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Every interaction with your customer is an opportunity to spark a lasting relationship. But for brands to win customer loyalty in today’s highly competitive marketing landscape, where the rules of engagement are constantly shifting, many are turning toward the world of omnichannel marketing to make their mark.
Just as an orchestra blends individual instruments to create a harmonious whole, omnichannel marketing weaves disparate channels and platforms into a seamless and unified customer experience. And it’s the secret weapon behind the growth of leading brands like Disney, Mailchimp, Target, Starbucks, and more. This is because it’s incredibly effective for extending their reach and generating revenue.
By implementing a multi-channel campaign strategy, businesses can experience a substantial increase in their purchase rate, with those using three or more channels seeing a staggering 287% higher rate compared to those using only one channel. Furthermore, companies embracing and integrating this approach across their marketing efforts can enjoy a 30% higher lifetime value than their counterparts using only one channel.
By leveraging multiple channels and devices to engage with their customers and provide a consistent brand experience, businesses can build trust, loyalty, and engagement in ways that were never before possible.
In this guide, we’ll explore why omnichannel marketing matters for businesses today and how you can implement an effective strategy to take your marketing efforts to the next level. Then, we’ll delve into various proven strategies, channels, and outputs that can help you build a successful omnichannel marketing strategy for your organization. We’ll also examine real-life use cases that demonstrate the effectiveness of these best practices. Lastly, we’ll hear from industry experts on the top omnichannel marketing trends to keep an eye on in 2024 to ensure you stay ahead of the curve.
But first we need to define what is omnichannel marketing.
Omnichannel marketing is the strategy behind the cohesive and personalized experience that today’s consumers expect, no matter where they engage with your brand. This powerful tactic has become increasingly essential for companies looking to stay ahead of the curve and drive success in the digital age.
And according to McKinsey, the pandemic accelerated this transformation. In a recent report, 45% of respondents said they added new channels during the COVID-19 outbreak. Eighty percent of those surveyed shared that they plan to keep those channels moving forward.
This means that whether customers interact with your brand online through your website, social media, mobile app, or in-store, you should aim to deliver the same unified messaging experience and quality of service. You should always create personalized journeys for the customer, no matter where they opt to engage with your brand. The goal is to build trust and loyalty by providing a consistent and integrated experience that meets and exceeds their rising expectations.
Think back to your last purchase. Was it in a retailer’s app? Or did you receive a nudge via SMS about an item left in your cart? If you were unhappy with the shirt, could you scan a QR code at an onsite location to initiate the return process? All of these are examples of a hybrid digital and brick-and-mortar experience.
Now, compare what that shopping experience would have been like ten years ago. Most companies had two or three channels at most to engage with their customers. You may have seen an ad in the paper or on TV, then searched around to see if that retailer was in your area. If you needed to make a return, you’d march right back to the location with your item in hand.
A lot has changed since then.
For companies to reach you today, they have to be able to cut through significant marketing noise. And so, companies use omnichannel marketing strategies to reach customers directly and consistently through the channels they use, such as social media, in-app messages, push notifications, email, live chat, and more.
While omnichannel and multichannel marketing may sound the same, implementing these strategies varies. To break it down:
So while every omnichannel customer experience uses multiple channels, not all multichannel experiences have an omnichannel focus.
To be perfectly clear, when it comes to omnichannel vs. multichannel marketing, one is not necessarily better than the other. It all depends on your organization and the needs of your customers.
Explore additional use cases and the latest trends revolutionizing omnichannel experiences.
Every business offers multiple ways for customers to interact with it. In a multichannel environment, your customers engage with your brand via an ad, website, app, social media, or a physical store.
In a multichannel strategy, a company focuses on each piece of the customer lifecycle as a distinct component. For example, one department may be dedicated to advertising, while one focuses on your website, another manages social media, and another is responsible for your mobile app.
An omnichannel strategy connects all the dots, no matter how disparate they may seem. As your customers move across different channels and platforms — from encountering their first ad to downloading a mobile app to making a purchase — the messaging and transitions feel more seamless and interconnected.
Not only is your branding and messaging consistent, but each channel has information about how your customer interacts that informs and personalizes that experience, no matter where the customer encounters your brand.
Regarding marketing, going omnichannel can be a game-changer for your business.
Here’s why:
Many types of businesses and organizations can reap the benefits of omnichannel marketing. Whether you’re a retailer, an ecommerce company, a service provider, or even a non-profit organization, there’s no doubt that offering your customers a consistent experience across all channels and touchpoints is the way to go.
But it’s not just businesses that benefit; customers too enjoy an omnichannel experience. And when customers are happy, they’re primed to come back for more, which can mean big things for the businesses serving them.
Are you ready to experience how an omnichannel platform can take your marketing from good to seriously great? When it comes to omnichannel marketing for mobile marketers, we built the all-in-one platform that combines engagement, retention, and CLV into a seamless machine.
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Embarking on an omnichannel marketing strategy can feel like sailing through uncharted waters. To do it confidently, companies must be able to leverage consumer behavior and preferences across all channels, ensuring they’ve built a solid foundation for their messaging and branding to translate at every touchpoint. This, of course, is easier said than done.
On top of that, seamless customer experiences don’t build themselves; they require a significant investment in technology and infrastructure and the challenge of coordinating across teams and departmental functions.
With all of these factors to consider, it’s no wonder that companies may hesitate to embrace an omnichannel marketing strategy—despite its many benefits. Luckily, by carefully planning, executing effectively, and prioritizing a customer-centric approach, businesses can overcome these challenges and enjoy the perks of a successful omnichannel marketing approach.
Are you looking to take your marketing to the next level? We’ll go into building your omnichannel strategy from the ground up in the following section. Still, it’s time to familiarize yourself with the channels you can mix and match as part of your marketing strategy.
Building an effective omnichannel marketing strategy requires careful planning and execution. Here are some critical steps you can take:
First, you’ll need to identify what you hope to achieve through omnichannel marketing. Are you looking to increase sales, improve customer retention, or boost brand awareness? All of the above? Clearly defining your goals will help to guide your strategy.
Are separate teams responsible for growth, marketing, product, content development, and social? Cohesion relies on your teams’ abilities to collaborate, plan, and communicate with one another. Make sure to have your team leads coordinate check-ins early, so you don’t create a wild goose chase where a separate campaign in one area accidentally cannibalizes a campaign somewhere else.
To provide a seamless and integrated customer experience, you must understand how your customers interact with your brand—in all permutations. Make a mind map using collected data on their preferences, behaviors, and habits to inform your strategy. We’ve provided a free customer journey map template to help you get started.
Now that you’ve identified who your customers are and what matters to them, it’s time to break them out into groups based on their needs, interests, and behaviors. That can include several attributes like pages they’ve visited, products they’re interested in, their geographic location, mobileOS, and their names. You can also take into their needs and behaviors to improve the targeting of your campaigns. Think personal demographics, customer lifetime value, app activity, habits, or specific needs they have. Using CleverTap’s automated segmentation tools, you can build actionable user segments based on historical data or real-time user interactions. The better you match your messages to their intent and need.
Identify which channels your customers use most frequently and which are most effective at achieving your goals. This may include a blend of social media, email, SMS, mobile apps, and more.
You may be telling your brand’s story across multiple touchpoints, but customers only see your brand as a whole, regardless of what channel they’re on. Ensure your messaging, branding, and design are consistent and mapped to each user’s lifestyle and preferences. For instance, you don’t want to send an onboarding referral code to someone who’s been a loyal customer for several years. Consistency is foundational to building brand recognition and trust.
Now it’s time to infuse your comms with relevant and engaging content using a customer journey-building tool. Because you’ve already segmented your users, you can use that information to make your messaging more relevant. The more details you can collect on your customers, the more complete your user profiles become, which means you can segment them and message them to create a more personalized customer experience.
A holistic view of your campaign performance is critical to success. Using the best marketing automation tools and customer relationship management (CRM) software will help you to streamline your omnichannel strategy and improve efficiency. Consolidating your martech stack will help eliminate redundancies in your efforts and ensure the integrity of your data.
Don’t just set it and forget it. The best omnichannel marketers continue to test and iterate, even post-launch. Monitor the performance of your omnichannel marketing campaigns and use data to improve and optimize your strategy continually.
Now that you’ve taken stock of your omnichannel strategy, you’ll want to measure the performance of your campaigns. Omnichannel reporting lets you see how you perform against key performance indicators to ensure you stay on track and meet your goals. The data you pull paints a comprehensive picture of your marketing channels’ performance.
There are four types of metrics business owners should monitor regularly:
Some of the most important social media metrics to track include:
Tip: Benchmarks vary wildly, so you’ll want to take regular snapshots to compare results to those within your company and your industry. For example, if your customer acquisition cost (CAC) in the healthcare sector is $200, is that considered good? Comparing this to industry-wide benchmarks will help you see where your business stacks. And by the way, we have a stack of vertical-specific app engagement benchmark reports.
Next, you’ll want to keep tabs on similar metrics for your site to evaluate if your messaging is getting the job done. Omnichannel marketers need to know where their traffic comes from. So omnichannel attribution — measuring each marketing element’s role in helping drive an eventual conversion — is essential to getting your customer journeys where they need to be.
Here are a few examples:
Tip: You can track these in an embedded analytics program like Google Analytics. Always check that you’ve configured this correctly, and create a filter to eliminate in-house traffic from measurements. Also, keep an eye out for bot activity and invalid traffic.
This metric is critical to track to test how effective your channels are. CTRs can indicate if specific marketing channels are meeting expectations and which are most effective for your goals. You can also get additional insights, such as which messages increase clicks.
Tip: You’ll also need to benchmark these against your industry. There are wide variations across industries, like 2.2% CTRs for apparel, fashion, and jewelry, 5.5% CTRs for business services, and 8.88% CTRs for finance and insurance.*
The holy grail of omnichannel marketing. You’ll need to determine the pathway that led to conversions. This can help you to:
Tip: Use conversion rates to spot weaknesses or gaps in your omnichannel marketing strategy. For example, suppose you experience a surge of traffic on a particular channel, but conversion is lower than on another marketing channel. In that case, this pinpoints where you can dig deeper and discover what’s holding you back.
Now that we’ve gone over the channels, tactics, and metrics that factor into a winning omnichannel marketing strategy, it’s time to discuss how to get the most value out of your efforts.
Selecting the right marketing automation platform will go a long way toward helping you reach your business objectives. You can expect your stack to evolve along with your brand’s needs. Here’s what to look for:
Your customers are constantly on the move, making it hard to know how best to engage with them to drive loyalty and increase sales. An omnichannel approach enables companies to meet their customers directly where they are by treating them as individuals to a journey as seamless as it is bespoke.
In this section, we’ll examine two real-life use cases of companies that have successfully woven a customer-centric omnichannel strategy into the core of their marketing efforts.
Fitness apps and subscription services have exploded in popularity since the start of the pandemic when businesses had to shutter their physical locations. Since then, it’s become a struggle for companies to create cohesion between in-app and in-gym experiences. By contrast, they’ve made fast work of bridging that gap.
Founded in 2011 in New York City, Muuv Labs is on a mission to help health and wellness companies develop tomorrow’s most cutting-edge apps and products. From captivating fitness and wellness content to interactive, real-time coaching, Muuv Labs excels in developing deeply personalized, multi-touch journeys that motivate users to “get moving.” Vi Engage, their cloud-based SaaS product, helps health experts deliver a deeply personalized experience for their clients and customers.
So, what’s their secret? Zeroing in on the right channel mix has proved crucial to Muuv Labs’ success. The company leverages channels like email, push notifications, and in-app messages to congratulate users on their progress or encourage them to keep going if they’ve been inactive for some time.
Having a suite of channels also makes it easier to promote behavior-setting that drives engagement within the app, like getting users to work out more regularly. “So a typical customer journey for us begins with trying to get our members and users to do their first workout,” explains Kim Adams, Director of Marketing, Client Manager. ”And when we say workout, we could mean in a physical location or doing a home workout digitally, or even an activity that somebody’s already doing that they might connect to the app via Apple Health or Google Play.”
To sweeten the experience, Muuv Labs also embraces personalization. If the pandemic pushed more fitness consumers online, it highlighted the importance of offering prescriptive tips that save time. “You can save [people] that brainpower—they’re stressed out enough,” Adams notes. “‘Just tell me what to do, and I’ll go do it.’ ”Using a recommendation engine, they can up the ante by infusing personal details into each experience.
For instance, based on a user’s past activity, like what exercises they skipped or if they indicate a preference for strength-building to endurance-building workouts, Muuv Labs can surface the workouts they’re more likely to engage with. Along the way, they can speak to customers individually by incorporating elements like their name, goals, and even music they might enjoy listening to as they break a sweat.
But for any omnichannel experience to truly sing, Adams insists cohesion is everything. You want to ensure each message feels connected to its journey, irrespective of the channel it’s on; for Muuv Labs, that can also translate to in-person activities and in-app engagement. Whether at home or in the gym, Muuv Labs is seamlessly helping users create healthy habits and reach their fitness goals. For one of their clients, a prominent American chain of gyms, they’ve designed in-gym Wi-Fi and kiosks where customers can log in to access recommended workouts or personalized playlists.
And for those looking to kick their fitness goals into high gear, guesswork can be the enemy of progress. To help them, they built a fitness plan engine that provides users with recommendations for workouts over the next several weeks or months. “We do that for a couple of clients,” Kim explains. “Just making sure that people have the things that make them comfortable in the gym or at home, getting the workout in and bettering themselves physically.”
AirAsia takes individualized, multi-touch journeys to the next level with an approach designed to drive engagement and revenue. The low-cost airline set out early on to widen air travel accessibility with cost-effective ticketing, but the pandemic pushed the company to innovate in creative ways.
When most of the world was locked down and at home, why not expand that accessibility into other areas outside transportation? Since this pivot, the company has transformed into a super app with unparalleled visibility into customers’ preferences and needs. This strategy has opened up a world of personal services consumers can take advantage of, from ordering food to ride-hailing or securing a loan to cover the cost of a trip.
What makes this super app so powerful? Well, data, for starters. Centralizing users’ activity and information enables them to simplify the travel experience, a bit like having a personal travel concierge in your pocket. This holds true even if a user hasn’t downloaded the app on their phone. For instance, if a customer’s boarding gate changes, a push notification wouldn’t be helpful to them. Not a problem, however. AirAsia can leverage that customer’s information to send an SMS informing them of the gate change.
What powers a practical omnichannel experience is the relevancy of the messages the customer receives. For instance, while it’s a great start to prompt a user to book a ride, using data in context makes those messages feel hyper-resonant. That high degree of personalization makes for a more user-friendly experience overall.
Su Lin Teo, Head of Growth & Digital Marketing, told us during a panel discussion: “As we launch more and more businesses and expand our features, all this micro-knowledge or micro-information helps make it very intuitive for the user.”
AirAsia thinks holistically regarding the end-to-end customer journey, with much of its communications triggered and driven by past activity, location data, and user preferences.
For instance, once a customer books a flight, AirAsia can anticipate the user needing a ride to the airport and send a push notification to book their Lyft. From there, they might recommend purchasing a specific in-flight meal the customer bought on a previous flight. Once the traveler lands at their destination, they’ll find another push notification that prompts them to book their ride to the hotel.
And this, says Teo, is just the tip of the iceberg for what they have planned. “We want to get better at [personalization] so that the services we offer [are] truly personalized with their need then, not just the need in general.”
For anyone looking to the future of omnichannel marketing, we’ve got you covered. Let’s check out the top seven trends and themes in omnichannel marketing that you can expect to influence this year’s business strategies.
No matter what type of business you have, whether ecommerce, retail, gaming, fintech, or subscription service, we hope you found value and practical guidance in the examples of omnichannel marketing we explored above.
Whether just starting out or looking for inspiration to improve your strategy, omnichannel engagement can increase customer lifetime value, retention, and revenue. By adapting these strategies to your specific needs, you can effectively incorporate them into your marketing campaigns to deliver the seamless experience that your customers demand. And thanks to CleverTap, it’s easier than ever to have the right message, to the right customer, at precisely the right time across mobile, email, and web channels.
Explore additional use cases and the latest trends revolutionizing omnichannel experiences
If you want to reach customers where they are, then you have to engage them on their preferred platforms — crafting messages that resonate, then sending these messages at the time when they’re most receptive to your marketing. This is what it means to go beyond just basic messaging: it’s taking the extra step to reach customers where they want to be reached.
CleverTap’s all-in-one engagement platform offers a wide range of features to help your brand create and deliver personalized messages to your customers across mobile, email, web, and other channels.
When it comes to meeting customer expectations, your brand has to be ready to reach out where customers want to be reached. Use CleverTap’s omnichannel engagement tools to deliver a seamless brand experience with marketing campaigns that connect across mobile, web, and the in-app experience.
With CleverTap, you can:
Segment Your Audience
Identify and group customers based on shared characteristics such as their in-app behavior, preferences, and psychographics. This allows you to send personalized messages to each segment at a level that tells them “This brand understands me.”
Personalize Content
Fine-tune message content and delivery times for individual users based on what they do in your app. Recommend content that hits the right spot. Send them irresistible offers that aren’t available to the general population. Because every customer is unique, and your content should be relevant to each person.
Optimize Campaigns
Tailor campaigns to reach each customer on the channel they prefer for incredible engagement, retention, and conversions.
Automate Delivery
Create and deliver sophisticated campaigns across all channels for thousands, millions, or billions of users with perfect deliverability. Automating your messaging campaigns saves time and resources, ensuring that customers receive the right message at the right time.
Measure Results
Track the performance of your omnichannel engagement campaigns to see what’s working and what’s not. Even better, track those KPIs in real time with CleverTap. This allows you to pivot when necessary, or instantly optimize campaigns for better results.
With CleverTap’s messaging suite, you can create a truly omnichannel messaging experience for your customers. This will help you reach them where they are and deliver the perfect message at the optimal time.
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