Multichannel Marketing: Strategies, Campaigns and Automation

Imagine trying to build your brand on just email. Or only Instagram. Or one lonely billboard. In today’s world, that approach isn’t efficient—it’s absurd. Customers bounce from Google search to Instagram, check their inbox while standing in line at the store, and tap an SMS promo while watching TV. Why would your marketing stick to just one channel?

That’s why brands embrace multichannel marketing. It allows you to be where your customers are, no matter how they choose to interact. And while omnichannel takes it further by weaving those touchpoints into a seamless journey, multichannel is a good place for your cannabis marketing strategy to launch.

What is Multichannel Marketing?

Multichannel marketing is the practice of promoting your brand across a variety of channels (both online and offline) to reach customers in more than one place. The goal is to meet audiences where they already spend their time and guide them toward conversion.

Typical channels include:

• Cannabis Email Marketing for direct communication and offers
• Cannabis Social Media Marketing for engagement and brand storytelling
• Cannabis Programmatic Advertising, including display, native, and CTV ads for demand capture
• Cannabis SEO and paid search for discoverability and inbound demand
• Cannabis Direct Mail Advertising for local or high-value campaigns
• Cannabis SMS Marketing for timely, personalized messages
• Cannabis Loyalty Programs and CRM touchpoints for retention and advocacy
• Cannabis Retail Customer Experiences for offline reinforcement
• Cannabis Event Marketing for community building and brand visibility
  

At its core, multichannel marketing ensures your brand doesn’t depend on a single touchpoint, increasing visibility and flexibility. Research shows that customers interacting across multiple channels spend 30% more than those limited to one channel, and companies with cross-channel strategies see an average customer retention rate of 89%, compared to just 33% for those without (Amra & Elma)

Benefits of Multichannel Marketing Campaigns

Running multichannel marketing campaigns offers several advantages over single-channel efforts:

1. Increased brand visibility: By spreading your presence across multiple channels, customers are more likely to encounter your brand multiple times, improving recall.
   
2. Reaching diverse audience segments: Some customers prefer SMS, while others respond better to email or social ads. Multichannel campaigns adapt to these preferences.
   
3. Higher engagement and conversions: Consistent exposure through multiple touchpoints encourages customers to take action.
   

For example, a dispensary might combine email newsletters with SMS promotions, social media ads, and in-store signage for a holiday campaign. This layered approach reinforces messaging and drives stronger results. Brands using two or more channels in a campaign report an average 166% higher engagement rate than those using just one (Comosoft).

Multichannel Marketing Strategy

To make multichannel marketing work, brands need a deliberate multichannel marketing strategy rather than spreading efforts thinly across too many platforms. A well-designed strategy should address several core areas:

Understand Your Audience Preferences

Use an audience builder, customer surveys, and social listening to identify where your customers are most active and how they prefer to engage. Segment audiences to uncover differences in channel usage across demographics or behaviors.

Select the Right Mix of Channels

Choose cannabis platforms that align with your campaign goals—whether that’s lead generation, brand awareness, or retention. Avoid overextending resources on channels that don’t serve your audience. Start with the channels delivering the highest ROI and scale from there.

Here’s an example of how a multichannel mix might align with the cannabis eCommerce journey:

Coordinate Creative and Messaging

Maintain consistent cannabis branding across all channels, while tailoring tone and content format to fit each platform. For instance, keep visuals aligned but adjust copy for the casual nature of social media versus the professionalism of email.

Align Timing and Frequency

Determine how often your audience should hear from you on each channel. Build a dispensary content calendar that avoids overwhelming customers with repetitive messages but still keeps your brand top of mind.

Integrate Tracking and Analytics

Implement UTM codes, centralized attribution dashboards, or marketing analytics tools to measure performance across channels. This allows you to compare channel effectiveness and optimize spend.

Test, Learn, and Refine

Experiment with A/B testing, creative variations, and new platforms. Multichannel marketing works best when treated as an iterative conversion rate optimization process, continuously refined by insights and results.

A well-executed strategy ensures campaigns feel cohesive, not scattered, and sets the foundation for eventually moving into a fully integrated omnichannel approach.

Multichannel Marketing Automation for Efficiency

Managing multiple channels manually can quickly become overwhelming. Multichannel marketing automation helps by streamlining tasks within each channel, even if those channels don’t directly interact. The goal isn’t to merge data across platforms, but to save time and keep messaging consistent.

Examples include:

• Scheduling recurring social media posts across platforms
  
• Automating weekly or monthly email newsletters
  
• Running SMS drip campaigns to promote special offers
  
• Setting up programmatic display ads to run continuously with minimal manual updates
  

In multichannel, each channel still works in its own silo, but automation ensures that your brand stays active everywhere without requiring constant oversight. This efficiency makes it possible to maintain visibility across channels, even without the full integration of an omnichannel approach.

How Multichannel Differs from Omnichannel Marketing

Multichannel might broaden your presence across platforms, but omnichannel goes further by uniting those touchpoints into one seamless experience.

Multichannel: 

Your brand shows up on multiple platforms, but each channel works independently. For example, your email campaign doesn’t know if someone just clicked your Instagram ad.

Omnichannel: 

Your channels share data and talk to each other. If someone clicks your Instagram ad, they might immediately get a follow-up email with a personalized offer related to that action.

Both approaches have value: multichannel excels at reach and visibility, while omnichannel prioritizes customer experience and data integration. Learn more about multichannel vs. omnichannel marketing.

Common Mistakes in Multichannel Marketing

Many brands undercut their results by making avoidable errors:

1. Inconsistent branding across channels confuses customers.If your social media looks playful but your emails sound overly formal, customers may struggle to recognize your brand identity.
   
2. Poor channel selection wastes resources on platforms your audience doesn’t use. Investing heavily in Twitter ads when your target demographic primarily engages on Instagram and TikTok.
   
3. Lack of unified tracking makes it hard to measure what’s working. Running campaigns on email and display ads without UTM tags or a centralized dashboard means you can’t see which channel is actually driving conversions.
   

Avoid these pitfalls by aligning teams, consolidating data, and focusing only on channels that drive measurable value.

Measuring Multichannel Marketing Success

To prove the impact of your campaigns, track these key performance indicators:

• Impressions and reach to measure visibility
  
• Engagement rate to evaluate audience interaction
  
• Conversions to assess sales and lead performance
  
• Customer retention to track loyalty over time
  

Use marketing revenue attribution models—like first-touch, last-touch, or multi-touch—to understand how different channels contribute to conversions. This insight helps refine future campaigns.

Takeaways for Building Smarter Multichannel Campaigns

It might be absurd to expect customers to engage on only one platform. Multichannel marketing solves that problem by broadening your reach and giving you more opportunities to connect. It’s how you stop being invisible in a crowded marketplace. Still, visibility is just the first step. If you want to transform those connections into loyalty, you need omnichannel marketing—and that’s where MediaJel can help. Reach out to our team to learn how we can build campaigns that turn multichannel visibility into lasting customer relationships.

Multichannel Marketing FAQs