• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, June 6, 2016

Campaigns may begin with email, but more often marketers are taking the strategy across channels. "The elephant can be eaten one bite at a time," said Kristie Reeves, senior manager, database marketing at PGA Tour, responding to a comment by fellow panelist Bridgette Darling, product marketing manager at Adobe, during the MediaPost Email Insider Summit Monday in Florida.

Darling suggests that marketers start small and stop trying to perfect one channel before integrating the next. Email marketers should keep the data from wherever the brand has contact with the customer, even if there's no use for it at the time, as this represents a move toward behavioral marketing.

Marketers cannot take the campaign across channels overnight, but they will find they can leverage the data across the journey, according to Mandy Grundy, VP of global innovation marketing at Visa. Grundy said marketers should stay with the customer journey and everything else will fall into place.

"Don't be afraid to take a risk, but don't do it without testing," said Matt Sperling, email marketing manager at Etsy, during the wrap-up. "You will learn from it."

All panelists agreed that at the end of the day they are all cross-channel strategists -- and that they should approach processes and campaigns with testing in mind.