Introduction to multi-channel and cross-channel campaigns

By the end of this module, you should be able to explain various marketing channels and identify a use case for multi-channel and Cross-channel Campaigns. Adobe Campaign offers the following delivery channels. Email Channel. Email deliveries let you send personalized emails to the target population. Direct mail Channel. Direct mail deliveries let you generate an extraction file which contains data on the target population. Mobile channel. Deliveries on mobile channel let you send personalized SMS inline messages to the target population. Social channel. social marketing lets you post publications on the most of your Facebook pages and send tweets to your Twitter accounts. Mobile application channel. Mobile app deliveries let to you send notification to iOS and Android systems.

What is Cross-channel marketing? Now that we know what delivery channels we have available, let’s learn more about Cross-channel marketing. Cross-channel marketing allows marketers to reach customers across different channels including email, web, mobile, apps, SMS, Call Center, in-store, and direct mail. The purpose of Cross-channel marketing, is not only to acquire new customers but to continue the conversation with customers across the channels they use throughout all customer life cycle stages. All the way from acquisition to loyalty and retention. Marketers needs to ensure they can create cross-channel experiences that are relevant to where the customer is in the buying stage.

Use-case for multi-channel Campaigns. In a multi-channel Campaign, a single marketing communication utilizes multiple channels. For example, you can pick a channel based on the customer’s preferences or based on the available channels to reach your audience. Let’s now see a practical example. We want to target our audience based on the available channels, email or mobile. How can we accomplish this? We will need the query activity for which we will edit the query and apply the search to our wanted audience. Once we have the recipients selected, we can use a Split activity to filter our audience into two sets, email and mobile. We will add a filter in competition on the inbound population for each subset, check and give the email is not empty. Respectively checking if the mobile is not empty, we can also generate the complement for the outreach for recipients, and there you have it, success. Our audience can now be contacted using the available channels.

Use case for Cross-channel Campaigns. In a cross-channel Campaign, you can send multiple deliveries using a different channel for each. For example, we can send out an SMS informing our recipients to keep an eye out for an offer in the mail, and then send the offer via direct mail. How can we accomplish this? To implement a similar Workflow, We have need a query activity in which we will filter our recipients and check if the failures for mobile and postcode are not empty. In phase one, we will have an Mail Delivery rather than a Mobile Delivery. In the email, we will inform our recipients that a new offer will be sent soon in their mailbox. Then we have a use a wake activity and set it to three days. Once that time passes, we will use a Split activity to target the responders and non-responders. We will send a direct Mail Delivery to our responders. Once this Campaign is started, three recipients will be filtered. The one with a valid email and others will receive an email, and after three days they will receive the offer in their mailbox. So far, we learned that the cross-channel Campaign has multiple touches or deliveries and can use a different channel for each. With multiple touches, the timing is important. One way to control the timing, is synchro the delay between deliveries and the single Workflow, which we did in our example.

Alternately, you could use multiple Workflows, one per delivery and then schedule the execution. For example, sending a save the date, X days prior to the event. You can also treat the recipients of the second delivery differently based on how they respond to the first phase. For example, we might want to target responders who registered for an event by sending them a packet in the mail. If they don’t respond to the first communication, it could send them a reminder about the event. There are two key things to think about, how do you want to set up the timing of the Campaign? And how do you want to treat the responders versus non-responders in the second phase? Now you should be able to explain various marketing channels in Campaign Classic and identify a use case for multi-channel and cross-channel Campaigns. Thank you for listening and I will see you next time. -