Cross-Channel Blueprint

Description

The purpose of a Cross-Channel Blueprint is to identify the level of importance and the specific roles that different channels play for customers at each phase of their journey. Often, marketing teams are unclear or have conflicting opinions about how to manage different customer-facing channels. This lack of alignment can cause endless internal debate and can lead to disconnected customer experiences, particularly for organizations that provide e-commerce and online self-services. This framework helps align marketing teams on how to make individual channels more relevant for customers, and how to make all channels work better together.

‍Question

What role does each of our channels play for our customer?

Steps

Determine the scope of your Blueprint. How will you define your journey, and how broad or narrow should you go? This will depend on the nature of your business and how you plan to use the Blueprint.
Based on your scope, identify the different phases that comprise the customer journey. Phases start and end when key actions or decisions are made by customers, and their needs and behaviours change accordingly.
Identify the customers that you are examining. If you serve very different customer segments, they may use channels very differently. If customer segmentation or personas do not exist, research is required.
Based on the framework, identify the level of importance of each channel for each customer type. Make sure that this is from the perspective of the customer, and not the business or channel owner.
Based on the framework, determine the main use cases for each channel. These represent the most important and frequently completed tasks customers are trying to accomplish for each channel.

Considerations

Use customer research (not internal opinions) to ensure the Blueprint is completed without bias.
Use engagement data from different channels (e.g., website analytics) to help understand use cases.
Consider including external channels that a customer uses to provide greater context, if helpful.‍