People receive messaging from brands and companies through a number of channels every day. For a cross channel marketing campaign to be truly effective and increase user engagement, it needs to reflect each of these channels. However, it’s also a major challenge for most cross channel marketers to deliver the right message on the right channel at the same time.

This is where marketing automation can help you. Marketing automation is beneficial because it spares cross channel marketers from having to complete remedial tasks, makes it easier to target customers in the first place, and streamlines the execution of your cross channel marketing plan.

In this article, we will touch on how automated applications allow the creation and management of cross-channel campaigns across email, social, web, and mobile in a central platform. Then, we’ll discuss how your campaigns can be designed and planned with the aim of getting closer to the customer.

What is Marketing Automation in 2020?

Marketing automation is exactly what the name suggests: the ability to automate marketing tasks to make it easier to reach out to and engage with your target audience. This includes automating everything from segmenting your contacts to converting leads to sending messages and other manual tasks.

Originally, marketing automation was focused primarily on email marketing, but since the term has grown to include a wide range of automation tools across virtually all aspects of business marketing. Marketing automation makes it easy for you to craft content and messages as far ahead as you would like, easily segment your audience, and then automate a schedule to get the right content to get to the right audience at the right moment.

As you can imagine, one of the biggest benefits of marketing automation is the fact that it can save you a lot of time with remedial tasks such as drafting and publishing content, targeting customers, storing recipient lists, and so on. Each of these removes the possibility of human error from your marketing plan.

As a result, online businesses and organizations can more easily engage their audience, streamline their sales processes, and generate new leads by replacing repetitive and yet important tasks with automated solutions. Ultimately, this will provide better results while saving you a significant amount of time, energy, and money.

Who Do You Want To Reach Out To?

It’s important for you to determine who exactly your audience is before you begin reaching out to them using marketing automation. It all really comes down to you answering these questions: who exactly are you trying to reach, and what do they care about?

This is something that you need to figure out because marketing automation solutions cannot figure this out for you. Automation software can help you to refine and segment your customers, but it does not magically inform you of who your customers are or what they need in the first place.

This is something that you will need to figure out on your own. You may have a vague idea of what your customers look like, but you may not have taken the time to conduct a thorough analysis to truly figure out who they are and what they want. If this is the case, your marketing efforts will most likely not connect with your audience.

The good news is that there are simple tricks to figure out who exactly your customers are. Always focus on your customers as actual people. It will be a mistake for you to think of your customers in terms of ‘buyers’ and ‘distributors’ so to say. Your products and services exist to help make someone’s life easier, not just so they can buy or distribute your products.

This may not be so easy when the product you are selling is a component in the product of another company. In this case, your customer is the designer of the other company’s product who is using your product to complete a specific task.

The good news is once you figure out exactly which people you are selling your product to and what they really want, marketing automation can take care of the rest for you. Automation solutions will allow you to see what your leads or customers are interacting with and their purchasing behavior, and then reveal the data you need to more effectively segment and target future campaigns. This is data you would not have otherwise gained without automation solutions in the first place.

We’ll discuss all of this in greater detail in the next section.

How Marketing Automation Solutions Improve Your Cross Channel Marketing

Cross channel marketing differs from multi-channel marketing in that whereas the latter simply means that you have a presence on multiple channels and/or digital platforms, the former refers to offering a seamless experience across those channels and platforms. Utilizing marketing automation solutions will help you to streamline your cross channel marketing efforts.

The most crucial element in determining the success of your marketing campaign is the timing. You need to know the best time to engage your customers so your message can hopefully convert them.

Automated cross channel tools can do this for you because they can interact with customers when they are the most likely to engage you. You can also set delay durations, meaning you can reach out to customers even if they are experiencing a delay on their end.

If timing is the most important element in determining an online marketing campaign’s success, personalization is easily the second most. Customers always favor engaging with brands that can personalize their messages and content because it helps make each customer feel valued.

Making your marketing messages feel more personalized; however, it is difficult when you are lacking accurate information and insight. Automation solutions can create personalized messages because they keep track of user behavior, and this can also make it easy for them to make specific product recommendations.

Keep in mind that different automated marketing tools will collect different data concerning user behavior. Web analytics tools will gather data on what a customer’s activity on your website(s) is like. Email marketing services will provide insights into customer engagement, making it easier to segment customers based on different parameters.

Cross channel marketing can help marketers to deliver high-quality marketing campaigns through seamlessly interacting with users, but only with the most innovative tools available. Marketing automation solutions simply make it easier for you to implement a digital cross channel campaign through optimizing your time, personalizing your messages, and improving segmenting and targeting of customers.

Author Bio

Nahla Davies is a software developer and tech writer. Before devoting her work full time to technical writing, she managed—among other intriguing things—to serve as a lead programmer at an Inc. 5,000 experiential branding organization whose clients include Samsung, Time Warner, Netflix, and Sony.