Introduction

Rush hour traffic is never fun — from the sheer number of people on the road to the frustrating start-and-stop progress — but that’s exactly what your website goes through during peak times. And with modern consumers turning increasingly to digital commerce, handling peak traffic is one of the biggest challenges businesses face. 

Don’t get us wrong, high website traffic is great — if you have the right strategies and technologies in place to convert that traffic into customers. If you don’t, it’s bad news for your bottom line. 

Your company needs to focus on compliantly collecting customer data and using that data to offer connected commerce experiences to your customers. That means moving away from point solutions, as they may struggle to work well together, slow down your team of marketers, and limit your multichannel marketing opportunities. Additionally, you’ll want automated marketing solutions that can react and adjust to new and added data in real time to save your marketers precious time.

If you felt a touch of panic reading that because your company doesn’t have those strategies and marketing technology in place just yet, don’t worry. You can still capitalize on the high traffic you’re expecting this peak season by building multichannel 1:1 personalization for your customers with short time to value.  

Having your collected customer data and marketing automation capabilities under the same roof enables you to feed that data into different channels and use it to inform interactions with customers on those channels quickly and easily. No more waiting for time to value as you would with point solutions that are not interconnected.

The ability to drive all of your multichannel marketing campaigns from one place also allows you to tap into an extremely important concept in the digital-first world — customer-centric marketing.

Customer centricity involves understanding what makes your customers different and unique so you can bring value to them on a one-to-one basis. And, it helps you focus on positive customer experiences, whether it’s discovery, point of sale, or post-sale communication. 

In a perfect world, your company wouldn’t have four different siloed marketing teams competing to get attribution for consumers’ purchases while trying to avoid spamming them. Your commerce-driving team would be able to have customers as their main focus and would be working in harmony to serve them with campaigns that foster brand loyalty. This is much more possible when your company’s multichannel marketing efforts are unified in a single platform. 

What would your peak season look like with a customer-centric outlook on your multichannel marketing strategy and all of your campaigns driven from a powerful single solution? Keep reading for a sneak preview.

The 6 Best Channels for High-converting Campaigns

Every marketing channel your company invests in has the chance to be high performing and lucrative — with the right approach. 

Unifying your data into a single solution and using that solution to power your multichannel marketing efforts will allow your company to hand pick the channels that will deliver remarkable customer experiences. This allows your company to orchestrate your individual channels into a meaningful journey for your customers. 

Let’s dive into the specifics of each high-converting channel in an optimal multichannel marketing strategy.

Email

We would be remiss to not start with old faithful — personalized email campaigns. While others have proclaimed that email was dying or dead, those are probably the same people who haven’t sent emails backed by customer data. The best marketers understand the value of being able to easily send personalized campaigns via email — including highly targeted deals, promo codes, and product recommendations — to targeted customer segments and the potential revenue that can be unlocked. By having access to that ever-important customer data, marketers know who is more likely to convert and can send content accordingly. 

For example, knowing the most optimal send time for a segment of customers allows you to greatly boost the chances of your recipient seeing, opening, and engaging with your email. 

Integrating email marketing into your company’s marketing automation efforts will directly affect lead generation, brand awareness, and impact how engaged customers are with your brand in between purchases. And for peak traffic times, an email service provider (ESP) that’s fueled by customer data collected by a customer data platform (CDP) is just what you need to make your email marketing both stable and flexible. 

The combination of an ESP and CDP means you can be confident your technology is going to work as it should when it matters the most. You’ll also be able to quickly and easily make changes to your email campaigns, which is key during busy times that require quick pivots.  

Peak season isn’t the time to neglect your email campaigns. Drive value fast with these three campaign ideas:

SMS

If your company isn’t creating SMS campaigns, then you’re missing a giant part of your target audience’s lives. After all, practically everyone’s on their phones these days. 

Using SMS channels to send messages — ideally personalized with zero- and first-party data — is key to unlocking mobile marketing revenue. Tailoring promotions and notifications with customer-specific content is proven to boost engagement and customer retention. 

For SMS campaigns to be most effective, they must be part of an overarching marketing strategy, and must connect to what customers are seeing in other channels. SMS campaigns without specific targeted segments are too “batch and blast,” and lead to customers simply opting out.

Before you start your campaign, though, be sure to lead with the opt-in message. After receiving that opt-in to stay in line with consent management standards, here are three ideas for SMS campaigns for your peak seasons:

In-app Messages

If you have a mobile app, in-app messages are an incredibly effective way to engage your customers, especially because you already have their attention. This makes it easy to gather data from them to further improve their experience. 

Using in-app messages also allows you to change the content inside the app (albeit not always perfectly) without having to deploy a new version that has to go through marketplace review. This gives you the flexibility to change key messaging when needed in your mobile app. 

With in-app messages, you can send already-active users targeted and personalized content to nudge them to take key actions with your brand. To get started, try these three campaign ideas:

Ads, Retargeting, and Lookalikes

To get the most out of your ad spend, you can turn to tactics like retargeting and lookalike audiences. Use retargeting to personalize your ad content based on a consumer’s previous browsing behavior.

Or, turn to lookalike audiences — based on those with high customer lifetime value or who recently made purchases — to target a more specific audience than available by default on social media sites like Facebook and Google.

And, by building your lookalike audiences using your collected customer data and then automatically pushing them into Facebook and Google, you can acquire similar high-value prospects more quickly and reliably.   

Regardless of where your customers experience your brand — email, web, or mobile — you should be able to build and maintain ad audiences based on their behavior on that specific channel. Being able to do this in real time will ensure that you aren’t spending advertising dollars trying to acquire customers that have already converted.

Here are three retargeting strategies that will help you maximize ad spend:

Push Notifications

Mobile

With the number of mobile app users growing rapidly, mobile push notifications should play an extremely important part in your brand’s overarching marketing strategy. 

Consider all of the important messages you receive on your mobile device throughout the day — the arrival of a package, a reminder for your upcoming appointment, a deposit in your bank account, a flight delay, and so on. These notifications can help you save precious time during your day, and brands should aim to replicate that value. 

However, that makes it crucial to be careful with the type of content you send customers via mobile push notifications. Customers don’t want to receive the same type of content on their mobile devices that they do via email — they are quick to consider things that are not hyper-relevant to them spam and opt out. 

Do you know what type of messages your customers would be interested in? It’s important to have this strategy mapped out prior to sending to avoid the dreaded opt-outs. It can really pay off. 

Browser

Similar to mobile push notifications, browser push notifications provide another channel to send unique personalized communications to your customers. And should be treated with similar care to try and avoid opt-outs. 

These clickable pop-up messages are designed to serve as brief bits of communication that enable you to convey quick messages, offers, or other important information to opted-in customers. So keep it simple! Subscribers can be anywhere on the browser and still receive these notifications, as long as they're online and have their browsers running on their devices. 

To help you increase website engagement and encourage visitors to keep coming back, Try these three ideas:

Invest in Ease of Use and Time to Value

If you’re really trying to raise the roof with your multichannel marketing campaigns and strategies, you need to first house your collected customer data and marketing automation capabilities under that same roof. 

Having a marketing technology solution that is a single platform built to support all of your channels will help you better strategize and scale winning customer journeys. Bring a customer-centric approach to the forefront and ensure that your customers are at the heart of everything you do. 

If you’re interested in learning more about multichannel marketing, check out the list of vendors Forrester considers to be leaders in cross-channel campaign management to get a better idea of what the marketplace looks like.

If you want to see how truly simple it is to set up many of the aforementioned campaigns with a single solution, check out our 6 Days of Holiday Campaigns. Not only can you build multichannel 1:1 personalized campaigns for your customers with a short time-to-value, but you can do it effortlessly without any need for IT assistance. 

Don’t miss out on taking advantage of your high website traffic again. Invest in a solution that puts your multichannel marketing in the fast lane today.