The complete guide to cross-channel campaign management in 2024

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?

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:

  • Using more channels than ever to interact with brands.
  • Expecting a personalized experience with relevant information across all those channels.

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.

The tools you need to build and manage cross-channel campaigns

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:

  • Lay the foundation for successful cross-channel marketing by unifying your customer data and segmenting your target audience.
  • Reaching customers where they’re at and building personalized cross-channel journeys for them from one place.
  • Analyzing your results and optimizing your campaigns accordingly.

#1 Data unification

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,

360-degree customer profiles

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:

  1. Standard, which includes traits like devices, operating systems, locations, demographics, and more.
  2. Predefined, which are automatically created audiences, like cart and browser abandoners, leads, mobile app users, people who’ve interacted with your brand on a specific channel, and others.
  3. Predictive, which include things like likelihood to purchase or engage on a channel, potential customer lifetime value (CLTV), discount affinity, and more. This type of segmentation is possible thanks to our AI-powered intent engine. You can learn more on the topic in our complete guide to predictive marketing.
Insider's segmentation and analytics

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.

#2 Cross-channel campaign orchestration and personalization

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.

Reach customers where they’re at with personalized content

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:

Example of product recommendation engine to deliver highly relevant suggestions to each website visitor.
  • Add various engaging elements to your site to generate more leads and sales. For example, you can use ready-made templates to add social proof to increase trust, purchase progress bars to stimulate purchase completions, countdown timers to induce urgency, gamification elements to generate more leads, and much more. PUMA used many of these techniques to reduce bounce rates and generate a 27% conversion rate increase.
templates for all sorts of eCommerce website personalization
  • Build highly personalized email campaigns. Insider gives you the freedom to completely personalize each email in your campaigns with relevant product recommendations, cart reminders, send-time optimization, and much more. Remix used Insider’s personalized emails and automation capabilities to increase first purchases by 104% compared to the previous quarter.
Example of email after the purchase
  • Extend your reach to messaging channels like SMS, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger. Insider enables you to send all sorts of personalized messages on these channels, including price drop and back-in-stock alerts, event reminders, and more. For WhatsApp, you can even create end-to-end buying experiences inside the app. Vogacloset used Insider’s WhatsApp functionality to increase their conversion rates and achieve a 30x ROI.
  • Target your customer segments with relevant ads across social media and search engines. As we mentioned, Insider lets you build extremely detailed customer segments. Thanks to our integrations with Google, Facebook, and TikTok, you can then target those segments with online ads based on their previous and predicted behaviors. Pierre Cardin used this strategy to reduce cost per acquisition (CPA) by 67%.
You can use the segments for Facebook, Google, and TikTok for ad campaigns

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.

Orchestrate consistent journeys across all channels

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:

  • Simple email flows that welcome new leads and guide them to their first purchase. 
  • Price drop or back-in-store campaigns for products that customers have shown interest in.
  • Upsell and cross-sell campaigns across email and messaging channels.
  • And much more.
Insider's drag-and-drop editor for all sorts of omnichannel use cases

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:

  • Channel selection: The Next-Best Channel feature automatically selects which touchpoint to use, based on each recipient’s behaviors. It’s very useful when you’re not sure how to start or continue a campaign beyond a certain point.
Insider next best channel predictions
  • Send times: The Send-Time Optimization (STO) feature automatically triggers your campaign messages at the time the recipients’ are most likely to engage with it. You can enable STO when building your messages for each individual channel.
Insider's Send Time Optimization
  • Experiments and optimizations: Insider A/B Test Winner Auto-Selection feature tracks the winning variant in your A/B tests and automatically guides users to it. All you need to do is select a winning metric (e.g., open rates, conversion rates, revenue, etc.) and a time period. This is a great way to save time and effort, as you don’t have to manually review and adjust every experiment.
A/B test in customer journey builder
  • Segment, journey, and content creation: Insider offers a comprehensive suite of generative AI tools (Sirius AI) that can create customer segments, journey paths, text, and images. You only need to provide a text prompt with your end goal and our platform will do the rest.
Leverage the combined power of generative, predictive, and conversational AI with Insider

#3 Campaign and behavioral analytics

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.

Insider's omnichannel customer journey analytics

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 Architect analytics

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: 

  • Funnels, which let you analyze how customers navigate processes tied to key goals like purchases, form submissions, event bookings, and more. Our funnels show you how many users go through each step and where most drop-offs occur.
Building funnels around goals in behavioral analytics
  • Channel reachability analytics, which show which channels certain customer segments prefer. This information can be essential for planning cross-channel campaigns and allocating budget in the best possible way.
Insider's channel reachability analytics
  • Message frequency analytics, which helps you determine the optimal message frequency per channel for different types of customers (e.g., inactive, loyal, VIPs, and so on).
Insider's message frequency analysis

How leading brands use cross-channel marketing and campaign management (3 examples)

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: 49x ROI in only eight weeks

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:

  • Enable them to engage their customers in a better way via personalized and contextual messaging across channels.
  • Help them improve the overall ROI from their martech stack.

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.

Slazenger team using Architect

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:

  • A 49x ROI within eight weeks.
  • A 700% increase in customer acquisition.
  • A 12% increase in click-through rates (CTR) compared to their regular campaigns.

Vodafone: 159% conversion rate increase and 6x ROI

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:

  1. Test new channels to enhance their customers’ omnichannel experience.
  2. Improve important metrics like Average Revenue Per User (ARPU), customer retention and loyalty, and conversions. 

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.

Insider's segments for their cross-channel campaigns

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.

Using Insider’s web push notification, Vodafone launched a campaign targeted at cart abandoners

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: 3x increase in leads and 20% reduction in sales cycle length

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.

Generali integrate their CRM with Insider’s enterprise CDP

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.

Generali's email communications, push notifications, and SMS messages

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.

Ensure a seamless customer experience across all channels with Insider

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.

Top omnichannel marketing platform by IDC

As an enterprise marketing platform, Insider can:

  • Aggregate your customer data into a central database to create detailed 360-degree profiles of your customers that reveal their behaviors, interests, and preferred touchpoints.
  • Segment your customer base and predict future behaviors, like how much they’re projected to spend and how likely they are to buy or engage with your brand on a specific channel.
  • Help you create personalized customer experiences across all channels and at scale, so you can improve key metrics like conversions, revenue, and customer retention. 
  • Use the full power of AI and machine learning to automate tasks around cross-channel campaign creation and management, such as choosing the right channels and moments to engage customers, generating copy and images, and more.

Schedule a demo with our team to learn how Insider can benefit your business specifically.

Katie Morley - Global Content Director

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).

Read more from Katie Morley

Get the latest insights, tips and tricks delivered to your inbox ✉️

Join our community of 200,000+ CX, Marketing & Ecommerce professionals. Subscribe here for the latest news, tips, and success stories.