Marketing is getting harder, and the whole landscape is more competitive. But, unfortunately, it costs more to run a marketing campaign – not less for a marketing department. So it would help if you had solutions, strategies, and tactics working together to generate revenue, leads, and a place in the future for your business. Check out a beginners guide to omnichannel marketing, and see what it is and its benefits and tools.
Omnichannel marketing is the current watermark for successful marketing teams. So, check out how you can leverage it for your website and business.
What is omnichannel marketing, and why do you need it?
Harvard Business Review and a large US retail company conducted a 14-month study to understand customer buying behavior. They surveyed 46,000 shoppers and found the following:
- 7% of customers were online shoppers only
- 20% of them were store-only buyers
- 73% of them used a couple of channels all through their purchasing journey
The study also revealed that the more channels customers used, the more valuable they were to retailers. For example, the study found that customers who used more than 4 channels spent 9% more in-store than those who used a single channel.
The writing on the wall was clear – omnichannel customer experiences are no longer an option. Instead, retailers are reimagining the customer journey to attract and retain customers through positive experiences across multiple touchpoints. And had to find a new way to maintain it.
With the emergence of new marketing channels, it is time for retailers to shift their focus from traditional marketing to omnichannel marketing strategies.
Omnichannel Marketing Beginners Guide: What is Omnichannel Marketing?
Omnichannel marketing is about building a brand presence and creating positive experiences across multiple channels –Online (website, app and social media, email, SMS, WhatsApp) and offline (retailers, events, call centers)… And continuously throughout the customer journey.
It’s important to note the words “positive” and “seamless,” as 67% of customers cite a poor customer experience as the reason for churn. So, on the other hand, if you want to attract and retain customers. In this case, it’s important to take your omnichannel marketing strategy seriously and enhance it to provide your customers with a positive experience throughout their journey.
Omnichannel Marketing Beginners Guide: Why is omnichannel marketing important?
Omnichannel marketing is essential as it helps create positive customer experiences at every stage of the lifecycle, reduce churn, and promote and build a positive brand reputation. Let’s look at an example. Imagine you’re tired after a long day at work and want a cup of coffee before heading home. We know your favorite coffee shop is packed at night, and you don’t have time to wait in line. Wouldn’t it be nice if your coffee shop had the option to pre-order coffee using an app? That’s exactly what Starbucks did. Order a result, and ordering paying has become easier for customers. In addition, mobile payments account for 29% of transactions. As a result, Starbucks improved the customer experience and increased sales through omnichannel technology.
Omnichannel Marketing Beginners Guide: How to create a seamless omnichannel experience?
To create a seamless omnichannel experience, start by deeply understanding your customer (probably more than your best friend). Starbucks, for example, understood the customer’s pain point, namely their reluctance to stand in line, even if they are tempted to reach for a cup of coffee, and used it to create an effective omnichannel experience.
A deep understanding of your customers means looking at the types of platforms they typically shop on, their buying behavior, their challenges while shopping, How they interact with brands at each touchpoint, and what devices they use to shop. This data will help you identify the right touchpoints and focus on strengthening and connecting them to make the perfect, personalized experience for your customers. It will also help you to identify common problems customers face and create a viable solution for them.
What defines a good omnichannel customer experience
Omnichannel Marketing Beginners Guide: How to build the perfect omnichannel marketing strategy?
First, let’s see how Disney created a perfect omnichannel marketing strategy to improve people’s experience at its theme parks. Through its website, mobile apps, and Magicbands and cards, Disney has made it easy for guests to book their stay, check tour times, book tickets, etc., without standing in a long line. But, of course, to create an omnichannel experience like this, you must have a perfect omnichannel marketing strategy. Here’s what you can do:
Plan the customer experience
Understand your channels and their behavior across channels, and create a detailed plan on how you want the experience to flow across all touchpoints.
Use data as a foundation when strategizing
With the help of CRM data, social listening data, and online customer research behavior, you will know how your customer behaves and also can create a solution to meet their challenges. You can even reduce the ch. This allows you to create personalized trips for each type of customer.
Find the Right Context
The most important part of any omnichannel marketing strategy is context. And if you send the wrong message to the wrong audience at the wrong time, your users will lose engagement. So, ensure the context of your message is relevant to your users, and send your messages to the channels where your users are most active and interacting.
Choose the right marketing automation tools
Use the right omnichannel marketing tools to take your strategy from concept to execution. Do a thorough analysis before choosing the right one. Make your organization customer-centric: This is an important step. Your strategy and marketing tools are useless if your employees aren’t trained to deliver a consistent experience for your customers.
Now you know omnichannel marketing tools and how to create the perfect strategy. Let’s dig deeper to learn how to implement it in your organization.
Omnichannel Marketing Beginners Guide: Omnichannel marketing use cases
You can use omnichannel marketing in a variety of industries, such as:
- Telecom: You can use omnichannel marketing to benefit the telecom industry to allow customers to pay bills, top up or receive notifications about new releases. MoEngage, for example, helped a telecom company implement an omnichannel self-service application to drive engagement and increase revenue. As a result, the self-service app improved the company’s revenue by 20%.
- Travel: From reminding passengers about their next flight a few days before their trip to sending them the best deals on hotels and also restaurants. The travel industry can capitalize on omnichannel marketing throughout the customer journey.
- Banks: Banks can use omnichannel marketing to remind customers of upcoming charges and provide up-to-date credit and debit balances for transactions. You can also use omnichannel marketing to announce new product launches and reduce the time it takes to open new inquiries and new accounts.
- For example, a bank in southern Europe ensured that there was no interruption in the purchase of credit cards. Offering the customer a seamless experience across different devices and channels. As a result, the client can complete the request in 3 minutes instead of 25 minutes.
- Healthcare: As a highly regulated industry, healthcare can slowly adopt omnichannel technology. However, some healthcare companies have adopted it to provide a superior patient experience. For example, remind patients of doctor appointments, allow access to reports on your device and provide daily health tips to improve engagement.
How to use omnichannel marketing strategies in your eCommerce business
While we have looked at some use cases where and can use omnichannel marketing, e-commerce is a business where omnichannel marketing plays a crucial role.
In its ‘Global Retail Trends 2019’ report, KPMG predicted that 2019 would be a transformative year for the retail industry. And from hyper-personalization to the rise of voice technology, the retail industry is full of news.
In a hypercompetitive business like e-commerce, your customers have many options. You must cut through the noise to acquire, engage, and retain them on your site. And also can only do this through a positive customer experience.
You can build strong relationships with your customers with these seven omnichannel retail strategies:
- Review your existing marketing strategy: Monitor all your channels and consider ways to improve your existing strategy. Think like your customer when working on your omnichannel retail marketing strategy.
- Analyze how customers interact with your brand: Pay close attention to how your customers behave online and offline and how they make purchasing decisions.
- Segment your audience intelligently: Customer segmentation is better defined. Your omnichannel marketing strategy becomes more effective.
- Customize the content of each channel: There are several ways to target your customer – from sending SMS and emails to sending push notifications. However, before targeting all channels, spend some time creating a custom message for each channel.
- Don’t forget to redirect: a customer may not buy from you in the first instance. By showing them relevant banner ads across different platforms, such as social media sites, you can create a top-notch recall, increasing the chances of conversion.
- Leverage your automation tools: A marketing automation omnichannel benefits tool lets you intelligently segment your audience, personalize messages, schedule your campaign, and measure your effectiveness. Leverage it to the maximum possible level.
- Test, measure, and repeat: Always do an A/B test and measure the result to know what is working and is not.
Omnichannel marketing tools
There’s a lot to think about in your omnichannel marketing strategy benefits and tools. However, once you’ve decided it’s the right approach for your business, you must find marketing software that lets you implement it correctly without hassle.
And built a platform like Omnisend for e-commerce benefits and for brands that want to explore all that omnichannel marketing has.
It presents the key elements needed to make this happen, including:
- Multiple channels to serve your customers wherever they prefer:
- email campaigns
- SMS marketing
- Web push notifications
- Social media, via Audience Sync for Google and Facebook Ads
- Intuitive and customized segmentation for e-commerce
- Marketing automation to deliver messages instantly based on a subscriber’s activity, with the option to combine multiple channels in the workflow
- Data reports to analyze your efforts
As you begin building your omnichannel marketing strategy, we recommend exploring resources such as the following for deeper insight and additional inspiration:
- How to create an omnichannel customer journey
- Missed opportunities in your omnichannel marketing
Try omnichannel marketing today without any risk. Get started with Omnisend’s features for free and discover how you can give your subscribers a consistent and relevant experience with more control over your marketing channels.
Conclusion
After reading this beginners guide to omnichannel marketing, knowing what it is, its benefits, and its tools, we know that Omnichannel is not a gimmick to get you to buy a certain marketing technology. Instead, it’s a whole data use strategy that brings your customer closer to your brand, no matter where they start. Therefore, investing in omnichannel can only benefit factor for your business.
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