An Intro to Omnichannel Marketing
What is Omnichannel Marketing Anyway?
In the past, before the great omnichannel marketing came about, many businesses solely relied on one-touch marketing campaigns that would die upon completion. They’d send out one piece of direct mail – one digital ad – one email – and expect a plethora of results. Whatever the trend of the moment was, that’s what they’d focus on, and only that.
Omnichannel marketing is “a cross-channel content strategy used to improve the customer experience and drive better relationships across all possible channels and touchpoints.” It takes all of the most relevant trends combined with multiple marketing touches to reach people how, when, and where they are, and provide them with the best customer experience, whether that experience be point-of-sale, digital, or physical. It meets customers where they are in the buyer journey with unified and steady messaging, instead of at a stop along the way.
At the end of the day, omnichannel marketing is all about driving better relationships – and targeting prospects and customers with the right messages, in the right places, at the right times.
Multichannel vs. Omnichannel
These sound very similar, and although they’re both great trends and important marketing tactics, they’re not one and the same. While omnichannel marketing, like we said above, is multiple marketing touches along the buyer’s journey, creating unified and steady messaging, multichannel marketing is interacting with potential customers on various platforms – but not necessarily messaging that’s tied together seamlessly and consistently. Multichannel marketing could mean you’re using print ads, retail locations, a website, promotional events, product packaging, and WOMM, but they may not all convey the same communication.
Here’s a trick to easily remember the difference:
- Multi means many (simply enabling each touch point), and casting the widest net to connect with the most customers
- Onmi means all (all touchpoints convey the same message to all customers), which focuses on building stronger relationships between consumers and brands
The Importance of Omnichannel
Omnichannel marketing can be great for many aspects of your business. Like we said, it can and will, if used correctly, attract the right people, at the right place, at the right time. In the digital age of 2021, it’s more important than ever to utilize technology to accurately find and target these recipients. Use omnichannel marketing to do the following for your company…
- Boost customer loyalty: Ensuring consistent messaging across all platforms, and going further to offer personalized experiences for each audience member, creates a better brand image and increases customer satisfaction
- Improve brand recall: Making sure your brand is represented in the same way across platforms and devices can produce better customer recollection
- Increase revenue: Content personalization, WOM marketing, and again, consistent messaging, can help retain and attract new customers
- Utilize purchasing patterns: 73% of shoppers use multiple channels during their purchasing journey, so capture your current audience and expand your content to reach a broader scope of your customers
Example of Omnichannel Marketing
To help you better understand how omnichannel marketing works, we’ve put together an example of omnichannel touchpoints along the customer journey, below:
Customer receiving text message about sales promo while in store -> Customer receiving an empty cart email at checkout -> Customer receiving retargeting digital and/or print ad
How to Get Started
Before jumping in and creating the marketing touchpoints of an omnichannel campaign, think about the customer first. Review all of your current touchpoints, and evaluate whether they provide a positive, consistent, and branded experience. Get to know your customer base even better by developing buyer personas and understanding their needs, wants, behaviors, demographics, preferences, goals, and more. Lastly, do a ton of tracking and research, hire the right guru, or choose the right partners to get going. Here at Strata we have data providers, digital advertising specialists, direct mail experts, and analytics and reporting professionals, all on staff and ready to help you – taking the guess work out of the entire process.
Still not sold? How about these statistics…brands experience a 287% higher purchase rate when using three or more channels, and companies with well-defined omnichannel customer experience strategies in place achieve a 91% higher year-over-year increase in customer retention rate on average.
Don’t wait to take advantage of what Omnichannel Campaign Marketing can do for your business. Click here to see how we can help.
