Why Cross-Channel Engagement Matters for Your Business

Today’s customers have so many devices and platforms at their disposal that it’s become possible for them to curate their experience of your brand. That’s a major shift, one that’s disrupting traditional marketing strategies and causing some brands to struggle with engaging their customers. Finding ways to effectively map out a modern customer journey and achieve strong customer engagement is really the golden ticket right now for marketers—and loyal customers are the prize.

Of course, every brand wants to claim that prize—and customers have plenty of expectations and preferences of their own. They’re looking and listening, expecting your brand to connect with them in ways that add value to their lives, both in terms of the products or services you offer, but also when it comes to the way your messages and brand experiences fit into their daily lives.

Messaging channels like email and push notifications are the freeways on that map. Routing your audience’s customer journeys requires you to understand the best way to get each individual where they’re looking to go using a cross-channel messaging approach. It’s a process, one that requires strategy, coordination, and the right technology.

Multi-Channel vs. Omni-Channel vs. Cross-Channel: What Are We Really Talking About?

It’s not enough anymore to depend on any single channel for your brand’s outreach. There’s no billboard you can rent, no email you can send that will reach, engage, and motivate every one of your customers to take action. The way forward requires marketing, growth, and engagement teams to harness the power of multiple channels to communicate more effectively.

How we approach—and talk about—this sort of approach matters. If you’ve spent any time in the marketing world in recent years, you’ve likely heard terms like “multi-channel,” “omni-channel,” and “cross-channel” used pretty interchangeably. But they’re not the same thing, and the differences are instructive:

• Multi-Channel Engagement — This approach uses multiple messaging channels to reach users, not necessarily in a coordinated or optimized way
• Omni-Channel Engagement — This approach tends to be focused on bringing together digital and in-person engagement, and is often used to talk about the vision of communicating with consumers across every available channel
• Cross-Channel Engagement — This approach is focused on ensuring that you’re using the ideal mix of channels to reach customers in a complementary, cohesive way, with an eye toward making the most of each channel’s strengths

How Cross-Channel Messaging Can Support Your Customer Engagement Strategy

Cross-channel engagement takes a multi-channel approach to the next level by coordinating the different channels at your disposal to support seamless communications with your customers. It’s important that each interaction you have with your customers aligns with your brand story...and that your users feel understood, valued, and nurtured by your brand throughout their customer journey.

The Push and Pull of Messaging to Boost Engagement

The rise of mobile and the explosion of new messaging channels and new engagement touchpoints has led to a fog of messaging that can be numbing and overwhelming to the people receiving it—after all, the average person receives at least 60 push notifications each day. The best way to cut through that noise and hold your users’ attention is with the right mix of “push” and “pull” messages.

• “Push” Messaging — This type of outreach (often email, SMS, or push notifications) is capable of reaching customers outside of the brand’s app or website and nudging them to engage
• “Pull” Messaging — This less obtrusive type of outreach (often in-app messaging or Content Cards) speaks to users directly within your app or web experience when they’ve already chosen to voluntarily engage

While many brands see strong engagement in connection with their marketing emails and push notifications, research by Braze has found that while these channels are powerful, they can’t reach their full potential on their own. To get there, they need to be paired with “pull” channels to complete the customer experience. When you add in in-app messages to a push campaign, for instance, the result is a 224% jump in engagement. The trick is to use “pull” messaging to continue the journey and seize upon the opportunity that “push” messages start, resulting in a cohesive, valuable user experience.

How Fiverr Used Braze to Master Cross-Channel Engagement

Fiverr, the global freelance services marketplace, had multi-channel activities but needed to find a way to elevate their approach through coordinated cross-channel messaging. To make that happen, Fiverr leveraged the Braze platform’s Canvas customer journey management tool to support both coordinated cross-channel campaigns and built-in campaign testing and optimization efforts. Using a control group as a point of comparison, they determined that the best-performing campaign in their experiment leveraged a cross-channel customer journey which recognizes the value of combining the push and pull of messaging, featuring mobile and web push notifications, in-browser and in-app messages and email.

By using Braze Canvas in conjunction with other key Braze features like Intelligent Timing, Exception Events, and Connected Content, Fiverr was able to roll out effective cross-channel campaigns and benefit from an accompanying boost in their results, including:

• 8.8% increase in the number of purchases made within three days
• 10.1% increase in average order value associated with those purchases
• 20.9% increase in revenue connected with that campaign variant

Final Thoughts

Effective customer engagement doesn’t just happen. Without the right strategy and the right technology, brands are setting their customers up for disappointment when it comes to their interactions across all of today’s key digital touchpoints. One of the key ingredients? An effective cross-channel engagement approach.

To learn more about the benefits of cross-channel messaging on customer engagement and how to make it happen for your brand, check out the Braze Cross-Channel Data Report.