When the Beatles met their idol and inspiration – Elvis Presley – for the first time at his home, they were understandably nervous. But what Elvis demonstrated impressed the boys even more: a remote control for the television that would change channels without needing to get up or touch the TV set at all!

While technology has come a long way since the 1960s, the concept of channel surfing has a different meaning to today’s B2B marketers. That’s because their prospects are able to access and gather product or service information through many mediums – or channels – such as through a company’s website, via pay-per-click ads, their mobile phones, print or banner ads, social media, etc. There are so many channels available, in fact, that it might be easy for marketers to get overwhelmed or discouraged in attempting to use all of them.

The good news is that, once again, email can come to the rescue. That’s because email is the one marketing medium proven and powerful enough to be the band leader over all your marketing campaign instruments. In fact, a new study by Salesforce concludes that marketers who integrate their email campaigns across multiple channels significantly outperform those who rely on a single-channel marketing strategy. In the study, among those who identify as “high-performing” marketers, 95% of them rate their marketing integration abilities as effective or very effective, and 64% of them have integrated email marketing across all their marketing channels. Only 19% of “under-performing” marketers abide by an integrated marketing strategy.

Because email can carry content, link to resources, alert users to news and special offers, and elicit participation in events, examples of emails used in multi-channel marketing abound. They serve to welcome, thank, inform, remind and confirm, and here are a few ways every B2B marketer can put them to work:

• Expand social followers by embedding social media icons in emails
• Welcome new customers or prospects
• Encourage product or service adoption throughout the customer journey
• Send alerts when new blogs, whitepapers and other content are published
• Develop personalized emails triggered in response to social or digital activities
• Issue alerts when deals or coupons are available or about to expire
• Invite users to webinars, seminars and live events
• Deliver blog commentary updates
• Link to videos posted on the web

Capitalize on Synergies Across Channels

An important element of multi-channel marketing is to keep the tone and message consistent across channels, while also staying true to best practices for each particular medium. The combined effort should be synergistic, with the underlying goal of guiding, educating and, ultimately, converting prospects into customers.  

In addition, synergism between social and email marketing initiatives is especially important today. Each of these channels can play off the other to drive follower and subscriber growth, along with market awareness and trust in your brand. Equally critical is the need to take the mobile landscape into account. All emails and related landing pages should be developed with a mobile-first strategy in mind, and new approaches, such as triggered emails, can be applied to synch your initiatives with mobile users’ daily routines, geographic locations, social activities, website visits and more.

In the end, B2B marketers should move beyond simply being present on multiple channels and work to connect them all together into one, melodious, multi-channel approach to inbound marketing. And, as in all email campaigns, quality business contact data is essential to success in making your multi-channel marketing efforts sing – perhaps so well that The King or the Fab Four themselves would be impressed.

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