By now, most marketers realize that providing cross-channel brand experiences to your users is essential. After all, your customers are using the web, apps, email, and social media—and maybe other platforms, too—to interact with your brand. So it’s a marketer’s job to understand how users transition between these platforms and associated channels, then tailor the customer experience they provide to fit that behavior.

Today, 9 out of 10 customers expect cross-channel messaging. And once a team takes this approach, they can boost user lifetime by 76%, compared to users who receive messages only in a single channel. But it’s not enough to just send messages across channels; those messages need to speak to each recipient. People today increasingly expect personalized experiences from the brands they patronize—in fact, 90% of consumers express frustration when they receive messages they perceive as irrelevant to them. Brands that make this happen can see “10-30% revenue uplift,” according to McKinsey’s Julien Boudet, making personalization one of the most impactful parts of a modern customer engagement strategy.

The upshot? Prioritizing cross-channel personalization can boost your ROI, strengthen overall revenue, and bring you the kind of positive attention that can propel you up the corporate ladder. But before you can get there, you have to get your cross-channel personalization efforts off the ground. Here are the first steps you have to master:

1. Invest in a cross-channel customer engagement platform: Before you get started with cross-channel personalization, you’ll need a natively cross-channel customer engagement platform that can help you understand how users engage with your brand in a nuanced, holistic way. A platform that’s architected in a natively cross-channel but channel agnostic way (as opposed to built around a single channel) makes it possible to ensure a comprehensive view of your customers as their user journey moves across mobile, desktop, email, and beyond.

2. Create live user profiles: The right platform gives you the crucial ability to create real-time user profiles. A user profile captures the data you need, starting the minute a user opens your app, following them through the ensuing twists and turns of their customer journey, and ensuring that the information you’re working from is continuously updated as their behavior or preferences change.

3. Tailor messaging based on channels and behavior:You know what your customers want—so now it’s time to deliver. Building campaigns that act on your users’ preferences is the best way to grow trust and loyalty. For instance, you might find that customers prefer email engagement during the onboarding process, then look for push notifications to learn about special promotions. Alternately, you might discover that users are more likely to take action if the messages you send are dynamically personalized to highlight products or services that are likely to be of interest to them. Try different kinds of customization to get a better picture of what is and isn’t resonating.

4. Test and evolve: Once you’ve nailed cross-channel personalization, your work isn’t finished. The way your customers engage with your brand is always changing. Using a customer journey management feature like Braze Canvas to collect data and test new variants of campaigns keeps you up to speed on how your outreach is resonating. Then you and your team can continue to optimize the customer experience—so that your audience remains satisfied and keeps coming back.

Next Steps

In today's world, consumers expect relevant, cohesive brand experiences across every channel they know you on (and even some they don’t). In order to achieve this, brands need the right technologies that help understand exactly what their customers want and deliver it to them. And when you do that, engagement, conversions, and more increase—and you get noticed.

Learn more about how Braze helps you power engaging cross-channel customer experiences in our 2021 Global Customer Engagement Review.