6 Benefits of Multichannel Marketing for Your Business

Updated April 25, 2024

Stop and think for a moment about how you interact with your favorite brands. Maybe you follow your favorite shoe brand on social media and like a post, and later in the day you happen to receive a postcard advertisement for a Summer Sale. Then you access their website to check out the sale. You may not realize it, but you’ve just interacted with your favorite shoe brand across three different channels.

When consumers are considering a purchase, they tend to do their research. In fact, 73% of consumers use multiple channels when researching a purchase. That means they’re interacting with more than one touchpoint from a company before making a purchase decision, such as on a website, social media pages, through a marketing email, or through a postcard that arrives in their mailbox.

It is important to remember that just like you do, different consumers interact with advertising messages through different methods. The best marketers are aware of this consumer tendency and make sure to take advantage of it when building their marketing strategy, because the payoff is real. Brands that use three or more channels in any one campaign earned a 287% higher purchase rate than those using a single-channel campaign.

What is Multichannel Marketing?

The strategy of using more than one channel, whether it be email, social media, digital ads, website, direct mail, or print ads, to get the message out about your brand is called multichannel marketing. The goal of multichannel marketing is to provide customers with a consistent and cohesive brand experience across all touchpoints, regardless of the channel they are using.

By engaging with customers on multiple channels, businesses can reach a wider audience, improve customer engagement, and increase their chances of making a sale. 84% of marketers believe that a multichannel approach is crucial for success in today’s digital landscape.

Benefits of Multichannel Marketing

What are some of the benefits of multichannel marketing? Here are six ways multichannel marketing can give your business a boost:

1. Increased brand awareness: By promoting your brand across multiple channels, you can reach a wider audience. The way you appeal to more people is by meeting them where they’re at, whether it’s online or at their mailbox.
2. Better customer experience: Multichannel marketing allows customers to interact with your brand on their preferred channels, making it easier for them to engage with your brand and enhancing their overall experience.
3. Higher engagement and conversion rates: By providing customers with consistent messaging and a seamless experience across multiple channels, you can increase engagement and conversion rates. 72% of consumers say they prefer to connect with brands and businesses through multiple channels. (Salesforce)
4. Improved customer retention: Multichannel marketing can help you build stronger relationships with customers by providing them with relevant, personalized messaging across all touchpoints. Companies with strong omnichannel customer engagement strategies retain 89% of their customers on average, compared to 33% for companies with weak omnichannel strategies. Furthermore, brands that implement omnichannel marketing strategies see a 91% higher year-over-year increase in customer retention rates, compared to brands that don’t.
5. Increased revenue: By engaging with customers on multiple channels, you can increase the likelihood of making a sale and generate more revenue for your business. Marketers who implement a multichannel approach to their campaigns see an average increase of 24.8% in their ROI compared to those who only use one channel. (Wordstream)
6. Better insights and data: Multichannel marketing provides a wealth of data that can be used to gain insights into customer behavior and preferences, allowing you to optimize your marketing efforts and improve your ROI. You can track the effectiveness of your campaign through email open rates and clicks on social media, and if you add QR codes to your direct mail, you can track interactions with that channel as well.

Wash, Rinse, and Repeat

The benefits of multichannel marketing are real, but to guarantee you’re getting the most out of your campaign, make sure you’re not only using multiple channels, but repeating your messaging multiple times. Send a series of postcards – not just one. Send multiple emails over a week or so. Rather than one long social media post, break your messaging into bullet points and push posts out once a day. The research tells you why:

A study published in the Journal of Consumer Research found that repeating a message can improve its recall and influence on attitudes and behaviors. This can be used to great effect in your marketing – the more times a consumer interacts with your brand across multiple channels and touchpoints, the more likely it is they will recall your brand when they need your services.

In addition, research has shown that repetition can be effective across different media channels, including television, radio, print, and digital media. A study by the Advertising Research Foundation found that repeat exposures to an advertisement across multiple channels can increase its effectiveness.

Therefore, advertisers who want consumers to remember their product should invest in a marketing mix where their message is repeated, often and across various digital and physical advertisements. This does not necessarily mean running the same advertisement repeatedly, but creating variations on the same messaging, paired with a clear, memorable brand.

The Case for Adding a Direct Mail Channel

Direct mail can be a highly effective form of advertising to add to your multichannel campaign because it appeals to a wide audience. Although many marketers believe that older people prefer more traditional marketing methods and younger people lean more toward newer methods, such as social media, this is not necessarily the case. In fact, recent USPS studies indicate that consumers between the ages of 18-25 prefer learning about special offers and promotions through direct mail rather than through e-mail.

Another interesting finding from these studies is that once consumers receive a piece of direct mail, they’ll go online to learn more about the offers and coupons they’ve received. To sum it up, using a multichannel marketing mix that combines digital with direct mail seems to offer the best return on your marketing dollar.

About Xpressdocs

With over 20 years in the marketing business, Xpressdocs has the tools, technology, and expertise to help you create campaigns that get results. Learn more about running multichannel campaigns with us by filling out this form: