As marketing and customer service channels proliferate, customer expectations have also grown, and they want to be contacted on their terms. It requires an omnichannel marketing strategy to fulfill this expectation of customers.
Interaction is a focal point; your customer can begin the journey anywhere from any channel.
Most companies in the modern digital world are motivated to deliver the best and most seamless customer experience to survive. You must fully embrace a variety of channels and strategies if you want your company to increase product and service sales.
Since 73% of customers start and finish their purchases using multiple channels, many companies have begun incorporating omnichannel into their current business strategies.
Whether you operate as a single trader from home or have a large customer base, embracing an omnichannel marketing strategy can strengthen the perception of your business and help grow your market.
You need to recognize the value of omnichannel marketing for your company and use it to differentiate your offerings from your competitors and increase your return on investment.
What is Omnichannel Marketing?
In layperson’s terms, omnichannel marketing is an approach to building your brand’s presence across multiple online and offline channels to give the customer a satisfying and seamless experience throughout their journey.
Be present wherever you think someone might be looking for you. Provide your potential customers and regular clients with access to your goods, discounts, attractive offers, and support services across all platforms, devices, and channels.
Giving customers a seamless user experience is the primary goal of omnichannel marketing.
You must be curious about these channels and why they are crucial for customer satisfaction or dissatisfaction! These are divided into two categories:-
- Online Channels: Mobile Application, Website, Whatsapp, Social Media, SMS, Email
- Offline Channels: Retail Store, Call Centre
Great omnichannel marketing doesn’t just happen overnight.
The main goal of an omnichannel strategy is to make as many people aware of your brand as possible to maximize the number of people who come into contact with it. Customer engagement is thus one of the crucial metrics of an omnichannel approach.
Let’s understand omnichannel marketing with some famous examples:
Nike
Nike is an excellent example of retail omnichannel success.
Nike achieved marvelous results with a business strategy that combined online and offline stores. Their physical stores are all digitally enabled thanks to the Nike app, which was a real success.
The app sends product recommendations based on previous purchases and allows users to browse the shoes in the nearby store and reserve them.
Since its release in 2018, the Nike app has received over 250 million downloads.
Spotify
Spotify is another excellent example of an omnichannel experience at the product level.
A company is known for its many songs and podcasts on a single platform. Spotify hosts songs in almost every language in the world.
The company has a mobile app, a desktop app, and a web app. The data is automatically synced among all the apps when you have them open simultaneously.
Suppose you are playing a song on your desktop. Your mobile app will show the same song in progress that you are playing on the desktop app.
Now the question is…
How can you integrate Omnichannel Marketing into your Business?
All sizes of businesses can benefit from omnichannel marketing. Even startups and small businesses are beginning to reap the rewards of implementing an omnichannel marketing strategy.
A customer’s interaction with your brand must be considered when developing an omnichannel experience. The overall experience is the main focus rather than the channel.
But before moving forward with any new marketing strategy, it’s crucial to lay a solid foundation.
#1 Bring the Entire Team on Board
A positive customer experience should be your brand’s top priority. Everyone on your team should agree and work to achieve that. It goes beyond just the marketing department.
#2 Data Collection and Analysis
Collecting data about your consumers is very important for implementing an omnichannel strategy. Your entire team should be utilizing data to improve the customer experience.
The data will help you understand:
- What devices does your target audience prefer to interact with your brand?
- Which type of message are they engaging more with? ( discounts or promotional offers )
- What kinds of goods and features do they need?
After collecting the data, it is time to convert and process that data into useful information. You will need to deploy an analytics platform that can process all the raw data and provide your team with valuable data to make the necessary corrections to meet the needs of the consumers.
#3 Personalized Marketing
Personalized messages always play a vital role in a business’s growth. It is also known as one-to-one marketing or individual marketing. It is a marketing strategy by which you can use data analysis and digital technology to deliver personalized messages and product offerings to current or prospective customers.
You can segment customers according to
- Demographics: age, gender, marital status, location, etc.
- Shopping behavior: what your customers shop for and how often they shop
#4 Mobile-friendly Marketing
Almost everyone has a smartphone. Marketers must practice mobile-friendly marketing. Nearly three out of every four dollars consumers spend on online purchases is made via mobile, making mobile even more important.
You should design your marketing strategy and campaigns while keeping mobile optimization in mind.
#5 Improve customer service by using AI and chatbots
Think about utilizing AI and chatbots to handle common issues quickly. Customers expect 24/7 service and easily accessible solutions to their problems.
#6 Focus on creating a positive experience for the customer
When creating an omnichannel strategy for your business, put yourself in the customer’s shoes as they navigate the different touchpoints. And then think, Is every channel optimized to put the customer at the heart of the experience?
You should optimize every channel from where the customer can reach you and make sure that every channel should provide the highest customer satisfaction possible!
#7 Test and measure the outcomes
No one can create the best omnichannel marketing strategy in one go. You regularly have to try and test different methods across various channels. The more customer data you gather and analyze, the more you will get insights, eventually improving your omnichannel marketing strategy.
As consumers gain more power, omnichannel strategies have gained popularity across industries, but they are widespread in the following sectors:-
- Automobile Industry
- Retail Industry
- Service Industry
- Healthcare Industry
- Financial Services
Let’s look at the features of the Omnichannel Platform that should have
What Features Make a perfect Omnichannel Marketing Approach?
As we discussed how you could integrate omnichannel marketing into your business, now have a look at some features that make omnichannel marketing perfect for your business.
Some incredible tools provide versatile features.
Ticketing Management: Automate the process of categorizing, prioritizing, and routing incoming tickets based on ticket fields
Customer Support: Manage all support-related communications across multiple channels in one place.
Workforce management: Organise and manage your field service operations from start to finish
Boost your team’s productivity: The built-in features of the helpdesk can automate specific tasks.
Assist customers in helping themselves: Use a knowledge base and forums to create a self-service customer experience.
Flexibility for total customization: Create your workflows, customer portal, agent responsibilities, and more to make the helpdesk uniquely yours.
Data security: Platform protection with enterprise-grade security features and thorough network, system, and regulatory compliance audits
Omnichannel Marketing Platforms
Omnichannel marketing platforms give your customers a great experience with your business. Furthermore, it helps to retain your existing customers. Some of the best Omnichannel Marketing Platforms are:
Freshdesk
Freshdesk Omnichannel is a customer engagement tool that helps you to track and manage all the complaints (tickets) from a single view. You can integrate different channels and give satisfying customer support.
Omnisend
Omnisend is an easy, simple, and powerful tool, especially if you have an e-commerce business. It provides email marketing campaigns support, SMS support, and automation & segmentation.
Zoho
Zoho is an all-in-one tool that your business needs. It provides excellent customer support with CRM, Email, and collaboration.
What are the Benefits of Omnichannel Marketing?
#1 High Brand Loyalty and Customer Retention Rates
Customers are prioritized in an omnichannel experience, so it makes sense that they would want to stick with companies that put them first. Your customers’ brand loyalty and retention rate will increase with higher customer satisfaction.
#2 Boost operational effectiveness
Omnichannel marketing not only boosts operational efficiency but also reduces costs. Businesses only need to collect consumer data once with an omnichannel strategy. When you create an integrated marketing channel, you don’t have to worry about developing and implementing new strategies for each channel.
#3 Increase in Revenue
Increased sales are directly proportional to a revenue boost for your business.
An effective omnichannel marketing strategy will include accurate customer segmentation and personalization. Increased customer engagement will increase conversions and ROI.
#4 The more integrated business
One fantastic advantage of omnichannel is that different channels don’t have to work for their individual goals. You can build a system of different channels working together for one purpose. So, you will have customer service, sales, marketing, and inventory resource planning departments working towards a single goal.
#5 Accurate customer insights
You can gather customer insights from various sources, including cookies, devices, IDs, shopping cart information, social media, mailing lists, point-of-sale (POS) systems, referral programs, and more. The contribution of each channel to the overall objective can also be easily measured. By doing this, you can identify what is broken, fix it, and determine what is working and utilize it.
Omnichannel Vs. Multichannel Vs. Cross-Channel Marketing
We have gone through what omnichannel marketing is and how you can integrate it into your business. Let’s learn about multichannel and cross-channel marketing and how it differs from omnichannel marketing.
Multichannel marketing is the process by which businesses engage with customers through various direct and indirect channels to sell goods and services.
Let’s compare omnichannel marketing, multichannel marketing, and cross-channel and know the differences:-
Omnichannel Marketing:
- All channels (social media, web, mail, etc.) are interlinked.
- The main focus is to maximize the customer experience.
- It includes multiple marketing channels connected to and communicating with one another.
- High technology costs are involved as it is to be integrated across the business systems.
- Customer data is stored integrated and can be accessed with a single click.
Multichannel Marketing:
- All channels are independent and are not interlinked.
- The main focus is to maximize customer engagement.
- It includes multiple marketing channels that are independent and disconnected from one another.
- No such business system integration is required in multichannel marketing.
- Customer data is stored differently for each channel and cannot be accessed easily. To access the data, the user must collect the data first from all the other channels.
Crosschannel Marketing:
- Communication channels are very selectively connected.
- Consistency of communication can be ensured through cross-channel strategies.
- A cross-channel marketing strategy links experiences across different channels within a single campaign.
- Low Involvement of cost.
- Segregating and analyzing customer data is difficult when compared to omnichannel marketing.
Conclusion
Omnichannel Marketing can give your business a kickstart towards customer retention. If you have a small to medium-sized business, you should integrate an omnichannel strategy into your business as it gives you control of your consumers and keeps you closer with them.
Implementing an omnichannel strategy will allow you to improve customer engagement and achieve a better customer satisfaction rate.
