What Is Omnichannel Marketing?
What Is Omnichannel Marketing?
Omnichannel marketing uses a combination of various touchpoints to connect with prospective customers throughout the user journey. The goal is to move people down the sales funnel and encourage them to become loyal customers.
An effective omnichannel marketing strategy will ensure customers have a positive experience at every touchpoint. In the process, it will also keep customers engaged to draw attention away from competitors, further ensuring they turn to your brand over competitors.
What Are Omnichannel Marketing Examples?
There are many ways you can use omnichannel marketing to optimize your marketing strategy and connect with consumers. These strategies involve using multiple channels to connect with people across different touchpoints in a set sequence.
One example of omnichannel marketing could involve the use of your website and SMS or email messaging. This might begin with a potential customer visiting your website after seeing an ad. At some point when the visitor is on your website, you can ask them if they would like to opt into your email or SMS campaign. You can then send either an SMS text or email introducing people to your brand, with occasional messages helping maintain brand awareness. Eventually, the recipient of these messages may want to purchase from you when the time is right, converting this lead into a customer.
Why Is Omnichannel Marketing Important?
If you want to ensure people move along the user journey, you need omnichannel marketing. Consider the fact that businesses with effective omnichannel marketing strategies retain as much as 89% of their customers, whereas those with weaker strategies only retain around 33% on average.
Omnichannel marketing is crucial for building the perfect experience for your customers as they move toward becoming delighted customers. The right strategy seamlessly integrates multiple channels to create a fluid journey from initial engagement to repeat purchases. As such, you'll get the most from your marketing efforts as you develop a holistic strategy that effectively uses every channel and tool.
What Are the Benefits of Omnichannel Marketing?
There are many advantages of using omnichannel marketing to connect with new and existing customers. These include:
Higher Brand Recognition
As people encounter your brand more frequently across different marketing channels, they'll come to recognize you better. An efficient and reliable omnichannel strategy will ensure that people don't forget about you and turn to competitors. Instead, you'll grab and hold your audience's attention with multiple channels working together.
For instance, if people visit your website and don't initially make a purchase, you can use retargeting ads to reach audiences on other websites and in various apps. These audiences will recognize your brand and, at some point, may return to your site to complete a purchase. You'll stick in these audiences' minds over less engaging competitors as you carry them along the user journey.
Better Customer Experience and Increased Loyalty
Omnichannel marketing also has the capacity to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty with the right approach. This is due to the ability for customers to connect with you through multiple customer service and sales channels. Also, you can satisfy your customers and boost loyalty by enabling customers to easily purchase products and services via several channels and devices.
If your customers are happier and remain connected to your brand more consistently, they'll be more inclined to stay loyal to you over the competition.
Revenue Growth
By attracting more customers and leading them to make purchases more efficiently, you'll see an increase in profits. An omnichannel marketing campaign can also enable customers to efficiently make repeat purchases and renew subscriptions, further maximizing revenue.
Better Cross-Channel User and Customer Data
With a seamless marketing strategy, you'll be able to keep track of where your customers are throughout the user journey. You'll collect data that helps paint a complete picture of this journey, which you can then use to determine what needs improvement. For instance, you might find that people are dropping off after interacting with your brand at a specific touchpoint. You can then go into that particular touchpoint and find out what's keeping people from moving forward. Once you address the issue, you'll be able to see if your efforts keep more customers moving along.
What Is the Difference Between Multichannel and Omnichannel Marketing?
Omnichannel and multichannel marketing are somewhat similar, but they have certain fundamental differences you should keep in mind. Both of these concepts are about connecting with customers across multiple channels but in different ways.
Multichannel marketing focuses on individual channels in the user journey and the level of interaction that takes place there. Meanwhile, an omnichannel marketing strategy considers multiple channels and how they connect. Here we'll dive into the specific differences between these two approaches.
Multichannel Marketing
Unlike omnichannel marketing, multichannel campaigns entail looking at each channel individually to connect with consumers. It's about maximizing your reach as opposed to constructing a holistic journey across multiple channels. You may want to use a multichannel marketing strategy to get the most from your ad campaigns, for instance, as you distribute ads online, in print, and other media. As a result, the channels in these campaigns tend to have a narrow focus.
Omnichannel Marketing
Although omnichannel marketing also uses multiple channels to reach customers, it focuses on the bigger picture. Multichannel marketing entails looking at each channel separately, while omnichannel marketing aims to create a wholly connective experience across all channels. It looks at customer interaction from top-of-funnel engagement to the moment they're ready to make a buying decision. Businesses look for any areas of inefficiency to smooth them out and make sure that people complete their journeys.
How Do You Develop a Good Omnichannel Marketing Strategy?
A strong omnichannel marketing strategy will ensure that all of the components of a campaign work together the way they should. This involves creating consistent visual elements, messaging, and general content across all platforms to create a specific recognizable brand image. Wherever customers engage with your brand along their journey, they'll come to know and trust you until they convert into customers.
If you're not sure how to approach your omnichannel marketing strategy, the following are some of the specific steps you can take.
Truly Understand Your User Journey
To start with, take the time to gain a deep understanding of the entire user journey. Look at every one of your existing touchpoints and identify a clear start and end. Figure out which channels your users interact with most throughout their journey and which fail to drive sufficient engagement. Based on your findings, you can work on optimizing each touchpoint to develop a complete journey.
There are many potential platforms to consider when painting a picture of the user journey. For instance, you should look at various ads and corresponding landing pages. Look at where those pages go based on their calls to action. Find out how people interact with you on social media and what leads them to your website or app. Look into your email campaigns and see what you can do to increase engagement on this channel.
With a better idea of how people move along the user journey, you can determine which steps to take to streamline it further.
Segment and Customize Users
Keep in mind that not all of your users will connect with the same messaging and touchpoints. This is why you should cater the customer experience to different types of users.
With a clear image of the user journey, begin looking into the different subsections of your audience. You'll likely find that there are multiple potential segments you can target with your marketing campaigns. Each segment may also want to use a different combination of touchpoints to interact with your brand.
One of the best ways to segment your users is to build buyer personas around them. Look at your existing user base and their behaviors based on certain traits. Conduct surveys that collect data around usage and preference, which will further help you identify individual segments. You can then use this data to build unique personas around each type of user, creating a hypothetical person for each segment. This will give you some guidance around which touchpoints to use when targeting each segment and what type of messaging resonates with it.
By personalizing the user experience across all platforms, you'll build better connections with new and existing users. You'll remain more memorable and engaging than competitors that neglect to offer a personalized experience. People will also be more loyal to brands that appeal specifically to them.
Use Customer-Specific Data to Develop User-Centric Content
Another fundamental difference between omnichannel and multichannel marketing is the emphasis on the user. An omnichannel strategy places the user first by focusing on the customer journey.
You can create user-centric content by using data that are specific to each user. For example, you can collect data about users' interests and purchase history to send unique product recommendations via email or push notifications. This would show that you care about providing each user with a personalized experience. You can also use this data to personalize messaging based on the user's individual wants and needs, ensuring your content speaks directly to them.
Also, look into specific pain points that affect your users. What are some challenges they're likely to experience to determine ways to overcome them? You can identify pain points by surveying your users and asking them about ways you can improve the customer journey. You can also look elsewhere online such as blogs and social media channels to see what issues people are experiencing when it comes to the user experience. Based on this information, you can continue creating the ideal user experience across your marketing channels.
If you demonstrate the desire to meet each user's needs, this will go a long way in increasing their trust and loyalty.
Use Necessary Automation Tools to Accelerate Your Marketing Process
There's a lot involved with omnichannel marketing, with these campaigns often involving a wide variety of platforms and tools. Managing all of this can be daunting, which is why you must take certain steps to automate your strategy.
There are many automation tools you can use to streamline the marketing process and connect with users at every level. For example, you can use an email automation tool like Mailchimp to send emails to users at various stages of the user journey. Other systems can automatically send push notifications and text messages to users with personalized recommendations, abandoned cart reminders, and other notifications.
Certain artificial intelligence (AI) tech can also help you learn from your user data to create more effective personalized content. Over time, you'll be able to perfect your content with more ease as you continually optimize the user journey.
By automating your marketing processes, you'll free yourself and your teams up to spend more time growing your brand and increasing revenue. In the end, you'll be able to rise above your competitors and stay there as your omnichannel marketing efforts help you meet your business goals.
Build the Perfect Omnichannel Marketing Strategy to Connect With Users
If you're looking for the best way to appeal to new users and increase the loyalty of your existing user base, omnichannel marketing is an invaluable asset to have. With the help of the right strategy and user-centric content, you'll establish a better relationship with prospective and current users and give your brand a chance to excel.
Using a combination of multichannel and omnichannel marketing will fully equip your app and brand to carry people through the entire user journey. As you develop your campaigns, you'll find certain areas of improvement that you can focus on to streamline the journey.
Looking for an effective tool to assist with your omnichannel marketing strategy? Consider integrating Storyly into your campaigns. This platform makes it easy to connect with app and web users through engaging personalized Stories. These elements engage users with appealing visuals and messages that complement other marketing content. Combined with other types of content, Storyly can help you get the most from your omnichannel marketing efforts.
