Omnichannel Marketing: Strategy, Examples, and Benefits

More than half of consumers now use three to five channels during a single purchase journey, while 70% of customers prefer brands that have multiple channels covered. When applied to the customer experience, an omnichannel strategy brings things together, supporting flexible journeys that jump between multiple channels. A multi-channel experience is like dealing with a team of people who, although they all work at the same place, may or may not know the details of each other’s tasks, and have different styles and personalities. Single-channel, meanwhile, describes offerings that can only be bought or discussed via one touchpoint.

Omnichannel thinking helps drive customer satisfaction because it removes roadblocks and redundancies from otherwise fragmented customer journeys. ‘Omni’ is a Latin prefix meaning ‘all’, so when we’re talking about omnichannel, we literally mean every single digital space that customers use and have access to. Omnichannel is the term given to an approach to communications, customer experience, and branding that unifies every available touchpoint and platform under one cohesive strategy.

Again, a one-size-fits-all approach to omnichannel marketing will fall short in a world where channel popularity varies dramatically by region. A few well-placed flyers, posters, banners, and resources at checkout can go a long way to delivering an omnichannel retail strategy that will resonate and be greatly appreciated by your customers. But even in your retail store, you can help them access special offers, giveaways, product information, and customer support from their mobile device.

TL;DR: What you need to know about omnichannel marketing

• The goal of omnichannel marketing is to meet shoppers with highly personalized messages at every phase and channel of the buyer’s journey.
• This means it’s essential to understand your customers and reach shoppers wherever they are—be it a brick-and-mortar store, a live event, social media, in-app, or on your website.
• If you’re doing omnichannel marketing for a coffee brand, for example, people who’ve opted into your email list might want more product-specific data than your social media followers.
• The rise of omnichannel retail helps ecommerce merchants, brands, and retailers meet shoppers wherever they are, which helps them take advantage of growing customer spending.
• An omnichannel experience connects customer interactions across channels, so each touchpoint has access to prior context and doesn’t require customers to start conversations.

Email is a reliable form of communication that allows you to build meaningful connections with your existing and prospective customers and can drive the highest ROI as compared to other digital channels. In contrast, North America sees a robust mix of SMS, email, and Facebook Messenger, with SMS achieving a 98% open rate in the U.S. and 74% of users preferring transactional messages via email. Meanwhile, Northeast Asia relies heavily on apps like WeChat (1.3 billion users) and LINE, which reaches 85% of Japan’s population daily.

An omnichannel approach advances the customer relationship and makes them feel less like a stranger. The chatbot or customer service rep can see data from all previous touchpoints. A large enough company could, in theory, have a team for email, one for the website, another for SMS, and yet another for social media. Offering a consistent brand experience across all those channels is now a key element in your marketing strategy.

core components of omnichannel marketing success

The results were taken from Mailjet’s The path to email engagement report Plus, 74% also chose email as a preferred channel for transactional communication. Also, it is by far the most preferred channel for brand communications. After all, social media is ruling the internet and providing brands and companies with a great platform for marketing their business and generating sales. Unravelling the audience’s internet-based life is the most crucial element in any omnichannel marketing approach, and email marketing is the simplest and most effective way to do it.

Without a software platform that can analyze interactions, understand sentiment, build customer profiles and unite disparate datasets, all you can do is guess customer expectations and haphazardly try to spot-fix pain points. The game here is one of continual improvement, where you’ll see where things stand, take measures to improve, and then see if those measures have worked. Once you have a benchmark, you have something to compare things to once you’ve started to build a more consistent, unified omnichannel experience.

With millennials and generation Z making up a large portion of your audience base, you need to make your communication efforts more personalized and seamless across all channels. This applies to physical in-store shopping at your brick-and-mortar store, the devices they’re using, where they are in the customer journey, and their previous interactions with your company. The most successful organizations employ omnichannel marketing strategies to make these interactions a consistent, integrated, and effective experience for their customers. Omnichannel marketing is a marketing strategy that works to provide your audience with a seamless, smooth, and hassle-free experience across all channels relevant to them. The right mix depends on your audience, but the goal is to ensure these channels work together to create a unified experience.

This can include your website, mobile app, social media platforms, email, SMS, live chat, physical locations, contact centers, and even third-party marketplaces. An effective omnichannel approach considers both digital and physical touchpoints, tailored to where your customers are most active. Ultimately, people are looking for interactions that feel connected, personal, and effortless. They expect convenience, speed, and relevance, with the ability to pick up where they left off across channels. That meant the brand could proactively close the loop on customer feedback with a much more omnichannel approach, covering all the bases with feedback that influences every touchpoint.

How to develop an omnichannel marketing strategy that delivers

Good customer service closes sales, prevents returns, increases positive word of mouth and online reviews, and solves post-purchase problems. And any future marketing you send them can also be tailored based upon their prior interactions, no matter the channel. But personalization is hard to do well – across multiple channels – if those channels aren’t connected. But in addition to that, omnichannel marketing offers several other benefits you can’t experience as easily using other approaches. As you have probably already surmised, omnichannel marketing saves you money.

This all comes down to unified customer data that can link – and then surface – a customer’s ID and history in helpful situations, like on a customer service team’s dashboard, or generating personalized discounts when they visit your site. Managing multiple channels is time-consuming, but you needn’t move from overnight. Customer retention is on the line if you lose people as they move from touchpoint to touchpoint, so it pays to know where your experiences are lacking. If you want to deliver on your omnichannel goals, you’ll need to know where your customers are, and what they expect. That’s while Forrester research shows that 25% of omnichannel-capable brands “enjoyed revenue boosts and cost reductions alike, and 35% sold more premium items and 28% saw higher order values.” The good news is that omnichannel customer service and experiences are win-win investments.

Sending a message at the optimal moment can significantly impact engagement. All your omnichannel marketing efforts will go down the drain if you omnichannel marketing don’t find a way to keep track of your performance. So, pick one additional channel such as SMS or one social media platform and build that one up. The best way to boost conversions is by correctly identifying and efficiently filling the gaps in the buying process. However, to make things easier for you, we’ve listed a few tips that will help you get started. That’s why omnichannel marketing works in so many online business contexts.