The Guide to Omnichannel Marketing

Marketing strategies are changing rapidly.

Nowadays, marketers do not rely on traditional ways of push/pull marketing tactics.

The focus is on building a consumer-centric approach to meet the needs of the customer. Marketing communication needs to be formed in a way that engages the customer and emphasizes on catching the customer wherever they are, at every touchpoint.

And this is where omnichannel marketing comes into play.

Omnichannel marketing provides 360-degree customer experience via different communication channels and devices used by the customer in a completely seamless manner.

Omnichannel marketing entails providing your customers with a seamless, unified shopping experience across all online channels, including emails, social media channels, phone call, live chat, and more.

Moreover, it is adaptive in nature and tries to balance the message with respect to the response of the customers towards multiple channels.

Marketers try to deliver information about a brand or a company by various means. It is essential to find out which all touchpoints work for a particular customer.

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Some of the features of omnichannel marketing are:

• Customer-centric: Earlier, the marketing strategies were all about communicating the product attributes. However, today, it is imperative to understand the customer perspective.
• Adaptive: The customer journey is analyzed thoroughly from the first visit to the website to the feedback given by the customer post-purchase. Based on customer behavior and the feedback, the message is then adapted to provide a better experience.
• Customization: Personalized interaction is aimed to cater to all the different needs of the customers. Customization is done keeping customer preference in mind.
• Value-added: Value is added to the sellers as well as buyers. There are several ways of how value is added, such as:

• Seamless integration of several channels
• Provide a unified customer experience
• Better control over channels
• Better ROI
• Brand awareness
• Brand Loyalty

Implementation of an omnichannel marketing strategy

1. Bring the entire company into the omnichannel strategy:

It is crucial to have everybody on the same page. If your company is in the transition period, then communicate the urgency of omnichannel strategy to every team member.

Develop a unified strategy keeping a few necessary things in mind, such as:

• Keep customer data at the center – While developing the strategy, keep the customer data at the center. Try and analyze all the details, including shopping pattern, consumer demographics, utilization of the information, etc. Develop the strategy from the insight you get from the customer information.
• Analyze the customer journey – From the first customer visit to converting those leads into regular paying customers, every step of the buyer journey needs to be analyzed. Modify the message in each step according to your customers’ preferences and cater to their demands.
• Importance of the data to close the loop – The gathered data is important to the brand manager, merchandising department as they are responsible for the delivery of the product as per the customers’ desire. The insight derived from the information can be helpful to create a more suitable GUI (Graphical User Interface) by the graphic designer to improve the customer experience. Moreover, all the stakeholders should be working in a unified manner towards a specific goal.

2. Audit your customer experience

It is indispensable to realize how the customer perceives you and your brand and how efficient your strategies are. And once you audit your customers’ experience, it is then essential to change your strategy accordingly:

1. Audit the process: Conduct an internal audit to evaluate the processes. Check for the following criteria:

1. Search Engine Optimization- Search for your products, categories, and check your SEO ranking. Take the necessary steps to optimize your traceability so that you get discovered by your target audience easily.
2. Ordering process- Place an order from your own store in private mode to understand the ordering process. Check for instructions and loopholes in various processes, including delivery time, return, and refund process. Test the entire series of events to check whether everything is running smoothly or not.
3. Subscription- Subscribe to your own newsletter and evaluate the subscription process. Too many mandatory details in your lead-form might annoy the customer. Figure out the areas of difficulties one might face while subscribing or unsubscribing. Try to make the process less complicated and less time-consuming.
4. Social media engagement- Try and engage with your customers via various social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. Word of mouth marketing is an excellent way of increasing engagement and promotion of your brand to the friends and family of your customers.

2. Ask for feedback: Customer feedback is the best way to understand the critical to quality parameters of the process. Confirm your strategy with the data obtained from the post-purchase feedback, feedback on the quality of the product, delivery process, etc.

To improvise your feedback process, you can do certain things, such as:

1. Incentives – Assign incentives to undergo the feedback process, such as loyalty points, discounts, free shipping, etc. Try to communicate how valuable the feedback is to you.
2. Surveys – Conduct market surveys to understand consumer behavior, ways to make your consumer delighted.
3. Analysis – Analyze consumer behavior, website behavior using big data analytics tools.

3. Segmentation and Targeting: Finding the right target audience is necessary in order to succeed. It is impossible to satisfy everyone – and you don’t have to either. You just need to identify your niche audience, segment your email list, and then personalize your marketing strategy according to that segmented list.

1. Segmentation by demographics – It is easy to divide your customers according to age, sex, geographical location, marital status, and income. These segments can be very beneficial to find out the correct target group for your brand.
2. Campaign Engagement – Try to understand the customers by their interaction pattern, such as last clicked item, most visited webpage, last purchased item, and more. You can then customize your marketing strategy accordingly.
3. Shopping Behaviour – Access the browsing pattern, discarding of carts, buying trends. Modify your product recommendation and cross-selling technique as per the behavior of the shopper.
4. Precise targeting – By layering your segmentation process, you can understand your customers deeply. As a result, it will be easy to form a relevant message to convert the customer. For example, a working woman in her early thirties who has last clicked a formal shirt is more likely to look for office wear. So, in your email, you can send recommendations for format trousers and shoes.

Wrap-Up

Listen and understand your customers first and then provide a customized solution taking care of all the needs of the customer.

Take the help of technological advancements in terms of predictive analytics to enhance your customer experience of shopping. Effectively done omnichannel marketing can increase the awareness as well as the customer retention by a large margin.