How to Choose the Best Omnichannel Marketing Solution

"The customer is always right." This is a business standard that’s already challenging to uphold, but in this digital age where customers have grown so accustomed to having everything at their fingertips, it can be especially difficult for businesses to ensure customer satisfaction.

With so many customer demands to meet and problems to solve, there are just as many omnichannel marketing solutions out there to address customer expectations of instant gratification and accessibility.

But how does a business decide which solution is the right one for its customers?

In our previous blog posts, we first explained the concept of omnichannel marketing and explored its benefits for increased customer engagement, and then discussed the steps for implementing seamless omnichannel strategies.

Now, we will learn more about what an omnichannel marketing platform is, how it can help businesses with their marketing campaigns, and what are the points to consider when choosing the right omnichannel marketing software.

What is an Omnichannel Marketing Platform?

An omnichannel marketing platform is a marketing software that businesses use to manage their multiple channels, analyze data and gather insights from customer interactions, build a customer journey for different audience segments accordingly, automate marketing campaigns, and provide personalized experiences.

In short, it is a marketing hub that allows a business to control, automate, and measure the success of all marketing efforts.

The Key Features of an Omnichannel Marketing Software

The six key features of an omnichannel marketing software are as follows:

Centralized Data Management

An omnichannel marketing strategy operates in a customer-centric manner. All marketing channels are interconnected and work together to provide positive customer experiences.

For this to happen, omnichannel marketing software gathers and integrates data from several sources, including online and offline marketing channels, and third-party systems such as customer relationship management (CRM) systems. Presenting this information in a centralized and comprehensive view allows marketers to manage strategies for each channel from one place.

Audience Segmentation

To increase customer satisfaction and loyalty, a business must engage with its customers in a personalized and contextual manner rather than with a generic, “one size fits all” approach.

Customers are unique, not just based on their demographic characteristics such as age, gender, occupation, and location, but their preferences and behaviors. It’s important to address these individualities and act accordingly.

An omnichannel marketing software performs audience segmentation to divide a large group of customers into smaller, more focused groups—sometimes even individuals—so that marketing efforts can be relevant, appropriate, and interesting for each group.

Customer Journey Mapping

An omnichannel marketing platform lays out the stages of a customer journey and identifies all touchpoints for customer interactions.

Visualizing this journey helps marketing teams assess the effectiveness of all touchpoints and make any necessary improvements to provide better customer experiences. Personalizing each step of the customer journey and seizing opportunities for contextual real-time engagement also becomes easier through this process.

Automation Capabilities

A marketing hub with omnichannel automation allows for simple and repetitive tasks to be automated. Some examples include drafting promotional materials for email marketing campaigns or sending customer satisfaction surveys after an interaction with a call center so that customers know their feedback is valued.

This way, marketing teams are able to instead spend their time and energy on campaigns that require their creativity, problem-solving skills, and human touch.

Personalized Customer Experiences

In addition to handling repetitive tasks, omnichannel automation can leverage AI and machine learning tools to provide customers with personalized experiences at every step of their customer journey.

This means that customers are presented with the right offers that appeal to them, at the right time when they’re most likely to engage with them, and through the right channel that they’d prefer to be interacting with.

Data Analytics & Reporting

Analytics and reporting tools gather data from multiple channels and present them in a consolidated way. This allows marketers to assess how effective their efforts are by gathering insight into customer preferences and behaviors and measuring important rates such as campaign performance and ROI.

The Benefits of Using an Omnichannel Marketing Platform

There are several benefits an omnichannel marketing platform can provide for a business:

Consistent Branding

One of the key points of adopting an omnichannel approach is to ensure consistent messaging across all channels such as emails, SMS, and push notifications.

Omnichannel marketing tools can make certain that the information and offers a business provides to its customers are accurate and consistent across all touchpoints. This allows for a more cohesive customer experience and fortifies the credibility of a business.

A Unified View

An omnichannel marketing hub gathers data from various marketing channels, including social media, a mobile app, an online store, email campaigns, and customer service, all in one place.

This holistic view makes it easier for a business to manage all its channels, observe its success in keeping a customer engaged, and adapt strategies accordingly.

Easier-to-Track KPIs

Once data from multiple channels are gathered in one place, analytics, and reporting tools can help marketing teams measure the success rate of their campaigns.

This makes it easier to track crucial KPIs such as conversion rates, ROI, churn rates, and customer acquisition costs. Based on these numbers, a business can adapt its marketing strategy in alignment with its goals.

Automating Simple Tasks

Omnichannel marketing platforms empower businesses to automate mundane and repetitive tasks to ensure marketing teams can refocus their efforts on more important matters.

Streamlining omnichannel marketing efforts with automation allows for efficiency, convenience, and better resource allocation.

Increased Personalization

Offering personalized customer experiences leads to better customer engagement and increased customer loyalty.

It both boosts conversion rates by cultivating leads with appealing offers, and fosters relationships with current customers by remaining relevant in communications and rewarding them with offers such as loyalty programs, turning them into repeat buyers.

Jennifer Adams, Senior Forecast Analyst at Forrester, states that using AI tools together with omnichannel marketing automation will increase marketing performance by improving predictive abilities and enabling marketers to scale their personalization efforts.

Factors to Consider When Choosing an Omnichannel Marketing Platform

There are numerous different products available that could provide businesses with an omnichannel marketing solution. How then, would a business know which solution is the best one for its specific goals and challenges?

Here are some determining factors that would help a business make the right choice:

Integrating with Existing Systems

When choosing an omnichannel marketing platform, it’s much more practical and efficient to choose a solution that can integrate into a business’ already existing systems. This way, a business won’t have to go through the arduous process of reworking its entire infrastructure to support the compatibility of a new platform.

Scalability

A good marketing solution not only has to solve problems in the present but also in the future. As a business grows, it will start experiencing a higher volume of customer traffic and data. The marketing platform must be prepared to handle this influx of data and scale by the business’s long-term growth strategy.

User-Friendliness

It’s advantageous for a platform to require little to no coding knowledge and feel intuitive for any user. Not all marketers have programming experience, so the more user-friendly the interface, the easier and quicker a marketing team will be able to comprehend and put the platform to good use.

Security

It is a business’s responsibility to ensure its customers’ data are protected. Choosing a platform that is secure, complies with data privacy laws and regulations, and does not compromise the privacy of customers while providing them with personalized experiences is of utmost importance.

Automation Tools

Having a wide range of automation tools is useful in various aspects. From automating repetitive tasks to using automation to craft personalized customer journeys, to performing A/B testing, omnichannel automation can truly transform marketing efforts.

Personalization Features

An omnichannel marketing platform that can provide personalized customer experiences is beneficial for businesses that want to especially focus on increasing customer engagement and loyalty. These features can include recommending products, tailoring messages, and presenting offers to customers based on their circumstances, preferences, and behavioral patterns.

Real-Time Capabilities

In today’s fast-paced world, not even seconds but milliseconds matter. A millisecond could be the difference between a customer deciding to interact with a business vs. walking away from the interaction. An agile omnichannel marketing platform that empowers a business to respond to scenarios and engage with customers in real-time brings incredible value to the table.

Cost

A business must assess if the pricing of the product, as well as the time required to implement the platform into the business’ infrastructure and train marketing teams on its usage, is a worthy investment that would yield successful results.

EVAM Marketing Suite: A Leading Real-Time Omnichannel Martech Platform

EVAM Marketing Suite is a powerful omnichannel marketing platform that can empower businesses in various industries such as retail, telecommunications, and banking. Several businesses that have implemented EVAM’s marketing hub into their infrastructure have been able to provide their customers with hyper-personalized experiences and have seen an increase in KPIs such as conversion rates and offer acceptance rates.

The marketing hub’s AI-powered tools can gather and consolidate data from multiple channels, segment audiences accordingly, and craft personalized customer journeys. They can predict customers’ needs before they even have to voice them, decide on what offers would resonate most with each customer, and take action in real-time.