By Tim Vrijsen, Director Solutions Consulting Europe
Everyone is talking about seamless cross-channel experiences. But what does it take to make them work? We asked Tim Vrijsen, who leads Marigold’s solution consulting team in Europe, to share his top five tips for doing it well.
In the age of hyper-personalization, relevance hinges on having a real-time, unified view of your customers. Fragmented data leads to fragmented experiences. To meet today’s customer expectations, you must unify that data into a centralized, actionable profile across CRM systems, e-commerce platforms, loyalty programs, and behavioral analytics.
Unification isn’t just about aggregation. It’s about stitching data together in a way that creates context: what customers did, what they prefer, how they engage, and what they’re likely to do next. This requires robust data ingestion capabilities and intelligent identity resolution that can merge behavior from web, mobile, and offline channels into a single source of truth.
With flexible integrations and real-time syncs, Marigold’s platforms make this process efficient and scalable. The benefit is immediate: unified data empowers smarter segmentation, real-time personalization, and journey logic that adjusts based on live behaviors. Whether a customer clicks on a product in an email, visits a store, or updates their preferences in-app, every touchpoint can respond accordingly.
This also reduces reliance on IT and data teams. Marketers can access, explore, and activate data directly within their campaign tools without waiting for extracts or manual reports. This speed-to-insight translates into speed-to-market and a far more relevant experience for the customer.
Ultimately, unified data powers consistent, customer-centric marketing that builds trust and drives loyalty. It’s the foundation of everything else.
Consumers expect brands to recognize them across channels and to communicate with consistency, not confusion. Coordinating cross-channel touchpoints isn’t just a best practice, it’s essential to creating an experience that feels smart and intentional.
But coordination doesn’t mean broadcasting the same message everywhere. It means orchestrating personalized interactions that adapt in real-time, depending on where the customer is in their journey. This requires a campaign engine that operates from a central logic layer so that every email, SMS, push notification, or in-store interaction draws from the same behavioral and profile data.
Journey orchestration with real-time decision-making makes this possible. Marketers can build flows that respond to live behaviors (like cart abandonment or loyalty points redemption) and automatically adjust based on engagement. If a customer clicks but doesn’t convert, you can follow up on another channel or pause outreach altogether if signals suggest fatigue.
It’s also about scalability. Coordinated touchpoints should work whether you’re running a targeted campaign to a few thousand customers or managing triggered journeys across millions. Built-in channel prioritization helps ensure the most effective communication path is chosen for each individual, reducing message fatigue and improving engagement.
With real-time reporting across channels, you can measure performance holistically, identifying which paths and combinations of touchpoints drive the highest conversions.
With the decline of third-party cookies and increased regulation, marketers are turning to more sustainable sources of insight: zero- and first-party data. These data types are shared directly by the customer or captured from their interactions on your owned channels. They are more accurate, privacy-safe, and reliable.
Zero-party data is information that customers intentionally provide, like preferences, interests, or intent. First-party data includes behavior like purchase history, website clicks, email engagement, and mobile app activity. Combined, they form the foundation for powerful personalization.
The key is making data collection engaging and valuable. Tools like interactive widgets, quizzes, and preference centers can make sharing natural and rewarding. Forms can be used progressively: instead of long registration forms, marketers can collect insights incrementally, each interaction adding more depth to the customer profile.
This data should feed directly into your campaign logic and content strategy. If a user says they prefer outdoor gear, your emails, push messages, and web recommendations should reflect that automatically. With dynamic content powered by real-time data, you can personalize at scale without endless manual effort.
The right platform will also make it easy to update and refine profiles based on new behaviors or inputs. Preferences change. So your marketing should, too. Continuous enrichment ensures your messages stay relevant.
Zero- and first-party data also foster trust. When customers see that you’re using their input responsibly and transparently, they’re more likely to share. And the more they share, the better the experience becomes. It’s a virtuous cycle that drives loyalty over time.
Privacy isn’t a compliance checkbox. It’s a core part of your brand experience. Customers want transparency, control, and security. They want to know how their data is being used and why. Designing with privacy in mind helps you build lasting trust while protecting your business.
Modern platforms embed privacy controls directly into the marketing workflow.
This includes:
You should be clear about its use from the moment you collect information. Preference centers, cookie banners, and inline disclosures contribute to this transparency. But just as importantly, you should be able to act on those preferences in real-time. If a customer opts out of SMS, they shouldn’t receive a message five minutes later due to a sync delay.
Privacy by design also means minimizing data usage where possible. Smart segmentation can help reduce over-messaging, and AI can identify when not to send, a crucial safeguard when managing millions of contacts across multiple channels.
Another best practice is centralizing consent and preferences in the same system that powers your campaigns. This way, you don’t have to enforce compliance manually; it’s baked into how you operate.
Respecting privacy doesn’t limit marketing; it elevates it. When customers know you’re handling their data with care, they’re more likely to engage. And that engagement, in turn, leads to better results.
AI isn’t here to replace creativity, it’s here to enhance it. In cross-channel marketing, AI helps marketers make smarter, faster, and more efficient decisions at every step of the journey.
One of the most impactful applications is predictive modeling. AI can analyze historical and behavioral data to forecast outcomes: who’s likely to convert, who’s at risk of churning, or who’s ready for a next-best offer. These predictions can trigger personalized journeys, segment updates, or budget allocations.
AI also optimizes message delivery. Send Time Optimization (STO) determines the best moment to reach each individual, increasing the chances of engagement. Subject Line Optimization (SLO) can test variations at scale to predict the top-performing phrasing.
Personalization engines use AI to deliver the right content or product recommendations based on affinity, past behavior, or lookalike modeling. This can be done across email, web, and mobile, ensuring continuity regardless of channel.
And it’s not just about doing more, it’s about doing better. AI allows marketers to scale relevance and generate appealing content without scaling resources, freeing time to focus on strategy and innovation.
The best part? AI keeps learning. As more data flows in, models become more accurate, predictions more precise, and results more impressive.
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