Guide
Cross-channel marketing
A complete guide with examples
Cross-channel marketing is an integrated approach to reaching customers across multiple touchpoints in a coordinated way. This strategy allows businesses to create seamless customer experiences while maintaining consistent messaging across channels.
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What is cross-channel marketing?
Cross-channel marketing is the practice of delivering coordinated marketing messages across various digital and physical touchpoints to reach customers wherever they are. By orchestrating campaigns across channels, businesses can create cohesive customer experiences while holistically analyzing performance.
How does cross-channel marketing work?
Cross-channel marketing works by integrating customer insights, consistent branding, and tailored content delivery with customer-centric journey mapping to create a unified brand experience. These elements enable seamless transitions between touchpoints and effective multi-channel engagement, ensuring customers receive a cohesive experience regardless of where or how they interact with the brand.
This approach is increasingly critical as consumer behavior evolves—the Beyond the Buy research from Amazon Ads found that 75% of surveyed consumers think about shopping multiple times per week, demonstrating that customers are always shopping and discovering brands naturally throughout their daily content experiences rather than following a linear path from awareness to purchase.
Integrated customer insights
Integrated customer insights are essential in cross-channel marketing because they enable businesses to maintain a complete, unified view of customer interactions across touchpoints. These comprehensive insights allow marketers to deliver tailored marketing experiences and make informed decisions about when and how to engage with customers across different touchpoints.
Consistent branding
Consistent branding across all channels is crucial in cross-channel marketing as it helps establish brand recognition and builds trust by providing customers with a cohesive experience regardless of where they interact with the business. When branding elements like messaging, visual identity, and tone of voice remain uniform across channels, it strengthens brand identity and helps customers navigate between touchpoints seamlessly.
Tailored content
Tailored content delivers relevant experiences that resonate with customers' individual preferences, behaviors, and needs across all channels. By leveraging customer signals to create customized messaging and offers, businesses can increase engagement, build stronger relationships, and drive higher conversion rates as customers move between different touchpoints.
Customer-centric journey mapping
Customer-centric journey mapping in cross-channel marketing helps organizations understand and optimize how customers interact with their brand across multiple touchpoints, identifying pain points and opportunities for improvement. By mapping the complete customer journey, businesses can design more effective cross-channel experiences that align with customer behavior patterns and preferences, ensuring a more seamless transition between channels and higher customer satisfaction.
Seamless transitions
Seamless transitions in cross-channel marketing enable customers to move effortlessly between different channels while maintaining a consistent and uninterrupted experience with the brand. This fluid movement between touchpoints, whether from social media to website, email to physical store, or mobile app to customer service, ensures customers can engage with the brand on their preferred touchpoints without friction or disconnection in their journey.
Multi-channel engagement
Multi-channel engagement in cross-channel marketing involves strategically coordinating interactions across various touchpoints like social media, email, websites, mobile apps, and physical locations to create a cohesive customer experience. By synchronizing these different channels and ensuring they work together rather than in isolation, businesses can meet customers wherever they are while maintaining consistent messaging and service quality across all touchpoints.
Why is cross-channel marketing important?
Cross-channel marketing is important for modern businesses as it drives enhanced customer engagement and improved brand perception through coordinated, consistent experiences across touchpoints. Leveraging insight-driven solutions to create unified customer experiences can help organizations achieve better return on investment and build stronger relationships with their customers.
Key benefits of cross-channel marketing
The key benefits of cross-channel marketing include enhanced customer engagement through consistent interactions across multiple touchpoints, improved brand perception by building trust and credibility with a cohesive presence, better return on investment by optimizing marketing spend and reducing redundancies, and signal-driven solutions that provide comprehensive insights to inform strategic decisions. Together, these advantages help enable businesses to create more effective campaigns, strengthen customer relationships, and drive measurable growth in an increasingly complex digital landscape.
Enhanced customer engagement
Cross-channel marketing drives enhanced customer engagement through consistent, meaningful interactions with customers across all touchpoints, leading to stronger brand relationships and increased customer loyalty. By engaging customers through their preferred channels and providing relevant, connected experiences, businesses can significantly increase customer satisfaction and lifetime value.
Improved brand perception
A major strength of cross-channel marketing is its ability to create a cohesive, professional brand image across all touchpoints, which builds trust and credibility with customers. When customers encounter consistent messaging, visual identity, and service quality across multiple channels, they develop a more positive perception of the brand, leading to increased loyalty and brand advocacy.
Better return on investment
Cross-channel marketing drives better return on investment by optimizing marketing spend across channels and creating synergies that maximize the impact of each customer interaction. By coordinating messages across channels and leveraging insights to reach customers more effectively, businesses can reduce redundant spending while increasing conversion rates and customer lifetime value.
Signal-driven solutions
Cross-channel marketing generates comprehensive signal-driven solutions by collecting and integrating customer behavior insights across multiple touchpoints, providing a complete view of the customer journey and interaction patterns. This unified view enables businesses to make more informed decisions about their marketing strategies, optimize channel performance, and better understand customer preferences and needs across all touchpoints.
What is the difference between omnichannel and cross-channel marketing?
Cross-channel marketing is a strategy where channels work together but still maintain some degree of separation, while omnichannel marketing creates a completely integrated and simultaneous experience across all channels. The main difference is that omnichannel marketing provides a more sophisticated, fully unified approach where all channels work as one cohesive system, whereas cross-channel marketing maintains slight distinctions between channels while still allowing them to work together.
How do you create a cross-channel marketing campaign?
To create a cross-channel marketing campaign, organizations must define clear campaign goals, analyze their desired audiences, and integrate their measurement systems before developing a consistent content strategy across selected channels, implementing marketing automation tools, and continuously monitoring and optimizing performance based on cross-channel analytics.
Strategy development
Strategy development forms the foundation of a successful cross-channel marketing campaign by establishing clear campaign goals and KPIs, creating detailed customer personas, determining ideal outcomes and measurement criteria, and mapping customer behaviors across preferred channels to ensure a well-aligned marketing approach.
During this phase, consider research from Amazon Ads Beyond the Buy report that found that 54% of consumers discover brands while engaging with entertainment content, and 50% view entertainment as part of their shopping experience.1 This means your cross-channel strategy should account for how consumers move fluidly between entertainment and shopping contexts, ensuring your brand appears at the right moments across both environments.
Channel planning
Channel planning involves integrating customer insights across touchpoints and implementing comprehensive measurement tools while strategically selecting the most effective marketing channels for your audience. This phase requires carefully defining each channel's specific role in the customer journey and ensuring all systems can communicate effectively to provide a seamless cross-channel experience.
Branding and messaging
This phase focuses on creating a unified messaging strategy and maintaining consistent branding across all channels, while implementing marketing automation tools and designing automated customer journeys to ensure seamless delivery of the brand experience.
Launch and implementation
The launch phase involves carefully rolling out the campaign across all selected channels while implementing triggered responses and ensuring seamless cross-channel integration, all while closely monitoring initial customer engagement to identify any necessary adjustments.
Measurement and optimization
While the campaign is live, marketing leads should continuously measure cross-channel metrics and analyze performance insights to make real-time adjustments that can improve campaign effectiveness.
How to address the challenges of cross-channel marketing
To address cross-channel marketing challenges, organizations should invest in unified measurement touchpoints that can accurately analyze customer interactions across all channels while maintaining privacy compliance. Additionally, implementing clear attribution models, ensuring consistent messaging across channels, and regularly updating measurement mechanisms to account for changes in technology and consumer behavior are essential strategies for overcoming these challenges.
Strategy and process alignment
Strategy and process alignment creates clear objectives and consistent messaging frameworks, while establishing standardized workflows and channel coordination protocols that ensure all team members understand their responsibilities and work cohesively across channels.
Unified measurement system
Unified measurement systems tackle data silos, while ensuring the selected marketing technology is properly integrated and compatible across all touchpoints to enable seamless signal flow and analysis.
Continuous monitoring and optimization
Ongoing analysis of performance metrics and integration issues allows for the enablement of insights-driven adjustments and updates to attribution models while consistently evaluating and improving channel coordination to maintain effectiveness.
Addressing these cross-channel marketing challenges requires a unified approach that connects performance across touchpoints. Amazon Ads provides comprehensive measurement solutions that enable advertisers to understand true channel contribution through privacy-safe first-party signals and sophisticated attribution capabilities. By combining holistic measurement with AI-powered marketing optimization, advertisers can move beyond isolated metrics to see how full-funnel marketing tactics interact to drive outcomes. This integrated view eliminates data silos, reveals optimization opportunities, and enables more effective decision-making to help drive sustainable growth.
Examples of cross-channel marketing
Case Study
Dove launched a full-funnel campaign addressing body image concerns that keep young women from sports participation. The brand strategically combined Prime Video ads during Thursday Night Football's Wild Card game with streaming TV, display ads, Fire TV screensaver experiences, and a homepage takeover following the Super Bowl. By leveraging Amazon Ads audience insights, Dove reached both existing and new customers across multiple channels while featuring culturally relevant figures like Kylie Kelce and Venus Williams to authentically connect their mission with product offerings. The campaign reached 140 million unique customers, with 35% of attributed purchases coming from first-time buyers.
Case Study
Revlon partnered with Horizon to launch the Glimmer product line using a comprehensive full-funnel strategy that integrated Amazon Marketing Cloud, Amazon DSP, Prime Video, and streaming TV ads with Horizon Commerce's NEON AI-driven measurement engine. The campaign focused on audience strategies based on purchase-based behaviors rather than traditional demographics, creating custom segments including High-Value New-to-Brand shoppers, Cart Abandoners, and Sponsored Product Keyword Engagers. Real-time optimizations during key retail moments capitalized on the discovery that viewers exposed to both Prime Video and search demonstrated 24x higher purchase rates. The launch exceeded forecasts by 120% with 170% sales growth.
Case Study
Haleon developed a comprehensive multi-channel strategy utilizing diverse Amazon Ads formats including Prime Video ads, online video ads, display ads, and sponsored ads to reach consumers across the full funnel. The global consumer healthcare company conducted region-specific studies to measure omnichannel performance metrics across different brands and geographical locations, testing various combinations of advertising formats to understand their collective impact. Campaigns using 3-4 ad formats generated 10x higher page views versus those using only 1-2 formats. Haleon and Amazon Ads consolidated these learnings into a global playbook, achieving a 153% ROI improvement for full-funnel campaigns versus single-objective approaches and a 10% lift in offline sales.
Channels available through Amazon Ads
Brands can access a wide array of channels and solutions through Amazon Ads to create a cross-channel marketing strategy aimed at reaching customers wherever they are.
Reach engaged audiences with ads alongside premium movies and TV shows on Prime Video.
Connect with passionate fans during live sporting events on Prime Video, a growing marketing channel for brands.
Engage with the vibrant and interactive community on Twitch, a livestreaming service for gaming, entertainment, and more.
Advertise on the world's most popular and authoritative source for movie, TV, and celebrity content.
Use audio ads to reach listeners on Amazon Music's free ad-supported tier and through Alexa-enabled devices.
Extend your reach across a network of premium third-party publishers and streaming TV apps.
FAQs
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Sources
1 Amazon Ads custom research with Strat7 Crowd.DNA. Beyond the Buy. Fielded March 2025 to July 2025. Data reflects AU, BR, CA, DE, ES, FR, IT, JP, MX, U.K., and U.S. aggregated. N=14,000.