What is omnichannel marketing?

Omnichannel might look like a new term, but what if I say we are experiencing it in our daily lives? Yes, with a lot of technological advancements happening around, omnichannel experiences have become an integral part of our lives.

Innovative technologies started disrupting our day-to-day living, and Omnichannel has disrupted the whole marketing space itself. A few years ago, marketers and marketing teams used to focus on users' desktop, smartphone, smartwatch, or smart TV experiences as individual independent spaces.

With the advent of omnichannel marketing, the focus is more on users rather than platforms. Thus, omnichannel marketing wrapped everything into a single, seamless experience, ensuring the end-user has a similar experience across all platforms.

Not an exaggeration, it's a proven theory:

According to Google, 85% of online shoppers start a purchase on one device and finish on another. Similarly, as per IDC, 85% of enterprise decision-makers say they have a time frame of two years to make significant inroads into digital transformation, failing which, they will fall behind their competitors and suffer financially. Interestingly, almost 51% of companies use at least 8 different channels to communicate with their users.

Omnichannel activity is a consumer habit, and no industry can overlook that and survive in the long run.

How omnichannel marketing worked in 2020:

Marketers using three or more channels in any one campaign earned a 287% higher purchase rate than those using a single-channel campaign.

The number of companies investing in the omnichannel experience has jumped from 20% to more than 80% since 2012. (PWC)

Almost 90% of retail leaders agree a seamless omnichannel strategy is critical to business success. (Research Live)

Who used it before? Did they succeed?

The brand Starbucks is synonymous with coffee. It’s amazing to think how a name has come to embody its core offering, but by looking at the strategy adopted, it is not a mystery anymore.

With its rewards app's help, Starbucks can create amazing omnichannel user experiences. Every user is given a free rewards card. Well, every business does that, so what's so special about it? What if I say you can load your card in a store, on your app, or website via phone, any change in the balance is updated in real-time.

Thus a seamless omnichannel experience improves customer experience and increased brand loyalty.

How to create a perfect omnichannel strategy?

Businesses can retain up to 89% of their customers if their experiences are integrated across different online and offline channels. That's amazing, isn't it? But the question is all about how to create a perfect omnichannel experience. Here it is:

Organize your communication: Make sure that you are telling the same story in the same voice across all channels. Consistency is the key here.

Collaborate your channels: Link all your channels. You should have the same information about your users irrespective of what channel they use.

Leverage Data: Gain insights into your customers and know what they prefer. Combine data across different channels.

Be customer-centric: Personalise user communication per their behavior and automate communication across channels.

Omnichannel Vs. Multi-channel Marketing

Multichannel marketing is a brand's effort to target an audience across different channels. Whereas omnichannel marketing is a step ahead by offering seamless experiences via integrated data irrespective of the user-engaged channel.

In today's scenario, around 46% of organizations are delivering poor multi-channel marketing experiences that end in cart abandonments. However, omnichannel experiences are driving revenues and have been found to retain 89% of the user base.

Also Read: Trends Shaping Future of Omnichannel Engagement in Retail

How Omnichannel Marketing Boosts ROI?

Imagine you want to buy a pair of shoes. You have got 3 options- Store A, Store B, Store C.

Let's assume, Store-A is a brick-and-mortar store with limited stock. Store B is an online store but is not in sync with its nearby physical store to display the available stock. Store-C is another online store that provides updates on nearby physical stores and offers discounts on available stock based on your purchase history and interests. Which store would you prefer to get your shoes from?

Store C seems to have adapted to the latest trends and thus focuses mainly on the customer who buys it rather than the stock to sell. Thus, the ROI of Store C is driven by user experiences rather than physical entities. This is a simple illustration of how omnichannel marketing helps businesses win the game, and ROI follows with no extra effort.

World-famous Brands That Have Mastered Omnichannel Marketing?

Walgreens

A US-based pharmaceutical giant that nailed omnichannel user engagement to make it to Forbes’ highest regarded mobile retail app. The approach is mainly focused on improving users' in-store experience.

Omnichannel marketing strategy of Walgreens:

The app manages user prescriptions; thus refill requests happen on time
Users can find deals on prescribed products in the stores
Orders can be placed on the app and picked from the nearest stores

Crate and Barrel:

A US-based furniture and home decor company that has physical stores across the world along with a digital presence.

Omnichannel marketing strategy of Crate and Barrel:

Crate and Barrel owners found that their users toggle through different channels before they make a purchase.
The app has stored every user interaction. From logins to shopping cart info, everything is recorded across different platforms.
Thus users can take off from where they left off in the shopping process, and this has tremendously increased their ROI

Crate & Barrel website — Image: Crate&Barrel website

Starbucks:

A brand that doesn't need any introduction, The emperor of the coffee retail chain for ages.

Omnichannel marketing strategy of Starbucks:

Firstly, users get a Starbucks loyalty card on their purchase
Reward points are added to the Starbucks card every time they make a payment
The linked app can find nearby stores, curate gifts based on stars gained and also order drinks ahead, update menus, and provide a lot more rewards
Moreover, recent integration with Spotify has enabled users to copy the songs played in the store into their playlists

Adopt Omnichannel Marketing for 2021 with Upshot.ai:

Omnichannel doesn’t just mean catering experiences on different platforms, every simple nudge needs lots of personalization if the communication has to be smooth and something that connects.

Below is how we strengthen brand omnichannel experiences:

Find your audience:

Every customer is unique. Every user's interest matters if we really want them to stay longer. So the first step to take care of before you nudge the users is to find them.

There are different ways to find and segregate users based on preferences. For example, we can use funnels as a filter to segment users at each step. Or we can segment users based on their specific condition or characteristics. Segmenting users based on user characteristics will create persona groups to target, and the rest is left to business preferences on how many channels and how to nudge them. You can segment users based on their platform, app version, or last-used timelines. Thus segmentation is at the core of an omnichannel engagement strategy.

Find their triggers:

Triggers are the user interactions (events) that kickstart the user journey. Find the right interaction point, whether it be a button click or user response, upon which the users can be qualified to be a part of the user journey or campaign.

Build the user journey:

Once we find our audience and their triggers, we are halfway through, and the rest is to define the user journey with conditions and actions.

Know how to nudge:

Upshot suit offers many user actions to nudge users at appropriate times. Via conditional flows, map different user actions so that every user journey is unique. That's what we call “personalized user journeys.” Based on requirements, one can create different journeys for different platforms or the same journey for users who started with the same trigger.

With the available nudges in place, everything is possible just at the click of a button. All we need is a strategy to engage users and a place to execute at ease. That’s where Upshot.ai comes in handy. Omnichannel experiences are more to do with the integration of data across all platforms and the creation of a single user persona. So that a user login becomes the all-important validation irrespective of the platform he/she is using.

In Conclusion:

There are many brands all over the world that have started exploring omnichannel marketing to achieve key goals. Darwin rightly said, "It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to the change".

This applies to current marketing trends as well. To win and stand out in crowded spaces, one needs to adapt to the latest trends, and the superior customer experience provided by a robust omnichannel strategy is here to stay.

Also Read : How analytics can help in customer retention: 2021

Omnichannel Marketing for 2021 and Beyond

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