Components of an Omnichannel Marketing Strategy

Understanding your customers’ wants and needs isn’t the most difficult task. Once you collect and store your data properly you should be able to dig out some really beneficial insights. But applying that data to an omnichannel marketing strategy can come with its blockers.

For plenty of businesses, an omnichannel strategy can be somewhat new to them. It requires a greater level of integration and planning than most businesses are used to. Which means infrastructure is as important as execution. It’s challenging knowing how to put together something without fully knowing what to include.

The main thing to keep in mind is that it’s all about making sure everything is working together nicely. Like an artisanal time piece, all the cogs need to perfectly mesh and move in sync. Once you understand that, putting all the pieces for your strategy together becomes clearer.

Setting Up Your Strategy

One of the challenges associated with omnichannel marketing is knowing where to start. There are common mistakes that trips marketing teams up. Lumping all channels together and pushing out one message being one.

Conversely formulating a smaller strategy for each channel and packaging it as omnichannel marketing, doesn’t work either. 

Omnichannel marketing is about harmonising your message to create a seamless customer experience. Not standardising it. 

Omnichannel strategies are very similar to any other strategies you may have put together in the past. It’s just about understanding the nuances and how – like the plot of a good book – how it all ties together in the end. 

Data and Omnichannel Marketing

Like any strategy you build up, it all begins with how you treat your data. It is a vital component that informs the strategy and allows you to deploy campaigns that meet the strategy’s objectives. 

You should think about consolidating your customer data. Creating a Single Customer View will provide you with granular insights to better understand your customers.

Creating messages that your customers will take notice of requires a deep understanding of your customers. Your messages need to deliver value so customers not only open them but take action too.

The more types of data you can include, the better. Pulling in transactional, product and behavioural data makes for much richer campaigns that show off how well you understand your customers. Your engagement and click through rates will certainly see the benefits from its use.

Data is your best friend when it comes to devising an omnichannel marketing strategy and will help you achieve the goals you set out. You just need to treat it well to get the most out of it.

Segmentation

A key component of your data management is segmentation. Without it businesses are reduced to batch and blast campaigns. You cannot go down the route of creating one size fits all campaigns and expect it to drive towards your strategy goals.

64% of customers expect a tailored communication experience when dealing with businesses. To engage your customers, meeting their wants and needs is a must, and that comes through segmentation.

Your data and its quality plays a significant role when it comes to segmenting customers. Customer segmentation relies on accurate first-party data, whether that’s information on the customer’s behaviour, spend or product searches.

When it comes to putting customers into groups, you should concentrate on three core elements: conditions, attributes, and events.

Once your segments are put together, it will make it easier to build campaigns with a specific audience in mind. 

Personalisation

Personalising your messages for your audiences is an absolute must when it comes to communicating with customers. It will make life a lot harder when it comes to achieving whatever goals you have set out for your team if you don’t.

Again, using your data to inform your messaging means that your communications will be far more effective. You will know what to say to the customer and how to say it. 

You should always look for ways to show your customer that you know them on a more personal level. Understanding their behavioural and transactional data means that you can deliver messages based on their previous activity. Messages that will entice them to career on to the next step you want them to.

91% of consumers say they are more likely to shop with businesses who provide relevant offers and recommendations. When it comes to your omnichannel marketing strategy, you can send these offers out on channels of your choice.

Have a mobile friendly website

Trying to navigate through a website that doesn’t suit mobile devices is incredibly annoying. Customer expectations are high so they simply won’t attempt to navigate your site if it offers a poor user experience. 

6.4 billion smartphone users in the world and 69% use their devices to make purchases. So it’s something you need to get right.  Similarly, make sure that the purchasing process on your mobile device is fully optimised otherwise you’ll be dealing with a lot of customers who have abandoned that process.

A fully optimised, mobile friendly website means that potential sales aren’t lost and the overall experience for the user is of high quality. If it’s something you haven’t considered, you should make it part of your strategy.

Identify ideal channels

Using your channels for customer communication isn’t an exact science. The mistake most businesses make is sending the exact same message through each channel. Not every channel attracts the same audience. You need to keep that in mind when it comes to using them.

The first thing to understand is what your estate of channels looks like. In other words, what channels do you currently have that you can communicate through. The usual channels would be your website, email, push notifications, SMS, and social media, paid search and offline.

What comes next is the slightly trickier part. And that is understanding what type of customers hang out where. For instance, B2C eCommerce businesses’ customers would generally hang out on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. Whereas a B2B eCommerce business would usually have customers hanging out on LinkedIn. These are two different types of customers who need to be communicated with in different ways.

Sending the same message down all these different channels won’t land. It gives off the impression that you don’t actually care about how you interact with your customers.

Identify what channels are available to you, where your audiences are within those channels, and tailor your messages from there.

Don’t underestimate the importance of customer support

For 33% of consumers, it takes only one bad experience with a business to drive them away. This is where your customer support system comes in and shows off its importance to our business.

Customers can be volatile beings at times. You need to make sure you have the teams and systems in place to handle their issues in a way that keeps them with you.

Being able to provide multiple channels comes into play in this instance as well. Just like you need to communicate with your customers in different ways, they should also have the same option. You should have email support, social media support, and phone support at the very least. If you want to give it a more personal touch, allow customers to write you a letter if they are so inclined.

Different scenarios will pop up, and some customers will be angrier than others. But, train your teams well and have the right processes in place, your customers should come out happy on the other side.

It may not be an obvious element to an omnichannel marketing strategy, but it’s important for customer retention.

Why Omnichannel Works

Omnichannel marketing strategies work because it allows you to deliver a totally unified customer experience. You acknowledge previous customer engagements through different touchpoints and deliver the right message at the right time. And because you only need to collect your customer’s data once, it’s one of the most efficient ways to communicate.

Through your omnichannel efforts, the customers you retain are highly likely to purchase from you more often. Engaging through single channels won’t give you the same results. As well as this, average order value should begin to increase too.

Whatever your strategy may be, the end goal of most businesses is to constantly increase their level of sales. 

Omnichannel customers tend to spend about 10% more than single channel customers, according to the Harvard Business Review. These customers will have interacted with you through multiple channels, meaning they are more engaged with your business. As with any strategy, you need patience. It may take some time, but it’s very likely your sales will increase.

But sales isn’t the be all and end all. An average of 89% of customers are retained because of omnichannel marketing. Keeping customers engaged and retained is an important aspect of running a successful business.

As with any campaign and strategy, some things will work and some things won’t. Don’t be afraid to make changes as you see fit. Learn from the mistakes you have made along the way and use them to improve your efforts.

If you want to learn more about creating omnichannel experiences and retaining your customers, book a demo today with a member of our team.