-channel campaign that automatically sends a personalized email after a customer visits a product on your site. For customers who don’t engage with your email, you can have Insider send a message on another available channel after a certain number of hours or days.
This is all controlled through a user-friendly drag-and-drop editor, so there’s no need to do any coding to set up cross-channel journeys. Additionally, you have plenty of AI-powered features at your disposal that can save you time and effort by optimizing different aspects of your cross-channel campaigns, like:
The final piece of the cross-channel campaign management puzzle is to consistently analyze campaign performance, uncover insights, and optimize accordingly. Again, when your customer data is unified and you’re using one platform to build and manage campaigns, this process becomes much easier.
For example, here are some of the ways you can analyze your campaigns with Insider:
First, you can see how each campaign is performing right inside the customer journey builder. You can also zero in on specific steps to get granular insights into the number of people who entered or dropped off, as well as the number of clicks, conversions, and other key metrics.
There’s also a dedicated analytics panel that you can use to build customized campaign reports. For example, you can create detailed reports with data on open rates, conversions, drop-offs, and other similar metrics, as well as high-level reports for stakeholders focusing mostly on acquisition costs and revenue.
Insider also offers plenty of behavioral analytics tools that you can use to extract valuable information about your customers’ behaviors and power your cross-channel marketing strategy, including:
In these final sections, we’ll explore how three brands leveraged cross-channel marketing and campaign management to improve their lead generation, conversion rates, and marketing ROI.
To illustrate the versatility of cross-channel marketing, we’ve chosen companies from drastically different industries — retail, telecommunications, and financial services. All three of these companies used Insider to reach customers across channels and build personalized campaigns.
Slazenger is a well-known sports brand, famous for its stylish sportswear covering cricket, tennis, swimming, hockey, golf, and much more. With over 150 years of experience, the company offers a range of both amateur designs and professional-grade products.
The team was looking for a cross-channel customer experience solution that could:
Insider was a clear choice for the job, as our platform supports key channels for Slazenger — such as SMS, email, and push notifications — and offers a cross-channel customer journey builder for creating a cohesive experience across those touchpoints.
For example, they used Architect to bring back cart abandoners to their website using contextual messages across email, web push, and on-site. This led to the brand recovering 40% of revenue in a single campaign and achieving a 3x ROI within just eight weeks.
They also use other omnichannel personalization use cases, like enticing potential shoppers with targeted price drop emails and web push notifications. Overall, Slazenger’s decision to partner with Insider as their cross-channel customer experience solution resulted in:
Vodafone is the largest mobile and fixed network operator in Europe. The brand operates in 21 countries and has over 300 million mobile customers, 30 million broadband customers, and 20 million TV customers.
Before working with Insider, Vodafone’s marketing team had two key goals:
Insider gave Vodafone the ability to reach customers across the channels they were using, including web push notifications, email, on-site, and Facebook. Plus, our platform enabled Vodafone to do that in a timely, consistent, and relevant manner.
Vodafone also used Insider to build detailed segments for their cross-channel campaigns with over 120+ ready-made attributes.
This helped the brand achieve a 64% increase in lead generation and a 52% boost in conversion rates in three months.
Cart abandonment was another issue that Vodafone wanted to resolve with Insider’s help. They believed that many cart abandoners would only require a small nudge to complete their purchase, so they used Insider’s web push notifications to display a targeted message that induced a sense of urgency.
Here’s what the Group Head of Digital Marketing and eCommerce at Vodafone said about the results:
“Last quarter, on-site cart reminders increased conversion rates by 159% and the platform as a whole delivered more than 6X ROI.”
Generali is one of the largest insurance and asset management providers in the world. Established in 1831, it serves 68 million customers in over 50 countries.
However, the brand’s marketing team faced lead generation challenges due to a poor onsite experience, leading to a high bounce rate and fewer sales opportunities. This was a big issue as the marketing team’s top priority was to collect leads and pass them over to the sales team.
Our team suggested that Generali integrate their CRM with Insider’s enterprise CDP in order to start collecting data on visitors’ online behaviors and interactions.
Then, the brand could use customized exit intent overlays to encourage visitors who were about to leave the site to provide their contact information. The team also rolled out customized banner campaigns that promoted each customer’s recently viewed products and services in an engaging and contextual way.
These tactics led to a 3x increase in leads. From here, it was time to build a lead validation process that would prevent the sales team from wasting valuable time contacting customers with low or no interest in their services.
Our local support team worked with Generali to build a process where every lead is evaluated based on their website behavior. Every time a visitor interacts with a page, they accumulate points in the system, reflecting their level of interest.
The more pages a customer visits, the higher their score. This allowed the sales team to focus on leads with the highest priority.
Besides being useful for the sales team, this process also powered Generali’s cross-channel marketing efforts. The brand used Architect to segment leads depending on their score and then send them via SMS, email, and web push.
This data is then sent back to Generali’s CRM via an API, so the sales team can view the lead’s personal information and their score, enabling the team to prioritize the hottest leads and boost sales. This helped them achieve a 20% reduction in sales cycle length.
Insider an ideal cross-channel customer experience platform for mid-sized and enterprise brands looking to build, automate, personalize, and manage their campaigns across channels from one place. Our solution has been ranked as the top omnichannel marketing platform by IDC.
As an enterprise marketing platform, Insider can:
Schedule a demo with our team to learn how Insider can benefit your business specifically.
Written by
Katie Morley
Katie is an award-winning content marketer with over eight years of experience in content strategy, development, and copywriting. As Global Content Director at Insider, she currently oversees content strategy across 26 regions. Fun fact: Katie read 64 books last year (for which she owes a long commute and two week-long holidays where she spent approximately six hours a day with her nose in a book).
