In today’s marketing world, new technologies and the evolution of tactics have resulted in a new generation of strategies with which marketers must get acquainted. One such method is known as Omnichannel marketing.
The term “omnichannel marketing” refers to the process of establishing your brand’s presence across numerous online and offline channels. Simultaneously, ensuring a great and smooth customer experience throughout the customer journey. The online channels include website, app, social media, email, SMS, WhatsApp among others. While the offline channels include retail stores, events, call-centre et cetera.
If you want to gain and keep customers, you must take your omnichannel marketing strategy seriously.
Benefits of Omnichannel marketing
There are no negative aspects to omnichannel marketing. Omnichannel marketing is critical because it allows you to provide a great experience to your customers at all stages of their lifecycle. It also helps to reduce churn and drive and build your brand’s positive reputation.
Omnichannel marketing activities provide each audience member with a consistent and personally-tailored experience. As a result, it contributes to increased consumer loyalty. Consistency improves the rate of brand recall for your customers. A strong sense of brand recall will boost your customer base’s likelihood of purchasing.
As a result, these initiatives assist brands in both retaining and attracting new customers through content personalisation and word-of-mouth marketing. More customers equal more business and, therefore, more revenue.
How to create the perfect omnichannel experience?
Step 1: Understand your customer
While having and enabling numerous channels isn’t a negative thing, linking them should be the aim. Begin by thoroughly understanding your customer.
Understanding your customer thoroughly would primarily include observing the following:
1. The platforms that your clients commonly utilise to shop
2. Their shopping habits
3. The difficulties they have while shopping
4. The manner in which people interact with the brand at each touchpoint
5. The shopping devices they utilise
This information will assist you in identifying and strengthening the appropriate touchpoints. As a result, you will be able to integrate them to provide a smooth and customised experience for your customers. It will also assist you in identifying typical client difficulties and developing a feasible solution for them.
Step 2: Plan
Once you’ve gathered all of the aforementioned information, make a thorough plan for how you want the experience to flow across all touchpoints. Use data effectively to weed out the churn.
You must decide on the tools and solutions you will use to communicate with them. To begin, we recommend looking at the following solutions:
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Software Marketing Automation Tools
Fully Integrated Customer Engagement Platform
Solutions for Social Media Management
Tools for Data Analytics
The Importance of Segmentation:
After analysing the data, you can easily categorise people into different groups based on common behavioural patterns. You can create subgroups based on buyer personas, purchase pathways, subscription status et cetera.
This will assist you in developing personalised experiences for each sort of customer.
Step 3: Personalisation
The most important aspect of omnichannel marketing is personalisation. This is how your consumers will feel appreciated. Personalisation requires you to make a personal connection with each and every member of your target audience.
You will be able to offer personalised content with the correct data points, automation, and analysis tools. This will enhance the consumer experience, grow revenue, boost brand loyalty, and ensure consistency across channels.
The context is the most important aspect of an omnichannel marketing approach. Ensure that the context of your message is relevant to the user, and send it to the user when they are most engaged and on the channel with which they engage the most.
Step 4: Test
Once the framework is in place, it’s time to put everything through tests. Is social media really where you should put your efforts? That and more will be shown to you during your testing.
After you’ve completed your initial set of tests, you may want to include additional and diverse marketing channels. Before you begin, it’s important to note that “omni” does not imply that you should try to employ every marketing channel available to you. It means that the experience should be the same or as similar as possible across all mediums.
Step 5: Track your KPIs
It’s natural to feel relieved when your framework initially goes live. But don’t get too excited – taking your omnichannel marketing from okay to outstanding needs tracking your KPIs and changing your strategy accordingly.
The importance of the correct Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs, in marketing, cannot be more stressed. Using the proper tools to track the right indicators allows you to report accurate data and extract meaningful insights to improve your omnichannel approach. By gathering the right indicators, you will be able to better report on the successes and failures of your omnichannel strategy and use those data points to adjust your strategy and improve your ROI.
Make sure that you alter your methods and replace your tools according to the data collected.
Omnichannel vs Multichannel
While they are frequently confused, they each address separate challenges. Multichannel marketing focuses on channel strategy — from social to mobile, each channel has its own set of objectives. The customer is at the centre of omnichannel marketing. The primary goal is to ensure that a customer’s encounter with a brand is consistent and smooth across all channels. The important thing is that no component of the consumer experience feels out of place, whether it’s a social media post, a digital ad, or a visit to a store.
In a multichannel strategy, all communication channels operate independently, with no link between them. As a result, the consumer experience is inconsistent. Omnichannel marketing involves all channels functioning in unison and in harmony with one another.
Conclusion
However appealing Omnichannel marketing might be appearing at this point, it is important to note the following in order to maintain a positive ROI:
Consistency and continuity in communication with the customers, maintaining a consistent experience across all channels and leveraging your data on a regular mode. If you provide an inconsistent experience, your customers will not hesitate to switch to the competition.
Companies like Starbucks, Disney, and Sephora have some fascinating findings that might help you design a successful omnichannel marketing approach. However, remember that there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all omnichannel marketing plan. It is critical to experiment and discard everything that does not work for you.
Get in touch with us at Shaktiki Marketing to learn more about the most effective marketing strategy for your business.