Increase Customer Interactions with Omnichannel Marketing

Omnichannel Marketing: Mastering Customer Engagement

In today’s digital world, customer expectations are evolving as rapidly as technological advancements, making it challenging for businesses to keep up with the level of demand for personalized customer experiences.

That’s where omnichannel marketing comes in. An omnichannel customer engagement strategy can segment customers based on their needs, preferences, and behaviors. This allows for personalized experiences that are timely, appropriate, and beneficial, meeting customers where they are.

In this blog post, we will be exploring the concept of omnichannel marketing, comparing it to other marketing strategies, and discussing its significance in increasing customer engagement for businesses.

What is Omnichannel Marketing?

Omnichannel marketing is a marketing strategy that aims to provide customers with a seamless experience across all touchpoints. Whether a customer interacts with a brand digitally through social media, a website, a mobile app, in-person through brick-and-mortar stores, or by calling customer service, their customer experience as a whole must feel cohesive and unified.

In contrast to older marketing strategies that focus on promoting the brand’s goods and services through as many marketing channels as possible, an omnichannel customer engagement strategy puts the customer at the forefront, prioritizing their satisfaction and comfort.

Multichannel vs. Cross-Channel vs. Omnichannel Marketing

Multichannel marketing has been the go-to strategy many businesses have embraced since the early days of e-commerce. However, in the past few years, various brands have adapted their marketing strategies, shifting from a multichannel to a cross-channel to finally an omnichannel marketing approach. Let’s take a quick look at what all these approaches entail, and how omnichannel marketing successfully addresses the shortcomings of the previous two.

Multichannel Marketing

Multichannel marketing has a brand-centric approach, where the goal is for businesses to advertise their products or services to customers through multiple channels. At first glance, this may seem like an efficient strategy, since it diversifies the shopping experience for customers and communicates with them on multiple platforms rather than through a single channel.

However, these multiple channels are operating independently from each other, which means customer interactions are being siloed, and different – perhaps even conflicting – information is being delivered on different channels. This is why multichannel marketing often results in a customer experience that is inconsistent and inconvenient.

Cross-Channel Marketing

Cross-channel marketing takes things one step further by connecting these multiple channels and allowing for information about the customer to be shared between different platforms.

This addresses some of the problems that result from channels being disconnected, however, there is still room for more flexibility and personalization. The brand also remains the focal point of interactions.

Omni-Channel Marketing

Omnichannel marketing, on the other hand, operates with a customer-centric approach, where the goal is to provide a positive experience for the customer that is consistent throughout all platforms. Channels are interconnected, and the customer’s information can be exchanged between them in order to offer personalized experiences that are engaging and relevant.

In a world where 90% of customers state they expect their interactions to be consistent across all channels, adopting an omnichannel marketing strategy proves to be crucial for businesses that want to have meaningful customer interactions and create lasting connections with their customer base.

Understanding the Omnichannel Customer Journey

Mapping out an omnichannel customer journey helps businesses identify all points of interaction their customers have with them through different channels.

Visualizing these stages of the customer journey makes it easier to analyze touchpoints for any flaws or room for improvement. From there, businesses can take the necessary steps to refine them, making sure all touchpoints are operating in coordination with each other. This integration is key to providing interactions that leave a positive impression, which leads to stronger and long-lasting customer relationships.

Admittedly, putting this into practice may prove to be challenging. There are several reasons why businesses struggle to provide their customers with an omnichannel customer experience.

The Challenges of Embracing Omnichannel Marketing

Businesses often struggle with providing customers with omnichannel experiences. These challenges, known as the 4Cs, include:

• Consistency: Omnichannel marketing empowers communication across different channels, allowing for messaging and the brand identity to remain consistent throughout. Achieving this consistency can be tough, especially if different channels are managed by different teams or individuals. However, it is imperative to strike this balance so that customers are able to switch between different channels conveniently without losing their progress or encountering interruptions.
• Customer-Centricity: According to Forrester, 41% of B2C marketing decision-makers state that personalizing customer interactions is what they struggle with the most. Implementing omnichannel personalization can be a laborious task, but for a strategy that focuses on customer satisfaction above everything, it is absolutely necessary to do so.
• Complex Technical Requirements: Collecting data from different channels to gain insights into customer preferences in itself can be technologically challenging. Then, once this data is collected, it must be integrated across all channels to provide personalized experiences. In addition to all that, businesses must conduct this data-gathering process while respecting customers’ privacy and sensitive information, or else risk falling victim to the privacy paradox.
• Calculating Effectiveness: It’s important for a business to be able to determine how effective its omnichannel customer engagement efforts are, but calculating the success rate of such efforts can be complicated with a strategy that values quality over quantity. Even when there are positive results such as increased conversion rates or improved ROI, it can be difficult to estimate which efforts and campaigns are responsible for these numbers.

The Impact of Omnichannel Personalization

According to Gartner’s 2021 Personalization Survey, 86% of customers prefer some form of personalized marketing communication from brands.

However, the same survey also reports that 55% of customers would stop doing business with a brand they find to be invading their privacy, and 44% would simply block a brand they find to be irrelevant or too persistent.

These statistics only serve to highlight the importance of omnichannel personalization efforts in boosting customer engagement. It’s not enough to just know what offers customers would find appealing, but when and how to present them.

• Higher Conversion Rates: These personalized offers can address customers’ preferences more directly and accurately, and this results in a higher chance of converting leads into customers.
• Increased Sales: Not only are customers more likely to make a purchase when presented with personalized offers, they are also more likely to become repeat buyers, increasing sales for the brand overall.
• Lower Costs: Resources for marketing efforts can be allocated based on gathered insights, ensuring that time and money won’t be wasted on campaigns that won’t yield the desired results.
• Customer Loyalty: Customers who are satisfied with their personalized experiences are more loyal to a brand and recommend it to their circle of friends and family. When customers become brand advocates, they end up organically helping the brand with customer acquisition.

The Significance of a Martech Platform in Implementing Omnichannel Personalization

A martech platform can provide a unified view of the customer journey, managing data from all offline and digital marketing channels, and responding with actions that are relevant and agile via real-time data analytics and personalization processes.

This simplifies the otherwise gargantuan task of segmenting customers and determining what offers would resonate deeply with each individual and provides a seamless, personalized customer experience at every stage of the customer journey.

EVAM: A Leader in Delivering Real-Time & Personalized Omnichannel Experiences

Empowering businesses in various industries such as retail, telecommunications, and banking, Evam emerges as a pioneer in delivering personalized omnichannel customer experiences.

Evam is a comprehensive martech platform that can address the challenges faced by businesses with features such as:

• Real-Time Data Processing: Processing billions of data in milliseconds and taking actions accordingly in real-time, allowing for hyper-personalized omnichannel experiences.
• Customer Journey Design: Mapping out omnichannel customer journeys and identifying all touchpoints with a user-friendly interface that allows for the integration of multiple channels.
• Easy to Scale Platform: Integrating into a business’ existing infrastructure quickly without the need for IT support, easing businesses’ worries regarding complex technical challenges.

Are you ready to discover how Evam can help you master omnichannel marketing and form meaningful connections with your customers?

Contact Evam