Why Cross-Channel Personalization Is a Retail Marketer’s Dream

It’s been more than a decade since the rise of mobile—and while there’s been a lot of disruption and change when it comes to customer engagement, we’ve also started to see some clear learnings around how to market successfully to today’s consumers. Generic, batch-and-blast campaigns are out. Personalized, cross-channel messaging flows that respect customers’ preferences are in.

These strategies can do a lot to move the needle—especially if your brand operates in a highly noisy, competitive vertical like retail. Let explore four key reasons that it makes sense for retail brands to prioritize a personalized, cross-channel approach to customer engagement:

1. Personalized Marketing Can Keep Retail Brands Front of Mind

Unless a given customer is particularly loyal, they may not visit your brand’s app or website in a consistent way, raising the possibility that they miss out on items and promotions that might be of interest to them. Sending these customers messages can be an effective way to keep them informed and increase the odds that they make a purchase.

However, sending too many generic messages can lead users to opt out of push notifications, unsubscribe from emails, and even delete your mobile app. Personalization, on the other hand, catches a user’s interest. When done right, personalization will not only increase customer engagement but also encourage your current users to bring others into your business—in fact, research by Braze has found that personalizing messages can increase push notification open rates by at least 1.6x.

2. Retail Brands Can See Stronger Results with Dynamic Content Personalization

Your customers will notice, appreciate and share your marketing emails and notifications if they appeal to them. Sadly, more than three-quarters of brands settle for the bare minimum when personalizing campaigns, using it only to add their company name and/or the customer's name to push notifications and emails. However, the good news is that this statistic means there is plenty of room for you to stand out and win over old and new users by using personalization to its full potential.

Research by Braze has found that leveraging dynamic content personalization to automatically add in content like individual product recommendations to messages in real time can boost unique email click rates by up to 1.7x, driving significantly more engagement with the messages you send. Those users may not buy anything immediately but they’ll stay engaged with you because they know you offer products that are relevant to their interests...because you highlighted those products in an individualized way in the outreach you sent.

3. Effective Cross-Channel Campaigns Can Help Retailers Stand Out from the Crowd

There are so many retailers to pick from that customers are spoiled for choice. Thankfully, you can stand out with a good cross-channel campaign. Research from Braze has found that when customers received outreach in two or more channels (think email and push notifications), their levels of engagement were 166% higher than customers who were measured using a single channel.

When you combine a cross-channel strategy with individually personalized messages, the impact can be significant. This approach ensures that your customers get messages about your brand that are tailored to their interests...and delivered on the channels they use most. In a retail context, that could mean ensuring that a campaign promoting a new sale includes each recipient’s recommended items and is delivered via a mix of email, push, SMS, or in-app messages—based on what segment each user falls into and what channels they’re more likely to engage with—to ensure that your audience is kept informed.

Final Thoughts

It takes thought and care to effectively deliver personalized, cross-channel campaigns to your audience. However, the results are more than worth the time and effort it takes. For more information about how leveraging multiple messaging channels in tandem can drive stronger engagement for your marketing campaigns, check out the Braze Cross-Channel Data Report.