How SMBs and Mid-Market Brands Can Leverage Cross-Channel Engagement to Thrive in a Challenging Marketplace

When you work in marketing and growth for a small business or mid-size brand, it's common knowledge that you have to do more with less—especially during challenging times like these. And that's where getting cross-channel engagement right can be your superpower.

While the resources that larger brands have at their disposal for splashier marketing initiatives may be out of reach for smaller organizations, the truth is, you don't need all the bells and whistles. And neither do your customers. At the end of the day, what they really care about is how brands treat them. They want to be called by name (and the right one). They want to get helpful information and reminders. And they want you to remember what they like (and don't). In short, they want meaningful, personalized experiences.

And as a small or mid-market business, making that investment to get customer engagement right can pay off. Most brands (84%) that manage to improve customer experience enjoy the benefits of watching their revenue increase...and companies with "superior" customer experiences generate nearly 6X the revenue than their counterparts with subpar customer experiences, reports Forbes.

Why You Need Cross-Channel Engagement to Thrive in Today's Challenging Marketplace

Today's fragmented digital landscape spans mobile, desktop, and a growing number of connected devices, and that means that no single channel is going to make or break your company's growth. To truly be successful, you need to go where your customers are, and your customers are interacting with a whole host of digital platforms and channels—often multiple times throughout the day.

What does that look like? Savvy brands that leverage the ideal mix of touchpoints via web messaging, mobile messaging, email, and more through cross-channel messaging can see their customer engagement grow by as much as more than 800%, according to our research of 300 million users around the world.

While some brands are still using the "batch and blast" approach to marketing—that is, sending the same marketing campaign via email, text, and other channels to all of the contacts in their customer databases—true engagement involves evolving to embrace 1:1 personalized messaging. That means reaching the right customers via the right channels at the right time about the right topics. And that takes investing in a best-in-class customer engagement platform.

Your customer engagement strategy needs a customer engagement platform that…

1. ...helps you listen to key customer behaviors and interests and send personalized, automated messaging in response
2. ... supports all the top messaging channels
3. ...can scale with you as your company grows
4. ...plug into the other best-in-class technologies that you’re already leveraging
5. ...seamlessly coordinate effective cross-channel campaigns without requiring a lot of technical assistance or having to log into multiple interfaces

What Cross-Channel Engagement Makes Possible: Happn and Braze

By partnering with Braze and leveraging our customer engagement platform to power its in-app messaging and email campaigns, dating app and SMB Happn was able to implement a cross-channel approach that significantly boosted the impact of the company’s key messaging channel (email) and provided a more positive experience for customers. This led to a 3X jump in onboarding email open rates, a 42% decrease in their bounce rate, and a 1.3X uplift in welcome email open rates, among other key outcomes. (Read the full case study here.)

Next Steps

There's a lot of noise out there, and the business landscape has never been more competitive, and that's why a thoughtful, effective customer engagement strategy supported by cross-channel messaging is now table stakes for any successful SMB or mid-market brand.

If you're ready to learn how a customer engagement platform like Braze can help take your outreach to the next level, connect with our sales team and get a walk through of our product, a breakdown of the channels and platforms we support, and our recommendations for how you can increase the impact of your customer engagement and retention efforts.