Eliminating data silos
Personalizing across channels
Prioritizing channel preferences
Implementing multi-touch attribution
Testing and optimizing channels

1. Eliminate data silos

Data silos are arguably the biggest obstacle to effective cross-channel marketing. When your email marketing, text messaging, point-of-sale (POS) system, loyalty program, ecommerce store, and customer service data live in separate systems, you end up with a disconnected and incomplete view of customer interactions across channels. 

In other words, your team sees only fragments of each customer’s journey—and you won’t be able to reach them in a way that’s timely and relevant. 

Disconnected systems also create redundancies, drive up costs, and slow your ability to operationalize customer data. Most damaging of all, they lead to disjointed customer experiences—where your messaging isn’t reflective of a customer’s full engagement history.

Eliminating data silos is the first step to effective cross-channel marketing. Start with a tech stack audit to identify where disconnected tools or weak integrations create gaps or slow you down. Then consolidate your systems in a B2C CRM with a built-in customer data platform and strong integrations ecosystem. 

This consolidation gives you a single source of truth for every customer. And that’s crucial for cross-channel marketing, because it empowers you to:

• Understand which customers are about to buy and which ones need more nurturing.
• Reach customers where they’re most likely to engage.
• Personalize messages according to lifecycle stage and preferred channel.
• Stay current with customers’ shifting needs and preferences.
• Send automated messages based on real-time behavior.

When meal subscription brand Daily Harvest, for example, consolidated 4 ecommerce tools to create a single source of truth for customer data, they not only cut tech costs by 18%. They also gained the ability to build better automated review flows and improve customer segmentation.

2. Personalize across channels without overwhelming customers

Customers are constantly switching between channels. But the last thing they want is to be chased by the same message across them. 

Cross-channel marketing works best when every message is tailored to each customer’s behavior. Here are just a few ways to avoid channel conflict and fatigue:

Avoid duplicate sends with flow filters

Flow filters automate skipping messages for customers who have already interacted on a certain channel. This makes sure that customers don’t see the same message on another channel if they’ve already completed an action through another one.

For example, if a customer taps on an abandoned cart text message, the flow filter stops the follow-up email automatically. And it works in reverse, too. 

Apparel and accessories brand Rebecca Minkoff, for example, uses their B2C CRM with marketing automation to send text message flows for welcome sequences, cart abandonment, and back-in-stock alerts. When a customer doesn’t engage with a text, the flow automatically follows up with an email, ensuring multiple channels work together without overwhelming the customer.

“I fundamentally think that if you’re going to be sending emails and SMS, they have to know what each other are doing,” says Jonathan Guez, CTO of Sunrise Brands, parent company of Rebecca Minkoff.

Use AI to increase message relevance

AI-generated segments and real-time engagement monitoring can help you personalize with more individual relevance. With AI, you can:

• Auto-monitor flows for any notable drops in performance, so you can adjust your channel strategy accordingly.
• Send messages at the moment when customers are most likely to engage with them, based on past engagement patterns.
• Delay or pause promotional messages for customers who have open support tickets.
• Build complex segments using plain language to identify key groups so you’re always sending hyper-relevant messages, no matter the channel.
• Send messages based on which message variation is most likely to resonate with each recipient.
• Brainstorm and draft content appropriate for the unique affordances of different channels.

Learn more about how to integrate both emails and texts in multi-step flows and campaigns.

3. Prioritize preferred channels with channel affinity

AI-powered channel affinity uses historical engagement data to determine which channel a given individual customer is most likely to engage with next. When your CRM stores these predictive insights in every profile, you can see at a glance whether you should lead with an email, a text, a push notification, or a WhatsApp message for greatest impact.

As behaviors change—for example, when a customer starts engaging on WhatsApp and stops paying attention to emails altogether—their profile updates automatically. So should your message strategy.

Channel affinity helps you prioritize people’s preferred channels in both campaigns and flows. Here’s how:

• Campaigns: Segment your sends based on channel affinity—for example, “subscribers whose first engagement preference is SMS and who typically purchase during sales.”
• Flows: Route customers down different paths in an automated flow based on their channel affinity. For example, if the subscriber’s top channel is email, set the logic to check a customer’s channel affinity and send them down a “Yes” path for email and a “No” path for SMS. For the “No” path, or after a time delay, send a follow-up text message. This way, you prioritize a specific channel without excluding others—creating a coordinated cross-channel experience.

“Channel affinity has really helped us reduce over-messaging and create opportunities to do more brand-building in extensive flows,” says Luke Styles, CRM manager at women’s activewear brand Lorna Jane.

“I can send prominent communications in the most relevant way for every subscriber in our key flows,” Styles explains. “It’s faster because it’s less manual, and it’s also allowed us to space out additional content in various formats.”

4. Set up multi-touch attribution reporting 

First- and last-touch attribution isn’t enough for effective ROI measurement in cross-channel marketing. B2C brands need marketing attribution models that show how channels work together to drive revenue.

Instead of attributing all credit to a single touchpoint, multi-touch attribution models distribute value across every interaction in the customer journey. Omnichannel, linear multi-touch attribution, in particular, maps channel influence for each full, non-linear path to purchase across time, channel, and engagement depth.

This gives you a full view of which customer interactions really influenced conversions, which: 

• Leads to a full understanding of the combined impact of your messaging.
• Prevents the double-counting of revenue.
• Credits sales accurately. 

Luxury skincare brand Tata Harper, for example, had a hard time measuring cross-channel performance because separate attribution models in separate systems often double-counted revenue across email and text marketing.

Once they consolidated their email and text message marketing platforms into a single B2C CRM, Tata Harper could clearly see which messages and channels were driving results, giving them a more accurate view of their marketing impact.

5. Test and optimize your marketing channels

Cross-channel strategies can underperform without ongoing testing and refinement. As customers’ preferences and behaviors shift, the ideal sequences for driving conversions are always changing. 

Here’s how you can make sure you’re always optimizing results:

• Use personalized A/B testing to identify which variation of a message is right for every person. Personalized A/B testing analyzes customer profile data such as location, historical engagement, lifetime value, and other criteria to predict which content each customer is most likely to respond to.
• Use funnel analysis to track how customers move through different stages of their lifecycle, from awareness to purchase and beyond. By seeing where customers drop off or engage, you can tweak customer interactions to nudge each person toward the next stage with timely, relevant messages.
• Use Smart Send Time to send messages based on when recipients are most likely to engage. By automatically adjusting for time zones and past engagement patterns, campaigns reach customers when they’re most ready to take action.

Beauty brand Laura Geller, for example, needed confirmation that sending more email and text messages could produce good results. Through gradual testing, they ramped up text volume for their most engaged subscribers from 4 to 7 sends a week. Then, they ran a 30-day holdout test to evaluate the impact of this high-volume approach.

Across almost all engagement cohorts, higher volumes of both email and texts proved effective for Laura Geller, boosting revenue and profitability.

Getting started with cross-channel marketing with a B2C CRM

Cross-channel marketing isn’t optional if you want stronger customer engagement and tangible growth. A strong cross-channel strategy turns distinct channels into cohesive journeys that move customers forward.

The foundation for making this work is a B2C CRM that’s easy to set up, with:

• Integrations that consolidate customer data across your entire tech stack to create unified customer profiles
• Automatic message routing based on demonstrated channel preference
• Smart Send Time to reach audiences when they’re most likely to take action
• Messages that adapt to real-time channel interactions
• Omnichannel, linear multi-touch attribution to identify what’s really driving revenue

Take your cross-channel strategy further with a unified CRM and marketing platform built for today’s non-linear customer journey. Klaviyo is the only B2C CRM, designed to deliver personalized cross-channel journeys that scale.