Omnichannel marketing is the future

Customer-centric marketing strategies work better than business focussed ones. Delivering customer experiences has been our forte at efficaci and omnichannel marketing is one of the best enabling tools for us. First up, omnichannel marketing is bespoke and it is unique to every business.

Understanding omnichannel marketing

Omnichannel marketing strategies meet customer needs at their chosen touchpoints to deliver high-end customer experiences. The customer chosen touchpoint could be social media marketing platforms, blogs, physical locations, newsletters, customer delight calls or live chats. 

The most critical aspect of an omnichannel marketing strategy is brand interaction and delivering brand-consistent conversations (messages and interactions with customers) across a plethora of devices and technologies. This is a customer-centric marketing strategy and customised according to the touchpoints, making it a ‘delight’ experience.

An omnichannel marketing strategy should focus on creating a seamless customer experiences, so we can connect all the touchpoints using the data collated, unify them and deliver. 

We should tie each interaction of the customer to all other channels to spin a singular, delightful, seamless, and a joyful experience. In short, it is a unified service offering. A happy customer is ready to give you more business and information in the future.

Example: 

A customer visits your store through a Twitter Ad, puts a few items in the basket and leaves without making a purchase. How do you handle the abandoned cart communication? What should you do to retain or regain the customer?

• Since Twitter is a preferred channel for the customer, send a Direct Message along with re-targeted ads.
• You have the email address of the customer, so you should email with suitable content.
• Since the customer comes from Twitter, he is a heavy social media user. Re-targeted ads on other social media platforms using demographics would be a great idea.

Understanding Cross-channel, multichannel & omnichannel

The objectives of all these marketing strategies are similar, conversion, however, the difference lies in the perspective of a customer. We execute all these strategies in bespoke ways and get different conversion rates.

Look at the comparison table below:

Why adopt multichannel marketing?

There are many advantages to adopt an omnichannel marketing strategy. Let us discuss the three major ones.

• Enhanced data collection through customer journey analysis: Collection of insights and analytics becomes easier and comprehensive because of enhanced customer experiences through omnichannel marketing. You can trace and collate engagement data across channels and touchpoints [Cookies, device id’s, tracking pixels CTRs, open rates etc.] resulting in deeper insights into customer journeys. Customer preferences, interactive behaviour combined with insights can help you identify profitable opportunities to grow faster. Identifying the best performing channels will help create better experiences and you have to tweak them as required.

• Build better and better customer experiences: While building better and effective campaigns, you can promote better personalisation using internal synergies and collaboration. This will help deliver amazing customer experiences by reducing marketing funnel friction, improving website flows, and creating relevant content. Use enhanced customer experience to drive better targeting through personalisation.

• Spend more and save more: Fine-tuning your marketing spend gets easier. Increasing spend on channels that work and weeding out others can be an initial strategy. However, more effective campaigns bring better revenue. So, by cutting marketing spend and increasing ROI, it turns out to be a win-win to adopt omnichannel marketing.

Planning an omnichannel marketing strategy

We at efficaci believe in bespoke digital marketing strategies and omnichannel marketing is right up our sleeve, because it is unique to each business.

An omnichannel strategy results from collaboration within a well-integrated business where the major stakeholders are: 

• Customer Success
• Sales
• Product
• Marketing

Internally, your business has to ask and identify what the above departments expect from customers. The information needs to be collated and frozen. This information should contain, from each of departments:

• The need to improve the present strategy
• Recommended touchpoints
• Touchpoints that are not effective
• Touchpoints your business is ignoring
• Touchpoints of core customers

There is no right or wrong marketing strategy. The way ahead is to create an omnichannel marketing strategy, A/B test it, and tweak it as you go. Wash, rinse and repeat.

Critical headless CMS

We have discovered that using a headless CMS is the way to go to create omnichannel customer experiences that are truly effective. The creation part of the strategy, like visual assets, messaging etc. should be segregated from delivery mechanisms.  

The delivery mechanisms and collection of customer data and insights should be a unique process. This is highly critical to collect enhanced customer insights. Again, customer experiences depend on delivery logistics and there are too many delivery platforms out there.

Conclusion…

Simply put, customer experiences are highly effective. For experience, wear the customer’s shoes in a buying journey from a business that practices omnichannel marketing . As a marketer, that will be an eye-opener.

At efficaci, we strive to empower brands, accelerate their digital transformation and create bespoke customer experiences for them to succeed and sustain.

More Digital Marketing trends for 2022.

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