Omnichannel Digital Marketing — What Is It and How to Apply It In 2021
The way we do business has changed a lot in the past couple of decades. We used to have phone calls, business letters, and store visits. Now we have emails, websites, social media, and digital advertising as our mediums of doing business.
With this shift, keeping up with trends is necessary. If you miss one trend or marketing channel, you might miss out on plenty of opportunities. For example, no matter how much content you are putting on your website, if you are not doing its SEO, most people will not find it. No matter how good you are at SEO, if you are missing social media marketing, you are losing many potential customers.
One of these trends is omnichannel digital marketing. You might have heard of this term before. It’s like that industry jargon that is thrown away quite often. But don’t think that it’s useless. I’m going to clarify many things about this channel, for example:
- What is omnichannel Digital Marketing?
- Is it different from multichannel marketing?
- How to apply it in 2021?
So without further ado, let’s get started!
What is omnichannel Digital Marketing?
If you use all your channels to create one, unified experience for your customers, you are going omnichannel. When I say all of your channels, I mean all: point-of-sale, in-store, traditional, and online channels.
This type of marketing is intended to create a seamless message that adjusts to your customer based on their behavior through your sales funnels. The end goal is to provide a personalized customer experience.
When you are using this type of marketing, you don’t think about who is interacting with your brand or what channels they are using. You have one thing in mind: to send a relevant message to your customers.
A few examples will clarify how it works:
- A customer is being retargeted on Facebook if they have left a product just before buying.
- The customer receives physical coupons in their mailbox.
- A customer getting an email or SMS message about a promotion while in-store shopping.
From the first touchpoint to the last in the buyer journey, it will create a unified message, voice, and brand for your company.
The reason why this trend is gaining traction is that the customer is omnichannel. When they interact with an e-commerce brand, they bounce between channels. Marketers are paying attention to this behavior and adjusting their behavior with that.
You can relate to this; when was the last time you bought a thing online after the first interaction? Other people are the same. They want to build trust with the company. That’s exactly what omnichannel creates for you.
Is it different from multichannel marketing?
Yes, it is. Although some people confuse these two types of marketing, they are different.
The main difference is in personalization. In multichannel marketing, channels don’t update and personalize with customers’ needs. In omnichannel digital marketing, each channel is updated.
Multichannel puts the brand at the center of the strategy, while omnichannel marketing puts the customer at the center of the strategy.
How Can You Apply It To Your Business In 2021?
Omnisend conducted a study according to which customers respond much better to an omnichannel digital marketing strategy. Omnichannel campaigns earned 18.96% engagement, while campaigns using a single channel only received 5.4%.
You might be thinking that engagement is not always a signal of revenue. Well, this time it is! According to the same study, campaigns using three channels or more earned a 250% higher purchase rate. The customer retention rate was also a lot higher in the case of three channels or more.
So it’s clear that besides engagement and revenue, this type of marketing gives you repeat customers. As a business owner, you’d know the value of repeat buyers. They’re cheaper to market. Plus, they bring more revenue and act as a source of word-to-mouth marketing.
Use these 4 foolproof steps to apply omnichannel marketing to your business:
Get Your Whole Team On Board
Everyone in your team must understand this strategy. For this, you’ll need to put customers’ data at the center of your customer operations.
That’s because each person on your team will use this data to provide a better experience for the customer. For example, marketers will use it to send the most relevant message to the customers. Customer success will use it to keep a consistent conversation with customers. And so on.
Learn Everything About Your Customers
This should be a part of the previous step. But if you don’t have enough data to work with, don’t worry; you can get it using these methods:
- Examine your customer experience. Visit your website as a customer would do and buy something. Take notes at each step of interacting with the website. Work with people outside your company and evaluate your customer experience.
- Get customer feedback. Ask your clients about several stages of the customer journey. One way to encourage responses is to give people incentives. Listen to the feedback and get constructive criticism. Learn from the mistakes and correct them. This way, you’ll make your business better. Keep in mind that customers are the reason for your success, so listen to them.
Personalize Your Messages
As I was talking about earlier, personalization is very important in omnichannel. A great way to achieve it is to target your messages.
You can do it using the data you’ve gathered in the previous steps. The segment that data into smaller groups based on similar traits. These traits may include profile data, campaign engagement, and shopping behavior. Then send personalized messages to these groups.
Test, Measure, Repeat
Finally, your campaigns will improve overtime as you collect data, analyze it, and make necessary changes. This may involve testing different messages, headers/subject lines, images, times, etc.
There you have it: what is omnichannel digital marketing, and how to apply it to your business in 2021. If you have any questions related to this trend, let me know in the comment section below!
