How to Craft an Omnichannel Marketing Strategy for Your Business in 2024
Picture this: you’re browsing online for some new work clothes, and you add something to your virtual cart but ultimately decide not to buy it. Then later, you see an ad on social media for the abandoned garment. Some scratch their heads at this and speak of how oversaturated they are with remarketing ads, but it’s actually a classic example of omnichannel marketing.
Omnichannel is a reference to the many ways customers might interact with a company. This can occur in physical stores, online, on social media, and in emails, apps, SMS, as well as other digital spaces. This all encompassing approach can be a powerful way to meet your customers where they are, providing them good service in line with their preferences and needs. What is worth noting is that as much as we refer to shopping online as part of an online approach, that employing an omnichannel approach applies both within B2B and B2C contexts.
Increasingly the customer purchasing cycle across all industries. In person, online, and beyond, to get what they want. But not every customer is looking for the same thing, and omnichannel marketing acknowledges that. Some people want more services for certain transactions; others prefer low-touch, 24/7 interactions. Effective omnichannel marketing, meaning one that aligns with a growth-marketing approach, then, happens when companies provide a set of seamlessly integrated channels, catering to customer preferences, and steer them to the most efficient solutions.
Whether you’re walking into a store or swiping on a mobile app, shopping is a unique experience for everyone. Think about the last time you made a purchase – what sparked it? Did you see a commercial? Receive an email? Walk past a display in the mall? Whether you notice or not, marketing is part of everything you do. Every brand interaction along your path to purchase plays a role in your decision to ultimately buy an item. So how can brands ensure they reach shoppers at each stage?
Why is an omnichannel marketing approach increasingly becoming so prevalent and urgent? Research on the omnichannel experience shows more than half of B2C customers engage with three to five channels each time they make a purchase or resolve a request. The average customer looking to book a flight online, for instance, tends to alternate nearly six times between websites, apps and mobile channels. If these customers encounter inconsistent information or can’t get what they need in terms of information needed to evaluate their options, they may lose interest in a brand’s products or services.
This translates into very clear tangible business outcomes. Omnichannel customers shop 1.7 times more than shoppers who use a single channel. They also spend more.
It’s also worth noting that providing an all-around omnichannel experience is important not just for maximizing promotional efforts, but also for fortifying customer service and ultimately maximizing customer experience. This is a key theme we will emphasize in this comprehensive article.
What are examples of an omnichannel marketing?
Omnichannel approaches are commonly used in retail (both B2B and B2C), but you’ll also find it in healthcare and other spaces. Medtech companies, for instance, use a variety of channels including digital marketing, inside sales, portal and e-commerce, and integrated sales-rep interactions to engage with healthcare professionals.
A couple of prominent omnichannel examples below can illustrate various approaches:
Best Buy typically focuses on commerce (both in store and online), but boosted its in-store experience by creating offerings for customers to explore smart home-technology solutions, pairing them with free in-home advisory services. Its mobile app lets customers “scan to shop” from catalogs and curbside, or buy online and pick up merchandise in the store itself, smoothing the end-to-end journey for customers with the 24/7 tech support from its Geek Squad. Best Buy’s Total tech support offer was compelling to customers—it launched with 200,000 memberships in 2018, which climbed to two million within a year.
Beauty retailer Sephora emphasizes omnichannel personalization, relying on rich in-app messaging, personalized push notifications, and easy ways for customers to book in-person consultations. Its in-store technology is a powerful complement that allows employees to access customer favorites and suggest products they might try next. Its loyalty program also plays an important role. The efforts are already driving value for Sephora: data showed that customers visiting the retail website within 24 hours of visiting a store were three times more likely to make a purchase, and orders were 13 percent higher than for other customers.
What is Omnichannel Marketing?
Defining Omnichannel Marketing
Before we get into just how to create an omnichannel marketing approach that works for your business, it is important to properly understand what omnichannel marketing entails exactly. Omnichannel marketing is a strategy that uses multiple marketing channels to create a seamless, personalized experience for your customer across all your brand touchpoints. In-store, online, on social media, in emails, in text messages and on printed materials.
Omnichannel marketing is the seamless integration of branding and messaging, of various online and offline touchpoints as consumers move down the sales and customer experience funnel, allowing for a much more powerful customer experience by taking a customer-centric view of marketing.
An omnichannel approach ensures that the consumer has a positive, consistent experience on each channel, by offering a few key elements:
Consistent, identifiable brand tone and vision
Personalized messaging based on specific interests
Content that is informed by past interactions and current stage of the buyer’s journey
Reliance on data and analytics in order to shape the aforementioned tactics
Few things disrupt the customer journey like a disconnect between the brand's website and social or emails and the brand's in-store experience. Effective omnichannel marketing guides the customer from touchpoint to touchpoint without running into barriers or dead ends. Done well, businesses can close deals and maximize sales. Done poorly, businesses can lose customers.
Audiences today want to interact with your business 24/7, online and off, through stores, ecommerce, on your business website, apps, and mobile devices. Omnichannel marketing delivers on this market demand by helping a business present a consistent, informed message to offer a seamless experience through multiple channels, improving overall buyer journey and customer retention.
The potential payoff is mighty, since marketers with campaigns involving 3 or more channels have a 90% higher retention rate than single-channel marketing efforts.
What are the benefits of a crafting an omnichannel approach?
Businesses are no longer in the power position when it comes to sales. Customers have virtually endless options, so businesses need to meet them where they want to be, whether that's on social media, in-store, apps, remarketing campaigns, or anywhere else on their journey.
Five Benefits of Omnichannel Every Growth-Focused Business Should Take Advantage Of:
1. High Customer Retention and Loyalty
Consumers will always buy from a brand they trust. Omni-channel marketing provides a consistent experience across different platforms. Each platform has a unique and personalized message for different consumers and helps to build top of mind brand awareness through interaction across these different platforms.
2. Smoother Customer Journey
Understanding how customers behave across your sales funnel will certainly improve performance and lower the number of drop-out points in the consumer’s journey.
3. Revenue Growth
With accurate segmentation and personalization, an omnichannel marketing strategy tends to lead to higher engagement, more conversions (ex; sales, leads, orders, etc.) and ultimately, a higher ROI.
4. More Integrated Business
Using an omnichannel has one incredible advantage. Instead of having different units working each for their separate goals, here you have a system of various units working together for one goal. As a result, you have integrated customer service, sales, marketing, and inventory resource planning working towards a single goal.
5. Better Customer Insight
An omnichannel approach allows you to collect and unify customer data from disparate channels and systems. This can come about in the form of cookies, device, IDs, shopping carts, social media, mailing lists, point-of-sale (POS) systems, referral programs, etc. You can also easily measure how each channel actually contributed to the order or a retained customer, allowing you to recalibrate and better profit from what is working.
How Can Your Business Go About Creating a Personalized Omnichannel Strategy?
Omnichannel personalization involves personalizing and unifying your communications across all of the channels that you use to connect with your customers.
This includes the in-store and in-app experience, the way your customer interacts with your website and social media accounts, and the text messages, emails, and push notifications they receive from you.
However beyond the channels that are used, devising an omnichannel strategy is just as importantly about delivering experiences that are relevant, timely, and valuable to the customer, while also maintaining consistency across any device being used. Ultimately, the goal of omnichannel personalization is to create a seamless, cohesive customer experience that deepens relationships, increases your marketing intelligence, and accelerates revenue.
What Are the Benefits of Omnichannel Personalization?
Customers and brands alike love omnichannel personalization because the practice ensures that every marketing touchpoint is timely and relevant.
There are countless advantages to omnichannel personalization, including:
More Connected Customer Experiences
Did you know that 88% of customers worldwide say that the experience a brand provides is just as important as the goods or services being sold?
When you nail personalization across your channels, you’ll greatly improve the entire customer journey. Everything will feel smoother and more connected. Just bear in mind that, in order to get personalization right, you’ll need unified customer data.
This is data that’s collected from various, sometimes fragmented sources and joined into one central dashboard. This provides your company with one single, reliable source of what is happening across the board in your business.
Improved Conversions
Put yourself in your customers’ shoes for a moment. Would you rather shop with a brand that remembers your styling preferences and always sends you a coupon on your birthday, or a brand that fails to personalize your experience, never sends you thoughtful incentives and simply looks at you as a customer in a very generic manner.
56% of global customers feel like most brands treat them as “just a number.”
By offering personalized experiences to customers, it is pretty clear that your conversion rates are bound to increase simply because you resonate more deeply with them.
Higher Average Order Value (AOV)
Speaking of continued conversions and purchases, omnichannel personalization can encourage customers to buy more with each order. That’s because customers are more likely to trust (and purchase) recommendations from a brand if they feel that the brand truly understands their needs.
When businesses provide personalized recommendations across the multiple channels where customers are most likely to engage, they increase customer engagement and build customer loyalty, leading to repeat purchases and higher average order value (AOV).
Improved Customer Loyalty and Retention
Want more repeat customers? Prioritize personalization. 78% of customers say that they’re more likely to become repeat buyers after receiving personalized content from a brand.
As mentioned earlier, personalized marketing makes customers feel valued and seen as individuals, rather than a face in the crowd of your target audience. By delivering personalized omnichannel messaging, brands kickstart a fruitful cycle in which customers feel recognized, demonstrate increased brand loyalty and repeat business, and drive higher customer lifetime value (CLTV).
Customer lifetime value is important for ecommerce businesses because it can help you forecast the long-term value of each customer and prioritize customer acquisition and retention efforts. When you properly understand each customer’s CAC LTV calculation, you can allocate resources to the customers who are most valuable to the business and, in the process, get the most bang for your buck.
Lower Customer Acquisition Costs
Another most significant benefit of personalized omnichannel experiences is that it can help to lower customer acquisition costs. By creating tailored experiences that meet customers' needs at every touchpoint, brands can build loyalty, increase customer retention, and reduce churn.
In addition, omnichannel personalization can also help brands to better target their advertising spending, resulting in better customer engagement and more efficient use of marketing budgets.
Barriers to Omnichannel Personalization
Personalization is a key element of any successful marketing strategy, but it can be difficult to achieve on an omnichannel level. There are a number of barriers that can prevent businesses from being able to deliver omnichannel personalized experiences to their customers.
First, one of the biggest challenges businesses face today is how to create a truly omnichannel customer experience. With so many channels to choose from - online, in-store, mobile, email, direct mail, and social media - it can be difficult to know where to start. Even if you do have a plan, executing it can be a challenge. That's because personalization is not just about knowing your customer's preferences; it's also about having the right tools and data in place to make sure that each interaction is relevant and engaging.
Second, there is the issue of data silos. In most organizations, customer data is spread across different departments and systems, making it difficult to get a holistic view of the customer. Without a single view of the customer, it's difficult to deliver an omnichannel experience. Creating a unified data board via systems such as Tableau can help in this regard.
Third, there is the challenge of creating consistent messaging across channels. It can be difficult to ensure that the same message is being delivered across all channels, and this can lead to inconsistencies in the customer experience.
Finally, there is the issue of channel conflict. 68% of decision-makers say their team has experienced increased channel conflicts as a result of more omnichannel sales. In many organizations, different teams are responsible for different channels, such as email, web, and mobile. This can make it difficult to create a seamless experience for customers who move between channels. Each team may have different goals and objectives, which can make it difficult to align around a common goal of providing personalized experiences. This can make it difficult to align the omnichannel strategy with the overall business objectives.
How To Get Started With Personalizing Your Marketing & Customer Service Efforts Across Multiple Channels
Ready to devise your own omnichannel personalization strategy? When it comes to omnichannel marketing, don’t overlook these steps:
Unifying Customer Data Across Multiple Dashboards
When customer data is fragmented, it can be challenging for marketers to get a complete picture of each customer journey and deliver personalized experiences. That’s why collecting data and then unifying it is so important.
By bringing together customer data from various sources, such as purchase history, website behavior, and social media activity, marketers can gain a comprehensive view of each customer and their unique buying patterns and behaviors.
With a single, unified customer view, marketers can deliver more relevant, targeted messages, improving the customer journey and strengthening the customer relationship. Additionally, unified data makes it easier for marketers to track the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns and make data-driven improvements, leading to increased customer engagement and sales.
Make Sure Your Channels Are Aligned
Once you’ve brought all your data together, the next big step is to make sure that your channels can work together. When your channels work together, you can create a seamless customer experience across multiple touchpoints that’s informed by the data gleaned from every previous interaction along the way.
However, keep in mind that aligning your marketing channels can come with its own set of challenges. It requires a deep understanding of your customers, their preferences, and behaviors, as well as the technology and data needed to track and analyze the customer journey across multiple channels.
You will want to make sure you’re using an omnichannel personalization solution that seamlessly connects your data across all your channels (not just multiple channels — all of them) in real time. Only then can you create truly impactful personalization at scale for your customers.
Test Your Way to Greater Progress
Testing your strategies is crucial because it helps you evaluate the impact of your personalization efforts and determine what’s working and what’s not. By regularly testing different approaches against your key metrics, you can improve the relevance and effectiveness of your campaigns and better engage your customers.
One popular testing method is A/B testing, which compares two or more versions of a webpage, email, or the like among different segments of customers. The version that best achieves the desired income (ex; more opens, for example) is the one that gets sent to the lion’s share of customers.
But, there’s another, better way to test your omnichannel personalization. Contextual personalization uses machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) to help your marketing team decide which message is most likely to hit the sweet spot with each individual customer.
With contextual personalization, you can get way more specific and give each customer exactly what they’re looking for, exactly when they want it.
Omnichannel Personalization Campaign Ideas
There are several different kinds of omnichannel marketing campaigns, each with its own goal and strategy. Here are some of the top campaigns that have been proven to drive success.
1) Welcome or Onboarding Series
A welcome or onboarding series serves to introduce your new customer to your community and offer something to encourage them to take the next step along the buyer’s journey.
In an email environment, a welcome series can look like this:
An initial email, welcoming the new subscriber to your community and letting the new customer know what to expect from your communications.
A second email to prompt the customer to make a purchase or book a service. Recommend products, provide a coupon code, or share success stories from other customers.
A third email that adjusts based on where the customer is in their journey. If a purchase was made after the second email, this email should direct the customer to follow your brand on social media and/or download your app. This touchpoint can also remind your customer to take action following the second email.
A welcome series certainly is not confined to the inbox, though. Consider welcome text messages, push notifications, paid ads, or furnishing a proper onboarding experience in your app.
2) Abandoned Cart Campaign
It is astonishing that nearly 70% of all shopping carts are abandoned. That’s right, out of every 100 filled shopping carts, only 30 of them are actually making it through checkout.
Abandoned cart campaigns help businesses recover lost sales by reengaging customers who have left items in their shopping carts without completing the purchase. Cart recovery emails have an open rate of 45% and a conversion rate of 11%, so they’re a worthy investment for your ecommerce business.
A typical abandoned cart message will remind shoppers of the items they’ve left behind and provide an incentive to complete the purchase.
3) Keeping Prospects Engaged.
Keep in mind of course that as much as we speak of abandoned carts (with the implicit focus being on ecommerce stores), the same principle can be applied for those approaching the B2B lead process with the idea of re-engaging those who expressed interest in their software or SaaS service.
Omnichannel personalization plays a key role in reengagement or win-back campaigns by allowing marketers to deliver targeted, relevant messages that resonate with inactive customers and encourage them to reengage with the brand.
By leveraging data gleaned from the customer journey, such as purchase history, website behavior, and engagement history, marketers can use strategic omnichannel marketing messaging to rekindle the customer’s interest in the brand and drive reengagement.
Win-back campaigns can be used for email, web, and paid ads in the following ways:
Send email campaigns to inactive customers to reengage them and entice them to make the purchase
Deploy targeted landing pages or weblayers on your website to offer exclusive deals to previous customers
Run digital ads displayed across popular websites to catch the eye of lapsed customers and offer them personalized discounts
4) Upsell or Cross-Sell Opportunities
Another great use case for omnichannel personalization is for upsell and cross-sell opportunities. Using intel from customer preferences and past purchases, marketers with an omnichannel strategy can create personalized recommendations that are most likely to result in a purchase. According to HubSpot, upselling and cross-selling boosts revenue by as much as 30%.
What a successful omnichannel marketing strategy looks like?
Before you go about crafting, let alone implementing your omnichannel marketing strategy, it is important to realize how to you measure success. Since your campaign spans multiple channels and marketing platforms, cross-channel or aggregate, metrics are important. Some KPIs to consider when evaluating your omnichannel efforts include:
Cross-channel pageviews
Social media engagement metrics
Cross-channel conversion rate
Average order value
Churn rate
Seven steps for creating an effective omnichannel strategy
1. Define your ideal customer and identify where to best target them
The first step in creating an omnichannel marketing strategy is identifying and defining your ideal customer. Omnichannel strategies are specific and customer-centered.
What do they care about?
Where do they shop?
Where do they get information?
What are their main points?
There are many more questions to consider when getting to profile your ideal customer, but these are a good place to start.
Once you’ve outlined your ideal customer and target audience, you need to know where they spend time, including where they hang out online.
Do they primarily shop online, in stores, or both?
When do they shop?
Do they shop with your competitors?
How much do they spend?
2. Choose your channels
A successful omnichannel strategy should have a mix of digital and traditional channels.
Social media
Brand website
Mobile app
Broadcast — radio and TV
Digital ads
Print materials
In-store ads and promos
3. Enhance your online presence
Your business’ online presence is extremely important, even if your brand primarily operates as a brick-and-mortar business. You must ensure your digital efforts align with your offline promotions and presence.
.Here are a few things to look for as you audit your online presence:
Consistent imagery and messaging across social media platforms
Mobile-friendly website with simple UX and clear CTAs
Frictionless experience within your app
Seamless integration with relevant third parties, such as delivery apps for restaurants
4. Map the customer journey
As you construct an omnichannel campaign stemming from the broader strategy, you’ll find many moving parts across the various channels. Create a map of your customer’s journey, highlighting which channels customers will encounter along the way.
Mapping the customer journey also helps you find potential pain points and inconveniences that could deter customers from engaging with you.
5. Prioritize customer support
A customer’s journey doesn’t end when they make a purchase. Customer support is an important part of the customer experience. Providing support via multiple channels, and creating a personalized experience through warm, friendly support specialists is an often overlooked aspect of the omnichannel experience.
6. Collect and protect customer data
As you implement your omnichannel marketing strategy, you willl undoubtedly need to tweak your targeting, messaging, or other elements of your strategy. Rather than basing changes on trends or assumptions, analyzing your various data touchpoints (or even better, as we mentioned before, centralizing your data) to be able to realize what promotional elements need to be tweaked or added is essential to being able to constantly optimize the broader customer experience.
Crafting the Ideal Omnichannel Marketing Strategy and Framework: A Customer-Centric Process
To attract and retain customers, brands need to be able to meet customers where they are, communicating with them with the right messaging and via their preferred channels. Communication can’t be about what’s best for the brand, it needs to be customer-centric, designed to elevate their experience.
An omnichannel marketing strategy ensures that brands can apply important tools like hyper-personalization and segmentation at scale and continue to track results to further their goals. Omnichannel tactics reveal a wealth of actionable information that helps brands determine where to allocate their resources and what elements of their campaigns to optimize.
Hopefully, with some of these tactics (which by no means run the gamut of the full range of possibilities), you are on your way to initiating and leveraging a powerful framework for implementing an omnichannel marketing strategy within your business.
That being said, if you are looking for help in terms of implementing and conceiving a comprehensive omnichannel approach tailored for your particular business, why not arrange for a meeting with our omnichannel marketing experts ? We look forward to taking a closer look at your business to see where the opportunities exist within your business operations and your overall customer experience to provide a more interconnected, omnichannel experience for your customers.