Offering your customers precisely what they desire- this is perhaps the sole philosophy upon which a marketer’s utopia is founded. And the closest they can come to achieving it? By embracing cross-channel marketing. For the uninitiated, cross-channel marketing refers to employing multiple marketing channels in tandem with the end goal of delivering an integrated experience, like none other, to your customers. Its core tenets involve eliminating silos, fostering an interconnected approach, and giving rise to a unified experience.
Of late, this strategy has been gathering incredible steam among businesses of every hue and form. Wondering why? Well, for starters, brands employing three or more channels have been observed to register a 287% higher conversion rate. Organizations that have robust cross-channel engagement strategies in place have as many as 89% of their customers return for more. 33%- in case you were thinking what’s the number for those whose cross-channel tactics are not as solid. You see, one of the greatest demands of the modern customer (87% of them, to be precise) is to receive consistent experiences, and implementing cross-channel marketing allows businesses to do just that.
That said, successfully realizing cross-channel engagement is not easy in the slightest; it demands copious amounts of precision, planning, dedication, sincerity, and tenacity. Thankfully, you have help- sophisticated platforms possessing a bevy of features that help you chalk out extremely effective cross-channel strategies. In this regard, Adobe Marketo is among the best in the business. In this blog, we are going to dig deep into how one can facilitate cross-channel engagement by leveraging Marketo. Read on to find out!
Using Marketo To Craft A Personalized And Cohesive Experience
With Marketo, navigating across multiple, online, offline, and native channels becomes a breeze. Subsequently, this enables you to keep your customers engaged, irrespective of the channel where they are interacting with you and when. A typical customer journey in 2022 involves several touchpoints spread across different channels. Marketo helps you deliver extremely responsive and customized content at every touch point, something that makes it wildly popular among marketers.
Before we dive into Marketo’s different cross-channel engagement features, let us take a look at some of the merits of adopting a cross-channel approach:
- One of the significant benefits of cross-channel marketing is that it lets you realize 1:1 personalization for your customer, and that too across multiple channels! In this day and age of information overload and email fatigue, the importance of tailor-made communication can’t possibly be overstated.
- It helps you pave the foundation for increased engagement and improved customer retention rates. Think about it- if your buyer receives information relevant to their activity at every stage of their customer journey, wouldn’t they be absolutely overjoyed? And if you manage to consistently deliver such experiences, earning your customer’s loyalty won’t be a strenuous affair.
- Cross-channel marketing allows you to align offline event marketing strategies with online experiences.
- You get a clearer idea of how your marketing campaigns are driving results. Often, in a siloed arrangement, one fails to visualize the progression underlying a particular outcome and ends up erroneously attributing the credit to one particular channel.
- To understand this better, let’s consider a hypothetical scenario: a customer approaches you on your social media handle to place an order. Now, if you are looking at your marketing efforts through a single-channel lens, it will make you think that your social media efforts alone converted this visitor into a customer. However, that might not be the accurate and complete picture. Even though they have placed their order over here, they might have discovered your brand at a different place altogether- say, via your website, blog, newsletter, or even mobile application. Only when you don a cross-channel perspective will you truly understand how your different channels work in unison to generate leads or drive conversions. This, in turn, allows you to shirk vanity metrics in favor of actionable ones.
Cross-channel Engagement Features
Marketo’s comprehensive suite of cross-channel engagement features span across multiple channels, including email marketing, paid media, social media, website, event and webinar, and mobile push notifications. This helps you amplify the effectiveness of each channel besides striking a mellifluous harmony between them. Let’s take a look.
Email Marketing
Many businesses prefer keeping email at the core of their cross-channel operations. This is on account of multiple reasons. Firstly, email lets you drive traffic to your other marketing channels, with consummate ease, no less. By including links to your website, social media handles, and mobile application (among other channels), you can easily lead your subscribers over there. Next, email lets you implement personalization at scale. How, you ask? By virtue of email list segmentation– dividing your contacts into different sections on the basis of various parameters such as age, gender, occupation, interests and preferences, buying patterns, browsing histories, position in the sales funnel, and the like. Lastly, one gets to harness email automation to set up triggered emails- messages sent to subscribers corresponding to their activities and interactions (or “triggers” they set off). As a result, you are able to send them the right message at the right time.
- With Marketo, you can create pixel-perfect emails using responsive templates, all within a matter of a few minutes. It offers a rich text & HTML editor as well as a drag & drop editor with which you can build the template of your choice sans any technical assistance.
- Take your personalization to the next level by leveraging AI and dynamic content. Craft tailor-made recommendations that align with your customer’s buyer persona. Additionally, you can trigger emails based on your customer’s activity (or inactivity) in real time.
- Stay on top of your email’s performance with Marketo’s robust analytics. Make the most of its sophisticated A/B/n testing capabilities to deliver the best version of your email to your subscribers. Subsequently, this will help you improve your email deliverability by leaps and bounds.
Website
- Marketo Engage lets you build personalized web campaigns for all your visitors, anonymous users, or known contacts, notwithstanding, by leveraging their geographic, firmographic, and behavioral data. Once the customer profiles of your visitors are mapped out, it becomes easy for you to retarget them on the web in the times to follow.
- It allows you to launch promotional campaigns of varying degrees on your visitors to understand what works best for them. This opens the doors for increased conversions.
- Measure the results your web campaign is driving and keep optimizing it until the outcomes match your central objectives.
Paid Media
- Marketo supports native integrations with a wide range of popular ad networks. This is beneficial because it provides you with a singular centralized place from where you can not only activate lead and account audiences but also execute different kinds of ad campaigns.
- It helps you identify your highest-performing ads, thereby giving you the scope of optimizing your ad spend and ROI.
Event & Webinar
- Leverage predictive attendance and lookalike audiences and fulfill your registration and attendance goals.
- Streamline online and offline event experiences without breaking a sweat. What’s more, Marketo also lets you clone entire event workflows in a flash.
- Using Marketo, you can integrate with several best-in-industry event marketing tools. This helps you facilitate greater customer engagement during events, automate workflows, as well as import data from third-party tools.
Dynamic Chat
- The website chatbots, based on their conversations with the visitors, trigger appropriate activities in other channels with the aim of building a consistent customer journey.
- Marketo’s Dynamic Chat bases its dialogue on audience data, as a result of which they are highly personalized and engaging.
- Visitor’s passage to the next stage is made as frictionless as possible, courtesy of various functionalities such as Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook integration, sales meeting booking, round-robin lead routing, and the like.
SEO
- Obtain rankings, search volume, and competitive levels for both inbound links and specific keywords so that you have ample clarity regarding their optimization.
- Marketo Engage provides you with intelligent optimization scores after automatically crawling your website. Additionally, it helps you understand the actions you can take to improve your search rankings for each page.
Social Media
- Videos and other assets you create using Marketo Engage all contain social sharing options.
- You can launch social media campaigns directly from within Marketo Engage.
- Gain an in-depth understanding of the performance of your social marketing efforts via Marketo’s detailed analytics.
Mobile Push Notifications
- Generate push notifications and in-app messages based on a user’s profile and contextual actions to foster greater engagement.
- Leverage Marketo’s geo-fencing parameters to send customers messages that are relevant to their current location. This comes in particularly handy when you are organizing offline events- those who are in the same city/country where it’s taking place can be easily alerted to it.
- Understand what kind of engagement your push notifications are receiving so that you can optimize your strategies accordingly.
SMS
- Give interested buyers the option to opt in via SMS.
- Monitor the activities of your customers across other channels to gain the required fodder for composing relevant and engaging text messages.
- Carry out a comparative analysis to better understand how SMS is faring with respect to your other marketing channels.
Wrapping It Up
We’re sure going through the cross-channel engagement features stated above would have made you realize how Marketo helps businesses create a seamless experience for their buyers using all the marketing channels at their disposal. So, what are you waiting for? Jump on this bandwagon and leave no stone unturned to delight your customers!