Omnichannel marketing

What is omnichannel marketing?

Omnichannel marketing is all about creating your brand’s presence and driving marketing campaigns across several channels, both online (like your website, mobile app, social media, email, WhatsApp, etc.) and offline (like retail stores, events, call centers, etc.), while making sure to create positive and seamless experiences throughout the entire customer journey.

It involves creating unified experiences across platforms and touchpoints. When a customer hops from one platform to another, they should be able to continue down the buying journey instead of having to start all over from scratch.

Irrespective of the interaction or channel, the messaging, visuals, and overall experience of an omni-channel marketing campaign must be consistent and relevant to the individual. All your channels and touchpoints would work together to put forward a unified message and voice for your brand. Omnichannel marketing involves an integrated shopping experience, all the way from the first touchpoint to the last one. For an omnichannel marketing strategy to work well, you would need to have the underlying data automatically updated, which would trigger your messaging across all channels to adjust as well.

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What is omnichannel marketing vs multichannel marketing?

The biggest difference between multichannel marketing and omnichannel marketing is that multichannel just seeks to engage as many customers as possible by driving marketing campaigns on the channels which the target audience tends to spend the most time on, while omnichannel marketing seeks to create a consistent, seamless, and holistic customer experience allowing customers to flow across channels as they naturally do, without needing to deal with disconnected, disjointed customer experiences and buyer journeys.

Multichannel marketing seeks to maximize the number of channels over which marketing campaigns are driven, but omnichannel marketing cares more about offering your customer a seamless experience as they flow across channels. Rather than simply offering your customer more channels to interact with you over, omnichannel marketing concentrates on getting rid of the friction that your customers face as they move between different touchpoints. 

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What are the four qualities of omnichannel marketing?

Here are the four qualities or pillars of omnichannel marketing:

Visibility

This is all about having a single view of your customer. 90% of customers hop across devices while making purchases (according to a study conducted by Google). To get a single, unified view of your customers as they move across channels and devices, you’d need to integrate your tech stack completely. You would need your marketing automation, retargeting platform, customer service software, CRM, and other systems to work together to provide you with a single, unified view of your customers. You would need to have insights regarding every interaction that your customers and potential customers have with your business across channels and devices.

Measurement

You need to be able to measure and understand the impact of every marketing touchpoint in your omnichannel marketing strategy. After you gain visibility into all of the interactions a potential customer has with your business, you can go on to measure the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. Figure out which touchpoints, offers, CTAs, copy, etc. is working best for you and try to understand what is persuading your customers to make purchases from you. You’d also want to find out which touchpoints aren’t working too well for your business.

Personalization

Since you’re getting a unified view of the customer and seeing their behavior across channels, you need to drive personalized marketing campaigns that are relevant to your customers and resonate with their needs and interests. You need to use tools like social media analytics, predictive analytics, marketing automation, a CRM, and more to personalize your campaigns in real-time. Your objective should be to integrate online and offline behaviors into your automation tools to pull off the most successful omnichannel marketing campaigns.

Optimization

This is an important part of any marketing strategy. You’ve measured all the aspects of your marketing campaigns to see which of your marketing efforts on which touchpoints are bringing you the greatest results. You’ve also found out which of your efforts on which channels aren’t doing too well for your business. Now you figure out why that’s happening and see what you can do to optimize these efforts, channels, and touchpoints to drive higher results for your business.

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What are the benefits of omnichannel marketing?

Here are some of the benefits of omnichannel marketing:

Higher customer retention

Omnichannel marketing lets you create better experiences for your customers, you’re not forcing them to restart their interaction everytime they switch channels, which means that you’re saving them the frustration that they’d have to deal with if you did that. When you deliver great customer experiences, your customers tend to stick around with you. There’s also the fact that businesses that successfully employ a consistent omnichannel marketing strategy enjoy a 13% annual improvement in customer retention rates.

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Increase in revenue

A Harvard Business Review study found that that omnichannel customers are 30% more valuable than single channel customers. There’s also the fact that when you take your retention rates up, your customer lifetime value is going to increase substantially. 

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Earn more referrals

Omnichannel marketing helps you create seamless experiences for your customers, which increases customer satisfaction and loyalty. When customers are delighted with their experience, they’re going to be more likely to refer you to their friends and family. That is extremely important because a Nielsen study concluded that 92% of consumers believe recommendations from friends and family over all forms of advertising.

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Better collection of data

When you’re taking your marketing efforts omnichannel, by default you’ll have to step up your data collection efforts as well. You will now will be able to monitor your customers across all the channels that you use and, thus, understand them better, learning what their preferences are, the product cards they have looked at, what offers they have clicked on, etc