How to Better Execute Cross-channel Strategies

Your digital marketing efforts don’t operate in a vacuum. Consumers are influenced by countless ad messages a day – in fact, experts estimate that Americans are exposed to upwards of 10,000 ads per day. The path to purchase is obviously cluttered and complicated and no two are the same. Your consumer likely interacted with several other organic and paid media channels before deciding whether or not to buy, so it’s incredibly important to consider how your media efforts can positively affect these decisions by learning how to better execute cross-channel strategies.

When evaluating your affiliate and display campaigns, cross-channel learnings can significantly impact the performance of all your digital efforts. Here are some key areas of optimization:

• Partners: You should always be on the lookout for new opportunities to grow partners! Review the publishers in both programs to see where it makes sense to either invest more or change your investment strategy. For example, a media or content site could potentially see more of an impact on overall sales performance while running one of your display campaigns than they would if you were to make an affiliate flat fee buy.
• Offers: Which customer incentives are performing well? Take a look at your top converting offers for each channel to determine what’s resonating best with your consumers, then share those same offers or similar ones across both channels. Depending on the transaction fields you’re sending in affiliate, you could really dig into the customer profile for insights to better inform your next targeted display campaign.
• Products: Dive into your top performing products on-site, as well as by marketing channel.  If certain products aren’t doing as well as others in your paid media channels, you could show them some extra attention by featuring them prominently in your display ads or by incentivizing publishers to promote those specific SKUs with an increased commission rate or in exchange for a goal-based bounty.

Each of these channels has a wealth of data on what works (and what doesn’t) to incentivize new or existing customers, and they can be used to better inform the decisions you make in your other channels.

How Cross-Channel Strategies Drive Sales Increases

Leading luxury beauty retailer Bluemercury can attest to the success of strong cross-channel strategies.

Bluemercury worked with Rakuten Marketing to evaluate the performance of their search, display, and affiliate advertising programs in 2017 to develop a more cohesive cross channel approach for 2018 wherein all three channels were better optimized to reach the right customer at the right stage of the online sales funnel.

By evaluating data from all three channels and optimizing their strategy so that all three channels were working more in sync with one another, Bluemercury saw a:

• 60% YOY increase in sessions.
• 113% YOY increase in conversions.
• 131% YOY increase in revenue.
• 56% YOY increase in new users.

Digital marketing channels need to be working in sync so that they are complimenting one another and not competing against each other. Using the data you have to your advantage to develop better, smarter cross-channel strategies will help you serve up the right message at the right stage of the sales funnel.

Katie England has been with Rakuten Marketing for over 4 years, and she is currently working as a Manager, Strategic Services. In this role, she consults with current and prospective clients on how to make the most of our product suite. She is based out of Tampa, FL, though likes to spend her free time travelling (or planning her next trip). When she’s at home, you can find her hanging out with her husband and two dogs.

Ready to learn more about how to get the most out of your digital marketing efforts? Get in touch with us today.