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Any successful omnichannel marketing strategy is driven by a deep understanding of your customers. Creating a flawless customer experience is an important aspect of your strategy and what allows you to create that for them is proper practices around your data.
Customers need to be shown that you know them well. By using the data at your disposal you should be identifying what makes them tick and produce content or offers that keep them interested in you.
Customer behaviour has evolved in line with the advances in technology. The greater the service businesses can offer, the more it is expected. That means identifying what they’re interested in, creating relevant content and putting it in front of them via the correct channels.
Competition is fierce so to attract or retain an audience you need to approach things differently. And make sure your customer knows about it. Creating an omnichannel strategy can help businesses achieve this while staying as relevant to their customer as possible.
For it to work, every aspect has to be aligned. Failure to do so can result in a disjointed or irritating customer experience.
Creating your Omnichannel Strategy
Setting up an omnichannel marketing strategy is similar to any other strategy. It may be slightly different in areas, but it doesn’t need to be overly complicated. You just need to understand the nuances involved and how it all comes together at the end.
Use Your Data
Any strategy you put together should be built on the foundations of your data. The quality of your data plays a big role in how strong those foundations will be.
How and where you store your data is important in putting together an omnichannel strategy.
Many companies fall into the trap of operating disparate systems, each with their own databases. While each system performs adequately on its own, it’s impossible to create a working omnichannel campaign because you don’t have a clear customer view.
Siloed data is also more difficult to manage, and impossible to glean insights from. If you’re not already using one, you should deploy a CDP. Consolidating data will give you a holistic understanding of your customer in a Single Customer View. Which, in the long run, will provide you with more granular insights and a deeper understanding of them.
Once you have this information available, you can start to create messages and campaigns that resonate with your audience. Your job is to add value to the customer experience through your messaging and content.
The more data you ingest and understand, the more value you can add. Using transactional, product and behavioural data makes for a much richer campaign and shows off your deep customer understanding. By adding this additional value to your communications, you should see your engagement and click-through rates increase as a result.
Whatever goals you set out, data is integral in helping you achieve them.
Segment Your Customers
Segmenting your data means you can understand what campaigns will work for certain groups. This plays a meaningful role in achieving your goals.
Tailored communications is expected by 64% of consumers. To provide that experience you need to segment your customers. This is where the quality of your data starts to show its worth and allows for deeper segments.
The deeper the segmentation the more personalised your campaigns can become.
There are three main elements you need to keep in mind when it comes to carrying out segmentation: conditions, attributes, and events.
Conditions
Think of conditions as the reasons why you want to put certain customers into a segment. From then you can use your data to identify who falls into which segment using the conditions you have set out.
In essence, conditions can be anything you want them to be.
And you don’t have to go too granular with them either. Concentrating on the type of device your customers are using, their general behaviour, or the source they came from is a good place to start. But it really is up to you and how you want to set it out for your business.
Attributes
When it comes to customer segmentation, attributes are one of the most important aspects to include. They are “tags” that you apply to a particular profile.
Again it is up to you to choose these attributes and options for them are vast. But they should be much more descriptive than your conditions. Generally, you will see businesses concentrate on:
- Demographics – age, gender, geographic location
- Behaviours – Number of purchases, pages viewed, downloaded or viewed content
- Psychographic – Opinions, lifestyle, etc
They are then used to segment your customers even further for micro-targeting.
Events
Campaigns that you create are usually launched to users after an event occurs. You can use them to either include or exclude customers from a segment. Any activity a customer carries out on your website or app can qualify as an event.
Segmentation makes it much easier to build out campaigns that are relevant and add value to your customers’ experience with you. Not just when it comes to omnichannel marketing strategies, but any strategy you put together.
Personalise Your Messages
91% of consumers are more likely to shop with a business that presents relevant offers and products to them. A consolidated and segmented customer database makes delivering on that expectation possible.
When it comes to communicating with customers, personalising your messages will help you stand out a lot more.
Your segmented data should help to craft your message and refine your targeting.
The messages should demonstrate to your customers how well you understand them and their needs. Doing this in the right way will nudge them towards taking the next step to converting.
Choose the Right Channels
Customers are more likely to respond to a business who communicates with them via their preferred channel. Without gathering zero party data it may not always be clear what that channel may be.
Drill into your data to identify how customers come to your website or what marketing communications they’ve engaged with in the past. You can then split test to determine best results.
67% of customers will engage through multiple channels before completing a transaction. This affords you some leighway when determining which channel works best for each of your customers.
The most common channels would be your website, email, push notifications, SMS, and social media, paid search and offline.
You need to understand where your customers are more likely to hang out so your messaging gets seen. .
Customers are present across a panoply of platforms, each serving a different purpose to the user. This means you need to tailor your messaging so your content or ad resonates within that setting.
B2B businesses aren’t limited to LinkedIn. It’s perfectly reasonable to advertise on Instagram but you need to change the way you communicate as the medium is far more informal and highly visual.
But only go down that road if you’ve got the data to suggest it’ll work.
Choosing the right channel and the right messaging matters. If you don’t get it right then it will look like you don’t care about your customers.
Have a Mobile Optimised Website
The last thing you want is to drive a customer to your website only to bounce straight away.
A poor user experience will turn your customers away from your site. It only takes users 0.3 seconds to decide if they like the look of a website. With customer expectations so high you can’t afford to make mistakes. And there are few things more annoying than trying to navigate through a website that’s not optimised for mobile.
By the end of 2021, mobile devices generated 54.4% of global website traffic. It’s also been found that 50% of mobile users would rather browse on a mobile website than download an app.
This shows that having a mobile optimised website and giving your customers a satisfying experience with you wherever they go is of high importance.
Your mobile check out process plays a significant role too. Optimising it means customers won’t get frustrated when trying to purchase your goods or services. Failure to provide a seamless checkout experience will lead to a lot of abandoned carts.
A fully optimised, mobile friendly website means that you won’t lose as many potential customers. Sales will be more stable and the customer experience will remain at a high level.
Things like this can go a long way as part of an omnichannel marketing strategy.
Continue to Test
An omnichannel strategy becomes a success for businesses when you can deliver a totally unified customer experience. It is also one of the most efficient ways of communicating with your customer as you only need to collect their data once.
Always keep in mind that omnichannel marketing isn’t all about increasing sales. Of course, that is usually the main goal of any business. But it is much more about keeping your customers engaged and retained. 89% of customers are retained through omnichannel marketing. So, it is well worth investing your time and resources into.
However, the creation of an omnichannel strategy is not a one time thing. There is always room for improvement. Your campaigns might perform really well the first time round, but if you don’t change anything then that performance will decrease over time.
Consistent a/b testing and taking learnings as you go is what turns a good campaign into a great one.
If you want to learn more about creating omnichannel experiences and retaining your customers, book a demo today with a member of our team.
