Omnichannel marketing refers to an interconnected multi-channel sales strategy that gives customers a seamless buying experience across sales channels commissioned by a brand.
The purpose of advancing marketing efforts over these interlinked channels is to provide a consistent and coherent buying experience for the customer, coming from different sources via different means.
Omnichannel marketing is a cross-channel content approach that aims to improve the customer experience and build stronger relationships across channels and touchpoints. This encompasses physical and online experiences, as well as traditional and digital channels and point-of-sale.
According to Omnisend, “Marketers who use three or more channels in a single campaign have a 287 percent greater purchase rate than those who only use one channel. Purchase frequency is 250 percent higher than single-channel purchase frequency, and omnichannel order value is 13 percent higher on each order”.
Thus, in today’s competitive business environment, it is imperative to adopt comprehensive marketing tactics. Some key strategies that can make an omnichannel marketing plan more effective are –
1. Know your customers
Before drafting any marketing plan, do thorough research on your customers – know who they are, understand their struggles, and where they are coming from. This entails identifying target audiences, creating detailed buyer personas, and gaining a thorough grasp of their desires, needs, behaviours, demographics, interests, and objectives.
You can make use of relevant tools like Google keywords, social mention, Klout, etc to collect, evaluate, and store this data that will help you identify and evaluate customer preferences. Your marketing efforts hit the right spot if you know who your customers are and what they desire.
2. Connect with your customers
The fact that omnichannel prioritises the customer is a significant differentiator between omnichannel and multichannel marketing.
A well-thought evaluation of the customer journey is the first step toward omnichannel success. Mapping this journey to the value-adds at different touchpoints comes in next, and then you come up with an engagement plan.
Examine each digital touchpoint a prospect encounters before deciding to become a customer. Often, brands take a company-focused approach to define customer touchpoints and that’s when they fail to deliver a coherent customer experience.
For instance, a channel is never a touchpoint but a way to understand where the customer is coming from and how they interact with you. While digital is one channel, a digital chat with your customer is a touchpoint.
When you are thorough with this, make sure that the experience throughput these points is consistent and customer-centric. If not, assemble the appropriate departments to make this adjustment. Each department should have a customer-first mindset and strive to create enjoyable customer experiences.
3. Generate content with context
The context is the most important aspect of an omnichannel marketing approach, especially for D2C brands. Your users will stop engaging with you if you send an irrelevant message to the wrong audience at the wrong time. For instance, you don’t want to ask the prospect to sign up for your newsletter when they are on their way to the checkout page.
Make sure your message’s context is relevant to the user and deliver it to them at the time when they are most engaged and on the channel where they engage the most.
These formats could be blogs, podcasts, email marketing, branded content and influencer marketing, user-generated content (UGC), community building, memes, infographics, whitepapers, etc. The channel of communication should be based on the buyer’s journey.
4. Be where your users are
Omnichannel marketing itself insinuates that you should be omnipresent, which in simple terms means, be wherever your customer is.
Analyse the customer engagement figures from different channels and divide your efforts and resources accordingly. You may classify your audience into multiple categories that assist you in creating a unique journey for each customer type and drive satisfaction.
5. Implement inclusive and purpose-driven marketing strategies
Be a brand with a cause. Your marketing strategy should always be inclusive and must appeal to diversity. This will happen only when you know the purpose of your marketing initiatives and how they will help your company during different growth stages.
A purpose-driven marketing strategy will help you grow in the timeline you set and overcome any challenges that might come in the way.
6. Don’t hesitate to automate
Use marketing tools for automating your marketing strategies and campaigns. For an omnichannel plan to effectively work, you will need certain automation tools to run things smoothly and avoid missing out on any insights.
Some tools you should consider are CRM, video/web conferencing solutions, email marketing automation tools, analytics and data visualization tools, content management systems, and social media listening tools.
7. Always measure your efforts
Your data analytics tool needs to be your best friend. A truly effective omnichannel strategy should constantly evolve based on the data gathered across channels via different campaigns for different audiences. Get clear visibility on all of your initiatives to turn customer feedback and behaviour into actionable insights.
Keep a track of your effort, do not dwell on the initiatives that didn’t work, and keep experimenting. Take the “fail fast, learn fast, improve fast” approach.
(Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of YourStory.)
