Cross Channel Marketing & Hybrid Headless: A Match Made in Heaven

When new devices and touchpoints first started emerging, marketers quickly adopted the latest channels with a traditional multichannel approach. But the experiences we could provide using this approach weren’t cohesive enough for customers. In today’s increasingly connected digital world, customers expect a seamless experience across all their devices and touchpoints, with consistent branding, and personalized communications as well.

That means marketers have had to take multichannel a step further with cross channel marketing. Let’s look at what cross channel marketing is, why it’s beneficial, and how a hybrid headless CMS enables efficient marketing across channels.

Cross channel marketing moves beyond traditional multichannel marketing — leveraging multiple channels to reach customers — by connecting them. Customers, therefore, can move easily between channels and still have a consistent experience.

Cross channel marketing is a substantial improvement over traditional multichannel marketing, and may even be a necessity in today’s hyper-connected marketplace. Some of the most significant benefits of cross channel marketing include better customer journeys, expanded customer reach, and reduced marketing costs.

The typical customer journey entails multiple interactions that range from initial awareness of a brand, to eventually making a purchase and becoming a loyal customer. Cross channel marketing not only creates a consistent buyer’s journey, but marketers can use data insights to reduce the friction customers experience when moving from one stage in the journey to the next. A better buyer’s journey, therefore, shortens sales cycles while improving the purchase experience.

A key benefit of cross channel (and even of multichannel) marketing is that marketers can reach wider audiences. Your target market may prefer a particular channel over others, and possibly even have different preferences at each stage along the customer journey. If you don’t leverage a multitude of channels, you could miss out on potential buyers.

By leveraging the data obtained from cross channel marketing, marketers can adjust strategy to focus on the channels that have the greatest ROI. Targeting customers in the right places increases conversions and lowers the cost of customer acquisition. 

Delivering on the cross channel approach requires tooling that optimizes digital experience management for marketers. As a marketer you need to be able to:

This is where a hybrid headless CMS shines through.

Broadly speaking, a headless CMS enables the delivery of content to a multitude of channels via APIs (application programming interfaces). This allows for faster iterations on the frontend side for developers, as they can work without having to know the CMS technology. But this also typically implies that marketers don't benefit from the authoring tools they are used to in order to layout, preview and fully control the experiences they create for the different touchpoints.

So, while the headless approach has a lot of momentum, enterprises are increasingly seeking solutions that are not purely headless, but that can provide both head-on and head-optional from the same system. That's because hybrid empowers marketers to truly control the digital experiences they create.

A hybrid CMSs provides better authoring tools than a purely headless system, giving marketers the control they need for true cross channel customer experience management.

With the benefits of cross channel marketing clear, at Magnolia we’ve doubled down on hybrid headless with features that enable both developers and marketers to effectively build & deliver amazing experiences to appropriate channels.

Let's have a look at how exactly:

First off, with Magnolia you can store, tag, search and syndicate your content from one central repository. Whether it’s marketing content from the CMS, product content from the PIM system, images from your DAM or data from virtually any connected source - Magnolia can bring them all in one screen for you. That’s because of our flexible and open architecture, and our unique approach to integrations which takes them from the technical level to the UI, which is where marketers actually assemble content and experiences.

The Campaign Manager lets you integrate content with touchpoints across web, email, social or mobile channels and deliver the right content at the right point in the purchase journey. Campaign content can be a simple banner or a complex layout with product assets, teasers or anything that will entice your audience. More importantly, you do this by maintaining all campaign content in one place and by reusing it across touchpoints as needed.

A rich authoring environment is crucial to the success of cross channel marketing campaigns. With our upcoming Visual SPA Editor we take the authoring experience to the next level.

Single page applications have grown in popularity, especially with eCommerce companies, as they provide a faster and slicker experience for users. The Magnolia SPA editor allows marketers to edit the presentation of content in-context from external SPAs built in frameworks like React, Vue, and Angular. Live previews and in-context editing are crucial for crafting great digital experiences that lead to higher customer engagement and increased conversions. And we want to make sure marketers have that, regardless of the customer touchpoint they need to address.

We believe it’s a great mix of capabilities that few CMSs have, to enable the full scenario of cross channel marketing.

Get in touch now and see how it can work for you.