Let’s do a quick activity. Try to remember all the times you’ve used the internet today. Every Google search, every email you’ve sent and received, every time you pulled up Instagram or scrolled your Facebook or Twitter feed. I’m guessing it’s a lot? And most of your customers are just like you. In every search, email or social media scroll lies an opportunity to grab your audience’s attention. Omnichannel marketing is what’s going to put your brand in front of your customers on all the platforms that matter to them.
What is Omnichannel Marketing?
Omnichannel marketing is all about providing your audience with a seamless, smooth, and hassle-free experience across all relevant channels.
In the modern digital age, the audience accesses the internet with multiple devices – and this allows for better connections and more control over the buying experience. All successful organizations of today are employing omnichannel marketing strategies to make these interactions a consistent, integrated, and effective experience for their customers.
Your customers are ready to interact with your business on different channels anywhere, anytime. The question is, are you ready to accommodate them?
How Does Omnichannel Marketing Work?
Omnichannel marketing methods involve meeting and interacting with your audience where they are. With millennials and generation Z making up a large portion of your audience base, you need to make your communication efforts more personalized across all channels.
In essence, omnichannel marketing is a customer-centric approach, rather than a company-centric approach. It requires you to see through your audience’s eyes and stand in their shoes. The basic assumption of this marketing approach is that customers tend to shift from one channel to another as they try to find the perfect solution for their needs.
Our 4 Tips for a Successful Omnichannel Marketing Strategy
We understand that it may be confusing to devise a kick-ass omnichannel marketing strategy from scratch. However, to make things easier for you, we’ve listed a few tips that will help you get started.
1. Get to know your audience
First and foremost, you must be aware of your audience’s needs and interests. Understanding what exactly makes your customers click is a prerequisite to creating a successful omnichannel marketing strategy. Find out which channels your audience is the most active on and then equip yourself with the right tools to help you convert your prospects into customers.
Ideally, you should tap into all the channels to determine the specific behavior patterns relative to each of them. The best way to boost conversions is by correctly identifying and efficiently filling the gaps in the buying process.
You should focus on interacting with your audience not only after they’ve made a purchase, but also before it. Proactive companies stay on their prospects’ mind by sending them personalized emails to highlight positive reviews of their products from other customers.
2. Pick the best channel for your products
For a successful, targeted campaign, you should be able to determine which channel is best suited for your product or service.
You should think outside the box when trying to engage your audience because, as the digital space grows, so do your customers’ needs. You should always be ready, both mentally and resources-wise, to adapt to the shifts. That’s the only way to continue to deliver quality relevant content that’s unique, fresh, and engaging.
3. Don’t overlook performance insights
All your omnichannel marketing efforts will go down the drain if you don’t find a way to keep track of your performance.
Using some form of analytics is a key step without which you may not be able to get insights into your audience’s digital habits, purchasing patterns, and transaction tendencies. Your business’ performance insights will help you modify your omnichannel marketing strategy to find more targeted solutions.
4. Focus on email marketing
Smart businesses always focus on their email marketing strategy, aiming to reach their audience in the quickest and most direct way possible – their email inbox. Email is a reliable form of communication that allows you to build a meaningful connection with your existing and prospective customers.
The best thing about an email marketing strategy is that it offers an opportunity to connect with your audience on a personal level, rather than addressing them as a whole – and customers love the individualized treatment!
When it comes to attracting and acquiring new customers, you may be surprised to hear that email is approximately 40 times more effective than Facebook and Twitter combined.
So, if you think email marketing is an outdated strategy, think again!
The Role of Email Marketing in Omnichannel Marketing Campaigns
You may be wondering why our focus is on email marketing and not on social media marketing. After all, social media is ruling the internet and providing brands and companies with a great platform for marketing their business and generating sales.
The reason is simple: when it comes to conversions, social media isn’t as effective in influencing and directing buyer decisions. Email lends itself to the audience making those decisions.
Email marketing is capable of driving the highest ROI as compared to other digital marketing channels. Unraveling the audience’s internet-based life is the most crucial element in any omnichannel marketing approach.
The 6 Benefits of Email Marketing Strategy
Here’s how your email marketing strategy fortifies and enhances your omnichannel marketing program.
1. Promotes targeted and personalized communication
Email marketing allows you to divide your audience base into segments based on their specific needs and preferences, enabling you to curate highly personalized content for them. From coming up with a catchy subject line and choosing images that align with your customer’s needs to producing content that resonates with them, email marketing is the ideal channel to drive engagement.
2. Reaches a wider target group
With emails, you don’t have to worry about where your audience is located. All you need is an internet connection and a compatible device to let them know that you care about them and their needs. This ease of use gives email marketing a greater reach than other channels.
3. Allows you to send behavior-based emails
Email automation allows you to act on the audience’s behavior, setting yourself up for improved conversion rates, maximum profits, and improved customer retention.
According to a study, 39% of marketers found that the use of automated emails based on customer behavior were the most effective marketing strategy.
You may use behavior-based email strategies when a customer views a product on your web page or spends time on the FAQ section, or perhaps adds a few products to their online cart but doesn’t check out.
4. Serve as mailable microsites
The world of email marketing is advancing –you can now send microsites and say goodbye to static messages. By allowing customers to watch videos, browse through product categories, and even make purchases while still being in their inbox, you can take your subscriber experience game to the next level.
5. Allows you to build a loyalty program
You know that most of your revenue comes from loyal repeat customers. And this is why you should focus a large part of your email marketing strategy on customer retention.
One of the best ways to do this is by creating a loyalty program. One great example is a referral program that’s a win-win solution for both you and your audience.. Referral emails are those that contain special offers for the customers to share with their friends and family. For each referral, they will get a reward.
You could incorporate loyalty a program into the very first email you send to your subscribers as a welcome gift.
6. Allows integration with other channels
You may integrate social media into your emails to increase the number of website visitors and social media followers. To ensure that potential customers don’t get detoured on their purchase journey, you should consider integrating your emails with other channels so that everything works together. By allowing you to target the audience multi-directionally, email marketing guarantees more leads.
Summing Up
Email marketing may only be one piece of omnichannel marketing, but it can be considered as the bridge that connects all the other channels you want to reach your customers on. It lets you personalize messages, reach a wider audience than a social media platform would, and can even direct traffic to your social media profiles.
If you think you don’t have enough time to spare on creating the best emails for your subscribers, you should consider getting help from professional email marketing services. From mapping out the ideal email marketing strategy to implementing it in the most creative ways, these expert services will handle everything in your best interest!