Omnichannel Marketing

Omnichannel marketing is a strategy that requires brands to interact with their audiences across multiple online and offline channels, providing a consistent shopping experience. These channels include social media, websites, apps, email campaigns, chatbots, web push notifications, stores, events, and other means to guide customers through their buyer journey. Omnichannel marketing helps brands gain customer loyalty, establish brand recognition, provide a personalized experience, reduce customer churn, and boost sales.

In this article, you’ll explore the importance, benefits, and statistics of omnichannel marketing and find out how it works and differs from multichannel marketing. Also, we’ll provide 5 best omnichannel marketing tools and some examples of campaigns.

Why is omnichannel marketing important?

According to statistics, 87% of companies assume that omnichannel marketing is essential for the overall success of their brands. Today, you need multiple touchpoints with your customer to close a deal. You can interact with your target audience in-store, on websites and social media, in chatbots, etc.

With omnichannel marketing, you can focus on customer experience rather than communication channels. This type of marketing makes customers a top priority. This means that companies improve the user experience, personalize their offers, and ensure support in-store and online. As a result, customers are satisfied, and companies increase their customer base, strengthen customer loyalty, and boost revenue.

Since most people often check several channels before making a purchase, brands should be ready to ensure a seamless and consistent experience across all possible touchpoints. A positive experience reduces churn and increases loyalty.

Now that you know the reasons for implementing the technique, it’s time to figure out its benefits.

Benefits of Omnichannel Marketing

Omnichannel marketing is gaining popularity because of the numerous benefits it offers both shoppers and sellers. 50% of customers want to have the option to purchase online and pick up in-store. Let’s review the advantages customers can enjoy when a brand adopts an omnichannel marketing strategy. They include:

• seamless customer experience;
• additional shopping options;
• more ways to reach a company and solve problems;
• convenient shopping;
• amazing in-store experience;
• personalized services;
• less time spent trying to contact a company.

More and more companies leverage omnichannel marketing for a reason. With this strategy, your business can get the following benefits:

• brand recognition;
• reduced churn;
• customer loyalty;
• excellent customer support;
• high revenue;
• more purchases and closed deals;
• improved customer lifetime value;
• scaled business growth;
• better customer experience;
• new audience segments;
• higher customer engagement.

When you provide a seamless and convenient shopping experience for your customers across multiple channels, you’ll get many benefits in return. Let’s proceed to the next section to unveil some essential statistics that demonstrate the advantages of omnichannel marketing.

Omnichannel Marketing Statistics

Omnichannel marketing offers numerous benefits for businesses, and we’ll back that up with some compelling statistics. Let’s take a closer look.

• 82% of companies using omnichannel strategy repurpose their content for social media platforms;
• 35% of marketers mentioned effectively incorporating omnichannel personalization;
• 52% of businesses state that interactions with customers have improved thanks to omnichannel marketing;
• 67% of companies stated that implementing omnichannel marketing was essential for their businesses;
• 54% of marketers report higher customer loyalty and retention after incorporating an omnichannel marketing strategy.

Now that you have already explored statistics, it’s time to figure out how omnichannel marketing works.

How does omnichannel marketing work?

In this section, we’ll figure out how omnichannel marketing works so that you can understand the details of this strategy and implement it right later. Let’s dive in.

Implementing omnichannel marketing begins with identifying your target audience and the channels they prefer for shopping and communication with brands. After that, marketers select the most popular channels and integrate them into a strategy.

In an omnichannel strategy, all customer touchpoints are interconnected to create a seamless experience. Marketers gather customer data from various channels, such as websites, mobile apps, social media, email, and physical stores, and store it in a centralized CRM. This data provides a comprehensive view of each customer, allowing companies to deliver personalized, relevant, and consistent experiences across every communication channel.

Now that you understand the basics of an omnichannel marketing strategy, let’s explore the difference between omnichannel and multichannel marketing. While they may seem similar, there are key distinctions.

Omnichannel Marketing vs Multichannel Marketing

Providing the best-in-class experience with a brand that communicates the necessary information to buyers requires time and the right strategy. Marketers need to be creative to strike a chord with shoppers. To choose a strategy, you need to know the key difference between omnichannel and multichannel marketing. Let’s now review each in detail.

Omnichannel marketing is a strategy that places customers at the center of business operations. Brands use multiple channels and personalized messaging to effectively lead prospects down the sales funnel. The strategy implies providing customers with a seamless and consistent experience. To attain this goal, brands use different channels. For instance, a user who views products on a website might later encounter targeted ads with the same products on platforms like Instagram, Facebook, or other websites.

Multichannel marketing is a strategy that entails a brand delivering the same message across several channels. This approach involves sharing identical content, promotions, offers, and news on all platforms. However, it does not necessarily ensure a consistent experience for leads and customers across these channels.

So, omnichannel marketing aims to ensure a seamless and consistent experience that helps lead a prospect down your sales funnel. In contrast, multichannel marketing aims to expand a brand’s reach and attract new audiences.

Now that you understand the difference between the strategies and know for sure that omnichannel marketing is right for you, we invite you to explore the trends that will help you with it.

5 Omnichannel Marketing Trends

Omnichannel marketing is constantly evolving, with new trends emerging regularly. To ensure effective business operations and communication with customers, it’s essential to stay updated on these trends. We invite you to explore the 5 main trends many brands implement for better user experience.

• AI-powered personalization. More and more companies use artificial intelligence to provide as personalized an approach and experience as possible. It analyzes customer behavior, preferences, and buying patterns and delivers relevant messages across various channels. With the help of AI-powered chatbots, you can send prospects product recommendations and dynamic content personalized for different customer journeys.
• Voice search. The active use of Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri has a big impact on the way clients search for brands and interact with them. Companies change their approaches and strategies to reach customers. Many businesses optimize their content for voice search queries and allow obtaining support using voice.
• Augmented reality. Virtual reality is increasingly popular, particularly among clothing brands, for enhancing the customer experience. This technology allows businesses to enable customers to visualize products before making a purchase. Virtual try-ons and tours help prospects assess whether a product meets their needs.
• Mobile-first design. The growing number of smartphone users and their active use for various purposes, including shopping, is prompting brands to optimize their websites. This can be achieved by creating simple, user-friendly navigation or developing dedicated apps. When prospects can effortlessly browse through a company's website or app and explore products, they are more likely to make a purchase.
• Reward programs. Many companies implement loyalty programs across various marketing channels to encourage customer retention. Loyal clients can earn and redeem rewards through multiple platforms, including websites, physical stores, and mobile apps. When customers seamlessly get their rewards, they are more likely to make repeat purchases and enjoy the perks.

Now that you have some trends in mind allowing you to improve customer experience and satisfaction, it’s time to reveal how to build an omnichannel marketing strategy for your business.

How to build an omnichannel marketing strategy?

Before fully embracing and integrating omnichannel marketing into your business, it’s crucial to understand how to develop an effective strategy. We invite you to explore our detailed step-by-step guide to help you create and implement a successful omnichannel marketing approach.

1. Understand your target audience. Conducting thorough research on the key characteristics of your ideal customer—such as their preferences, behavior, and the channels they commonly use—is essential. Utilize various forms of research, including analytics, surveys, and customer feedback, to gain a clear understanding of your target audience’s journey across multiple touchpoints.
2. Outline customer journey map. The next step implies identifying the main stages of the customer journey and understanding how customers move through each stage using different channels. These channels might cover social media platforms, messengers, websites, email, physical stores, etc. By outlining customer journey maps and each touchpoint, you can discover how customers interact with your brand and their next steps. This way, you can develop effective journeys, encouraging conversions.
3. Gather all information in one centralized system. After collecting the data, it's essential to store it on a secure platform, such as a customer management system. This lets you provide your team with the necessary information to make well-informed marketing and sales decisions. With access to a comprehensive view of customer interactions across channels, marketers can deliver personalized experiences tailored to customer behaviors, preferences, and actions.
4. Integrate all the necessary communication channels. By connecting all your communication channels—such as messengers, social media networks, and email marketing—you ensure that information is effectively utilized to deliver a consistent experience across all platforms. To streamline operations and reduce team workload, consider using marketing tools, sales platforms, and robust customer support systems. This approach allows you to monitor every customer interaction and response, helping you refine your strategies and achieve higher conversion rates.
5. Ensure consistent messaging. Develop messages that align with your branding and brand voice across all communication channels. Consistency is key, whether your channels are online or offline. Tailoring messaging for each channel helps reinforce brand recognition and ensures your brand remains at the top of customers' minds.
6. Apply personalization. Leverage the benefits of collected customer insights and automation tools to create personalized experiences. Use these insights to offer personalized recommendations, relevant content, and targeted messages. By delivering timely offers based on specific customer actions, you can encourage purchases and enhance overall satisfaction.
7. Provide mobile-first design. When developing an omnichannel strategy, you should ensure that customers can reach you through the most convenient smartphone channels. Since more and more clients use their mobile devices to search for products and shop for them, consider adapting to these preferences to stay competitive.
8. Track and evaluate the performance. To assess the effectiveness of your strategy, you need to keep an eye on the key performance indicators, including engagement, conversion rates, customer retention, and sales. By using analytics tools, you’ll be able to monitor all the interactions, your strategy’s pros and cons, successful sales, and many more.

Now that you have a clear understanding of the steps to develop an omnichannel marketing strategy, it's time to review the tools that will help you execute these steps seamlessly and efficiently. Let’s dive in.

There is a wide range of services when it comes to omnichannel marketing. Yet, not all of them work for all types of businesses and industries. We’ve compiled a list of the top 5 omnichannel marketing tools for you to consider.

SendPulse

SendPulse is an excellent all-in-one marketing platform that allows companies to seamlessly integrate email campaigns, chatbots, web push notifications, marketing automation, and SMS into their strategies and ensure enhanced transitions between the channels. After incorporating Automation 360, you can instantly deliver welcome emails, abandoned cart reminders, and order confirmations as soon as customers interact with your brand.

With the service’s personalization and segmentation features, you’ll be able to divide customers into groups and send email campaigns, messages in chatbots, web push notifications, and SMS that resonate with their needs, problems, and interests. With SendPulse’s help, you can schedule campaigns and deliver timely messages and offers based on customer behavior.

Pricing:

• free plan: 500 subscribers, 5,000 emails, 5 flows, 1 event, and 50 elements in Automation 360 monthly;
• paid plan: 500 subscribers, unlimited emails, 10 flows, 10 events, and 70 elements in Automation 360 for $6.40 monthly, billed annually.

Klaviyo

Klaviyo is an omnichannel platform focusing on personalized email and SMS campaigns and web forms, allowing brands to establish trusting relationships with their audiences. Its powerful segmentation feature enables businesses to group customers based on their preferences, age, location, needs, challenges, etc. This way, you can deliver relevant content resonating with prospects’ interests and driving higher engagement.

The software’s automation provides users with 60+ pre-built flows and ensures omnichannel experiences using email, SMS, and push notifications. Its flows are fully customizable, meaning you can use the necessary customer data to build the sequences.

Pricing:

• free plan: 500 email sends and 150 SMS/MMS credits monthly;
• paid plan: 251 - 500 active profiles, from 5,000 email sends, mobile push notifications, and 150 SMS/MMS credits for $20 monthly.

Brevo

Brevo is an omnichannel marketing platform offering a variety of tools to reach customers without any coding skills. The service enables businesses of all sizes and industries to effectively integrate email, SMS, CRM, WhatsApp, push notifications, and live chat to provide seamless communication and support to each prospect and client.

With Brevo’s automation, you can deliver welcome emails, anniversary emails, or confirmation emails as responses to specific user activity. By developing a personalized series of emails, you can onboard new clients, re-engage existing customers, upsell, and cross-sell additional products. This will result in better customer relationships and higher conversion rates.

Pricing:

free plan: 300 emails daily, email templates, transactional emails, SMS and WhatsApp campaigns;
paid plan: from 5,000 emails, no daily sending limit and Brevo logo (add-on), basic reporting, and analytics for $9 monthly.

ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is a platform empowering you to coordinate all your marketing channels using one toolkit. With the service’s help, you can reach your customers through the preferred channels including email campaigns, SMS, dynamic content, marketing automation, social media ads, and more. Moreover, after each interaction, you’ll be able to note its details in ActiveCampaign’s CRM for further communication with clients.

Its AI-powered automation builder allows you to create automated email and SMS campaigns, leading your prospects through all the stages of the customer journey. By setting triggers, adding your touchpoints, and scheduling your campaigns, you’ll be able to map out the customer experience, which will help customers take the desired action.

Pricing:

free plan: 14-day free trial;
paid plan: 1,000 contacts, 3 users, unlimited automation actions, web forms, A/B testing for $79 monthly.

Omnisend

Omnisend is an eCommerce platform enabling businesses to send emails and SMS, deliver web push notifications, and create marketing automation, improving engagement and sales. It allows you to seamlessly integrate several channels and provide customers with personalized experience through the preferred communication platforms.

By using pre-built automation scenarios for the welcome, abandoned cart, and post-purchase emails, you’ll be able to reduce the workload on your marketers and ensure consistency across all channels. Besides, you can segment your customers and deliver messages based on their campaign activity or shopping behavior. It will help you provide subscribers with timely offers.

Pricing:

• free plan: 250 contacts, 500 emails, and 500 web push notifications monthly;
• paid plan: 500 contacts, 6,000 emails, and unlimited web push notifications for $16.

Whether you use one of these tools or not for your business, you can come across several problems. You’ll find them in the section below.

Challenges of Omnichannel Marketing

While omnichannel marketing is an effective approach to reaching customers, it comes with its own set of challenges that you should be aware of. We’ll review the main points in this section.

• Need to constantly adapt to changing customer behavior. Since customer expectations, preferences, and behaviors frequently change, companies need to adjust their omnichannel strategy continuously. Managing this can be challenging, especially for businesses that use multiple communication channels. This complexity can lead to increased workloads for teams and additional tasks, potentially causing operational strain.
• Integrating the right tools can be overwhelming for teams. When choosing the right tools for omnichannel marketing, including CRM, marketing automation, and analytics, marketers should focus on platforms that offer seamless integration to avoid potential issues. Without proper integration, teams might face challenges like irrelevant data, ineffective campaigns, and inconsistent customer experiences. To streamline the process, consider using an all-in-one marketing solution that provides comprehensive tools for smooth integration and effective management.
• Content irrelevance. Since customers interact with a brand using different channels, it sometimes can be difficult to map their customer journey and identify marketers’ next actions. As a result, companies may struggle to identify the correct stage of the customer journey and might share irrelevant content or offers. However, leveraging analytics and AI can help prevent this issue by providing insights into customer behavior and ensuring that the right content and offers are delivered at the appropriate stages.
• Significant amount of resources. Implementing omnichannel marketing can be challenging for startups and medium-sized companies due to the significant resources required, including time, budget, and personnel. Effectively managing multiple channels and promptly identifying issues can strain these resources.

Now that you’re aware of the challenges associated with implementing omnichannel marketing, it’s time to explore best practices that can help you navigate these complexities and streamline your strategy.

Powerful Omnichannel Marketing Best Practices to Follow

There are numerous techniques to implement when considering omnichannel marketing for your business. We’ve listed the most effective ones below.

1. Develop a single customer profile. Collect information from all the available channels to create a comprehensive profile, ensuring you provide customers with a seamless customer experience. Consider using CRM to consolidate all information and monitor interactions, needs, and preferences.
2. Maintain consistent branding. Consistency helps make your brand experience recognizable and differentiates you from the competition. Ensure that the tone and visuals of your content remain consistent across social media platforms, messaging apps, and email campaigns.
3. Apply audience segmentation. Before delivering content, divide your customers into groups based on their behavior, preferences, and demographics. This will help you provide only relevant content and offers to each group, improving customer satisfaction and the opportunity for conversion.
4. Personalize experience across channels. Personalization drives higher engagement, as people are more likely to interact with content that aligns with their interests. Use data such as browsing behavior, purchase history, and preferences to understand customer needs and challenges. This enables you to offer personalized product recommendations, relevant email campaigns, and targeted ads.
5. Combine online and offline channels. Since customers can use both online and offline channels, you need to ensure seamless integration of these touchpoints. This approach facilitates effortless transitions for customers between different channels. For example, allowing customers to place an order online and pick it up in-store bridges the gap between online and offline purchases, enhancing the overall customer experience.
6. Incorporate omnichannel support. This gives customers space to choose the most convenient way of communicating with them. By offering live chat, email, phone, or in-store support, you gain a competitive advantage and can more effectively resolve customer issues. Additionally, implementing an AI-powered chatbot allows you to automatically address FAQs around the clock, further enhancing customer satisfaction. When using SendPulse, you can create chatbots for WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook, and Instagram and seamlessly provide help and assistance 24/7 without human involvement.
7. Consider developing cross-channel rewarding programs. An omnichannel rewards program allows you to appreciate customer loyalty and encourage repeat purchases. By designing a program that integrates across all your channels, customers can redeem their rewards through online stores, mobile apps, and physical locations. This approach boosts engagement with your brand and fosters word-of-mouth promotion.
8. Use augmented reality. Consider incorporating virtual reality to improve the shopping experience with your brand. Online try-ons and product visualizations will help customers find their perfect products without having to visit physical stores and postpone their purchasing decisions. This experience should be available across multiple channels, including website and app so that customers can access it on different devices.
9. Take advantage of real-time data for higher engagement. Use real-time data to instantly act upon customer interactions. It will help you deliver timely and relevant offers that resonate with your customer’s needs and problems at the perfect moment. Real-time analytics will help you send personalized email campaigns, targeted ads, and relevant web push notifications based on customer actions and interactions with your website or app.
10. Use AI for a better customer experience. By leveraging AI, you can enhance customer experience across multiple channels, including support, email campaigns, social media platforms, websites, etc. With its help, you’ll be able to provide customers with highly personalized experiences, including tailored recommendations and dynamic content adjusting to customer journeys. To provide seamless customer support 24/7, you can use AI-powered chatbots. They will help you respond to common questions in seconds at any time of the day and week.

Now that you know some effective ways to implement an omnichannel marketing strategy, it’s time to see these tips in real life by reviewing examples from brands. So, let’s start with the Starbucks Rewards campaign.

Eye-Grabbing Examples of Omnichannel Marketing Campaigns

There are many amazing examples of brands that provide consumers with the best omnichannel experience. We’ll review different companies’ campaigns to see how the strategy works. So, let’s grab some inspiration.

Starbucks Rewards

The renowned coffeehouse chain encourages customers to use its app, designed to cater to the growing trend of mobile ordering. The app offers multiple features, including the ability to pre-order and pay at select locations, streamlining the customer experience and enhancing convenience.

You can pay for your coffee with a credit card, cash, or a special Starbucks Card. This way, you no longer need to wait in a long queue after a hard day at work just to get a cup of your favorite coffee. Customers can order in advance and enjoy their evening with coffee. Moreover, they can even be rewarded for choosing the brand’s beverages.

Amazon

Amazon synchronizes customers’ carts in the app and website if they are signed in and offers support via clients’ preferred communication channels. Amazon Prime members have no worries when shopping with Amazon, as they can use any medium to access the benefits of this membership.

Spotify

Spotify focuses on meeting listeners' needs and ensuring a seamless experience across various devices. Whether using the web app, desktop app, or mobile app, users benefit from synchronization features. This means that a song playing on a mobile device will also appear on the desktop app, providing a continuous listening experience.

Spotify reveals in detail how to synchronize listening across multiple devices below.

You are the one to decide whether an omnichannel strategy is a good fit for your company. However, you should always remember that with personalized messages and a seamless user experience, you’ll always be one step ahead of your competitors and one step closer to your audience.

Last Updated: 16.10.2024