Omnichannel marketing guide for 2021 [tips and hints]

Omnichannel marketing — sounds interesting, but not everyone who uses these words understands what they mean. Let’s figure out what it is.

Omnichannel marketing is about creating a presence everywhere and at the same time because people shop by jumping from one device or channel to another. Your job is to create a seamless and consistent channel environment (both online and offline) that customers can use to explore and interact with your brand, and you, in turn, will be able to track the entire customer journey through your channels and offer them the highest quality service.

But there is multichannel marketing. Why, then, do you need an omnichannel?

To understand this, let’s define the difference between multichannel and omnichannel marketing.

Multichannel vs. omnichannel marketing

The main difference between these types of marketing is the approach to customers:

• multichannel marketing focuses on the number of customers
• omnichannel marketing focuses on the customer experience while interacting with the brand should be equally easy and comfy on each of the channels, be it social media, mobile app, online store, call center, offline store, newsletter by email, video on YouTube.

Nowadays, shoppers often start their journey to order from one device and end on another, or browse online and buy offline, or vice versa.

This leads to the conclusion about why omnichannel marketing is becoming more and more popular: it helps to satisfy the needs of customers, improves CLV, allows segmenting customers to build tactics of interaction with them, and also helps to increase the coverage of new customer segments, which in the consequence leads to an increase in your profits. So, let’s move on to the main question.

How to create an effective omnichannel digital marketing strategy?

Step 1. Analyze the customer’s touchpoints with your brand

This step will help you determine the customer journey through your channels and identify possible issues that require some fix. Don’t forget to review sites, blogs, and forums — these resources also shape the final image of your brand in the eyes of customers.

It’s a good idea to ask a few people to interact with your channels and ask them to give feedback on the experience. Happy customers are the key to success, so do not ignore their opinion and listen to their words to make your store as convenient as possible.

Step 2. Create a unified system that will store customer data

Customers will interact with your store using different channels. Detailed analytics and segmentation help you create the right omnichannel strategy, so collect information about all customer calls across all channels and organize them in one place. This data will help you segment users and personalize the approach to each of them, which is an important part of creating an omnichannel marketing strategy.

Important data to collect:

• age, gender, marital status, location;
• ways of interacting with a particular channel or company;
• shopping behavior, including the frequency of shopping, what actions are taken before buying.

All this information will help shape the tactics of interaction with the client. That way, you can figure out when to send specific trigger messages to your customer at the right time on their purchase journey.

Step 3. Provide top-notch customer support

As you learned in the beginning, omnichannel marketing is customer experience-driven. To shape the customer experience positively, they need quality and fast support. Knowing the needs and having a history of communication with the client will make it easier for you to provide relevant information. The omnichannel marketing approach means that this support can be obtained from a user-friendly platform or channel (messenger, chat, app, mail, call).

Step 4. Test and analyze

Omnichannel marketing doesn’t work without analytics. Analytics will allow you to understand which channels are performing more efficiently, which will allow you to understand which channel you need to focus more on to increase conversions.

For you, a client is now not one separate device, but a collection of them belonging to one person.

There are now many services available to implement this step. One of the omnichannel marketing automation tools is Google Analytics, which allows you to track the behavior of your customers, see which channels are converting from, and redistribute efforts in favor of content formats that receive more responses from the target audience. Now, everything is changing quickly and customer behavior is no exception, and you, as a marketer, need to keep up with these changes and respond to them, changing campaigns to meet the needs of users.

Let’s proceed. The steps for implementing an omnichannel marketing strategy are clear, but what tools can you use?

Convenience is one of the determining factors. So, in addition to the steps described above, you need to make sure that the client is comfortable. One of the most important things is to make sure your site is mobile-friendly. Why focus on mobile devices? The traffic that goes from the PC drops every year, which is confirmed by many statistical sources. The use of mobile devices is steadily growing, as is the number of purchases made with their use.

This is a great opportunity for you because it is the mobile device that allows you to create the most personalized approach and entice the customer to make a purchase from you.

How to bring mobile traffic?

Not as difficult as it seems — for this you can develop a mobile application so that the customer can select a product and make a purchase from the phone and/or maintain social networks for additional user engagement. Moreover, you can use the data received from users, such as their location, to create personalized offers.

But there is one problem: most of the mobile sites are still not adapted for comfortable interaction with them. And it’s not just about optimizing the site in terms of the arrangement of elements. The loading speed of a large number of mobile sites leaves much to be desired, to put it mildly.

What does Google statistics say to this?

If the site is loaded for more than 5 seconds, then the probability that the user will leave it increases by 106%.

It doesn’t sound very good, and it looks like an excuse to think about optimizing your site (unless you want to lose potential customers).

So it’s time to summarize the above

Omnichannel marketing is an example of an approach that creates a great user experience and helps you benefit from it. Buyers can make a purchase and get information about the product where it is convenient for them, and for you, as a brand, it doesn’t matter where they made it, the very fact of making a purchase is important.

Will it be useful for you? Definitely yes, but for this, you need to create all the necessary conditions for its successful functioning. And if you manage to create such a network of channels that will satisfy all user needs, then omnichannel marketing will start to bring you profit.