The Multi-Channel Marketing Statistics You Need To Know

The first step in multi-channel marketing is to clone yourself and create a focused army of advertisers and content creators who you can deploy across space and time.

No, not really. Today’s tools allow you to expand your reach with relative ease. 

In addition, multi-channel marketing is important, but it doesn’t have to be complicated. Even now, the most common reason consumers cite “multichannel service relevance” is when “checking online to see if the product is available in the store.”

The object of multi-channel marketing is to communicate with and market to your audience on various platforms. These can include physical as well as digital touchpoints.

By reaching customers through multiple avenues, businesses can meet customers where they are, allowing them to choose the most convenient way to receive information. 

These are the multi-channel marketing statistics that prove that the strategy works and why you should include it in your brand’s plans for the future.

Multi-Channel Marketing Statistics: It’s All About the $$$

Marketers and brands are spending even more money on multi-channel marketing. Those dollars return to them many times over.

Multi-Channel Marketing Spending Statistics

How and on what are the big businesses spending their marketing dollars?

First of all, marketing budgets are on the rise. After record lows during and following the pandemic, the average spend is 9.5% of company revenue across industries.

In the U.S. alone, the digital ad market should pass $300 billion by 2025. As for social media ad spend, it hit $230 billion worldwide in 2022.

Approximately 42% of retail executives allocate up to half of their marketing budget to omnichannel initiatives. The rest of their budget goes to channel-specific material.

Enterprises employing a significant number of channels allocate their total marketing budgets according to the following average shares:

• Social advertising: 10.1%

• Search advertising: 9.8%

• Digital display advertising: 9.3%

• Digital video advertising: 8.8%

• SEO: 8.5%

• Partner or affiliate marketing: 8.1%

• Digital audio advertising: 8.1%

• Content and messaging 7.8%

• E-mail marketing: 7.8%

• Organic social content or influencer marketing: 7.6%

• SMS/in-app advertising: 6.9%

When it comes to content marketing across channels, almost half of B2B marketers spend more than 10% of their budget, and 23% spend more than 50%. The numbers increase for B2C marketers: 31% spend more than half of their marketing budget on content marketing. 

Multi-Channel Marketing ROI Statistics

Consumers now exhibit multi-channel behavior, which must be met with multi-channel marketing. It’s no surprise that implementing a multi-channel marketing strategy has proven to yield a higher return on investment (ROI) across the board. 

According to the Harvard Business Review:

• About 73% of consumers prefer shopping through more than one channel.

• Omnichannel customers spend more in their transactions, on average 10% more online and 4% in-store.

Multi-channel strategies also lead more people into physical locations, generating an 80% higher rate of incremental store visits.

Compared to single-channel campaigns, omnichannel ones generate an ROI almost 5x greater. Channels working together send a focused message to a brand’s audience.

The strategy pays off in the long term, too. Customer retention improves by up to 91% when customers interact with a brand in more than one channel.

Multi-Channel Marketing Statistics by Channel

Not all channels are created equal. Check out some of the statistics on email marketing. 

How else do people try to connect with their audiences? 

• 83% of marketers use social media.

• 67% use search marketing.

• 66% use videos or live-streaming.

Small businesses have their own priorities. 67% use social media tools, but only 6% believe that video marketing helps them achieve their goals.

Both one-on-one and mass communication play a role in marketing strategy. 40% of marketers identify their greatest multi-marketing challenge as getting the right message to the customer at the right time.

Messaging apps have become more and more popular for customer communication. Pick yours according to where your specific audience congregates, but the services that most people use are listed below:

• WhatsApp: 1.22 billion daily active users

• Facebook Messenger: 404 million daily active users

• Telegram: 200 million daily active users

• Snapchat: 168 million daily active users

Messaging apps now join email as customers’ second-most-preferred communication channel. However, they both lose out to phone calls for the number one spot. It’s a good reminder that not all effective channels are digital.

A lot of customers want to have real-time conversations with businesses and prefer humans to bots. Be careful as you navigate the tricky balance between efficiency and intimacy.

When it comes to SMS communication from businesses, context matters. People increasingly prefer text communication for action-centered messages. For example:

• 75% of consumers prefer to receive appointment reminders via text.

• 67% want emergency notifications.

• 65% want delivery confirmations.

• 54% want payment reminders.

These messages require immediate action: go see your doctor, watch out for the tornado, grab your package before someone steals it from your stoop, and pay your bill.

For everything else, people prefer email. Most people want to receive these kinds of message by email:

• Order confirmations (52%)

• Flash sales (43%)

• Event invitations (49%)

• Customer support (38%)

• Payment support (60%)

• Promotional offers (53%)

The area where the battle is closest is in customer support. Text, email, and phone are all popular mediums. It really depends on your specific clientele.

Conventional advertising, which includes print, radio, and TV, also remains an integral part of multi-channel marketing strategies. 63% of small businesses use it to personally connect with their customers.

Social Media Marketing Statistics

The variety of available social media platforms turn what could be considered one channel into many. 91% of businesses use two or more social media channels.

Facebook remains the most common platform for marketers with 89% reporting that they use the platform. 80% use its Meta sibling, Instagram.

In choosing where to put your time and money, it makes sense to choose the right platform for your target demographic. Find out where your customers spend their time or take advantage of social media demographic statistics.

• Facebook is the most popular across the board, but particularly with people over the age of 50, followed closely by YouTube.

• The use of LinkedIn increases according to both education and income, as does the use of Nextdoor.

• Pinterest is a much more common tool among people who self-identify as women than as men.

• The use of all platforms except for Pinterest decreases as you move away from urban areas, with a small drop between urban and suburban users and another between suburban and rural users.

Multi-Channel Marketing Statistics: Effectiveness and Growth

The multi-channel marketing market is expected to grow from $6.96 billion in 2023 to 28.6 billion by 2030. That’s an incredibly rapid increase. Factors driving it include growth in:

• Adoption of digital channels

• Personalization

• Marketing automation

• Demand for analytics

From the customer’s perspective, multi-channel marketing provides them with the convenience they crave. 

• 97% of consumers have backed out of a purchase due to inconvenience.

• 83% say that convenience is more important now than it was 5 years ago.

• 52% identify convenience as a factor in more than half of their shopping decisions.

However, customers often want to stay in control of the process. One of the biggest touchpoints in multi-channel marketing comes from meeting prospective customers’ research needs. Before making a purchase, they research via:

• Search engines such as Google (54%)

• Amazon (36%)

• Retailer websites (34%)

• Social media (31%)

• Price comparison websites (29%)

This is equally true in the B2B world. While there’s still a prevalent image of B2B marketing/sales as being heavily hands-on — interacting through a designated sales representative, most of the customer’s journey takes place through other channels.

They spend relatively little time speaking with various sales reps (17% split between vying companies). Instead, they spend their time in the following ways:

• Learning independently about solutions online (27% of their time)

• Learning independently about solutions offline (18% of their time)

• Building consensus among internal and partner stakeholders (33% of their time across the two groups)

Multi-Channel Marketing Strategy

To grow your brand, optimize your multi-channel strategy. With so many possibilities, it’s vital to take a holistic, focused approach.

According to surveyed marketers, the most essential elements you’ll need are:

• Accurate measurement of performance (61%)

• Integrated/unified marketing technology (43%)

• Dashboards/visualization of analytics (39%)

• Marketing automation (33%)

• Optimized channel mix (31%)

• Unified data (27%)

Most of them (67%) rate their current strategy as “somewhat successful” in driving the targeted outcomes.

Common problems include insufficient resources, insufficient data, and insufficient tools. The future looks rosy, though. 86% of them believe that multi-channel marketing is increasing in effectiveness.

One tip: make use of varied marketing metrics, but don’t go overboard. Companies that limit their focus to 3 or 4 metric types are 49% more likely to exceed marketing performance targets than companies that only use 1 or 2 and 24% more than those using over 5.

How To Use These Multi-Channel Marketing Statistics for Your Business

Armed with the knowledge of multi-channel marketing statistics, the next step is to apply these insights to your business. 

A multichannel platform such as beehiiv — which offers access to website, paid advertising, and email tools — is a great place to start.

To get the most out of beehiiv, evaluate your current strategy. You can use some of the statistics discussed in this article as benchmarks to assess your current marketing efforts. For example, are you on the right channels to find your audience and let them find you? 

Identify areas for improvement. Think about ways to make your channels work together as well as additional channels to add.  It’s better to focus on a few channels that support one another than to maintain a token presence everywhere.

Here are a few ideas for combining your newsletter with other channels:

• Create landing pages for email campaigns. Direct readers to pages with targeted offers or opportunities.

• Develop an integrated content calendar for all channels. Plan content that promotes and builds on other content.

• Convert social followers to email subscribers. Use other channels to grow your list.

• Add pop-up forms to your website. Target new visitors with a friendly welcome and invitation to join your newsletter.

Finally, if you do figure out how to clone yourself to maintain a constant marketing omnipresence, drop me a line.

Why Trust Us?

At beehiiv, we know multi-channel marketing. Our multi-channel platform is designed to optimize your email strategy, ensuring higher open rates and conversions, and build your web presence. As for me, I enjoy bringing research skills developed while earning my Ph.D. to regularly published content about digital marketing.