The rise of omnichannel marketing comes from the increasingly complex consumer journey and consumer demands for highly personalized experiences when engaging with a brand’s channels.
Consumers today interact with brands, back and forth, across multiple touchpoints along the path to purchase. Although the increase in consumer touchpoints adds to the complexity of the customer journey, it also presents marketers with more opportunities to engage with consumers. But only if you establish a unified customer experience across multiple touchpoints. Immersing consumers in a highly personalized, seamless, and cohesive customer journey experience is critical for brand success in both the online and offline world.
What is Omnichannel Marketing?
Omnichannel marketing is an integrated approach toward delivering a consistent and personalized customer experience across all consumer touchpoints, such that consumers can seamlessly transition back and forth between channels. This includes aligning messaging strategies around the customer journey and orchestrating meaningful experiences across multiple touchpoints.
Omnichannel vs. Multichannel Marketing
Omnichannel and multichannel marketing are oftentimes used interchangeably, mostly by uninformed marketers. In reality, they’re two distinct marketing approaches. In multichannel marketing, brands are available across multiple channels, but these channels operate independently from one another, each with its isolated marketing strategy. While being on multiple channels is great, the multichannel marketing approach is disjointed by nature and doesn’t cut it for consumers who expect seamless shopping experiences. Which is practically all consumers today.
For example, imagine seeing a captivating promo on a brand's Facebook ad only to visit the store to discover that the offer is online only.
Omnichannel marketing fixes this with an integrated brand experience across the board. Channels work together and interact with each other to create the synergy needed to deliver a cohesive customer journey experience.
The Benefits of an Omnichannel Marketing Strategy
- Increased Consumer Loyalty and Satisfaction
With 32% of consumers “breaking up” with a brand after one poor experience, marketers must provide better consumer experiences to retain and gain customers. This means customer interactions across all channels must be seamless. The best omnichannel marketing strategy is one that customers do not notice. It just feels easier and faster. As the need for seamless cross-channel experience grows, you can increase consumer loyalty by delivering an effective omnichannel experience.
- Higher Conversion Rates
According to research, brands with a working omnichannel strategy retain 89% of their customers. Consumers are more likely to stick with a brand that delivers highly relevant, personalized omnichannel experiences. As a result, omnichannel experience equals repeat purchases.
74% of consumers are likely to complete a purchase based on experiences alone. This means that consumers are no longer looking for the better price but the better/easier experience. If you make it easier for consumers to travel from channel to channel, then you’re removing possible barriers and ultimately increasing your conversion rate.
- Customer Journey Optimization
The customer journey is one of the most important yet highly misunderstood parts of any marketing strategy. One reason for this is not prioritizing the right data. Collecting data across channels provides a better understanding of the customer journey and allows you to optimize it. Omnichannel capabilities give you a holistic view of all channels. Without this, you may be missing an important part of the customer journey.
How To Optimize Your Omnichannel Strategy
Implementing an omnichannel approach is one thing; having a clear strategy that ensures you maximize the impact of every campaign is another. The best omnichannel strategies leverage technology to create a unified view of consumer behavior and inform marketing strategies across channels. Here are three steps to help you optimize your omnichannel strategy:
- Analyze Channels' Performance
To optimize your omnichannel strategy, you need to analyze your channels' current performance. Are customers satisfied with their experiences on each channel? How quickly are you resolving cases across all channels? Analyze your transcripts to determine what keywords appear most frequently. This can reveal customers' sentiments and pain points that’ll inform your omnichannel strategy.
The goal is to gather useful data from across all channels to create a holistic view of your marketing performance. This makes it easier to analyze customer data and pull actionable insights.
- Implement Personalization Capabilities
Personalization is key to providing consistent, unified, and seamless experiences across all touchpoints. As a result, brands looking to optimize their omnichannel strategy must invest in personalization. This means pulling actionable insights from customer data and leveraging those insights to deliver tailored offerings that drive individualized experiences according to each customer’s needs.
For personalization to be effective, it must be scalable. Brands must be able to create individual customer experiences at an organizational level. To achieve this, you must leverage the right technology (data science and artificial intelligence). Only then can you optimize your omnichannel strategy.
- Leverage the Right Technology
Leveraging the right tech stack is a challenge for most brands. However, AI solutions have proven to be a game changer for marketing automation, enabling personalization at scale. Marketers, as humans, can only do so much when analyzing data. On the flip side, there’s no limit to what you can achieve with artificial intelligence. AI can spot trends that are otherwise hidden from the human eye, thus ensuring you can take advantage of every possible opportunity.
Consumers interact with brands in a variety of ways, and they expect seamless experiences as they transition from one channel to another along the path to purchase. By collecting data, organizing data, and pulling actionable insights, any brand can strengthen their omnichannel marketing strategy to drive consistent and personalized experiences throughout the customer journey.
Ready to learn more about predictive personalization and data science in digital marketing? Check out Breinify’s other blog posts or get in touch.