How to increase sales with omnichannel marketing

One of the biggest challenges facing businesses today is finding new and relevant ways to communicate with their customers. There are so many platforms and marketing methods to consider. Many businesses address this challenge with multichannel marketing which, as its name implies, provides multiple ways to communicate with customers. After all, using different communication methods increases your chances to get through to your audience.

While your business can use multichannel marketing, omnichannel marketing provides more benefits and a larger profit for your business (we’ll explain the difference below). This is because it is adjusted according to each customer, making them the center of the business. In this article, we will cover the benefits of omnichannel marketing while giving you points to implement into your strategy. 

What is omnichannel marketing?

You are probably thinking that it’s just “another buzzword” that doesn’t have any real meaning. Well, we’re here to explain exactly what it is and how you can implement it yourself in order to boost your marketing strategy.

Omnichannel marketing is a marketing method that targets your users on various channels with a seamless message that changes based on their behavior through the sales funnel, providing the ultimate personalized customer experience. Meaning, that everything that you’re customer receives from your brand, no matter what channel they are on, is consistent with past communication and based on their behavior. This kind of unified voice and personalization increases the odds of customers feeling engaged and making purchases.

Here is an example to show you how omnichannel marketing works.

1. The customer visits your website and purchases a product.
2. You launch a sale for similar/complementary products to the one the customer purchased.
3. The customer receives an email or text message to tell them about the sales.

This is just one of many ways that omnichannel marketing works. There are various methods to implement so long as the user has it provides the customer with a seamless and integrated shopping experience. It can include targeted ads, updates, and reminding them if they have an abandoned cart on your website.

 The different approaches will vary depending on both your brand and your customers but they will ultimately all work together to bring key messages to your customers.

The key is to remember that omnichannel marketing focuses on sending a united message from all the brand’s channels. It will provide your customers with the opportunity to have their needs met consistently on all channels. 

Multichannel marketing vs. omnichannel marketing: What’s the difference?

Some people think that multichannel marketing and omnichannel marketing are the same thing. However, there are a few crucial differences that some people may overlook.

Multichannel marketing is simply when a company uses multiple channels to communicate with their customers. This means that the business identifies a message that they want to communicate with their customers and uses all (or some) of their channels to do so. This does not guarantee that the message from all channels will be consistent and relevant for each customer, which could ultimately affect the brand’s image. Omnichannel marketing focuses on the customer to make sure that all of the messages received will always be based on their behavior.

In a nutshell, this is what differentiates between omnichannel and multichannel marketing:

• Omnichannel focuses on the specific customer, multichannel focuses on the general message. 
• Omnichannel adjusts messages based on customer needs, multichannel sends the same message to each customer.
• Omnichannel focuses on having unified channels, multichannel just focuses on having multiple channels, which can cause multiple variations and inconsistencies.

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Overall, while omnichannel marketing is more beneficial, it also requires more of an effort to implement.  It will ultimately prove its worth by providing an integrated experience for your customers.

Does omnichannel marketing really work?

Omnichannel marketing has multiple benefits that will ultimately boost your business and increase customer engagement. According to research done by Omnisend,  Omnichannel campaigns have an 18.69% engagement rate. When you compare this to single-channel’s 5.4%, this is over a 300% increase in engagement rate. 

Now, engagement doesn’t mean more revenue necessarily. However, when comparing single-channel and omnichannel campaigns, campaigns using three channels or more have a 250% higher purchase rate.

This all makes sense when you think of the nature of today’s customer. They bounce between channels when interacting with multiple brands, and with a notable delay, marketers are just beginning to respond to that behavior.

How to implement an omnichannel marketing strategy

While omnichannel marketing seems like a no-brainer, some businesses still struggle to implement it in their marketing strategy. 

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Don’t worry if you’re one of them. As you can see, 89% of marketing professionals do not have a proper omnichannel strategy in place. But, you’re in luck because we’re going to show you exactly how to do it.

1. Make sure that everyone in your company is 100% on board. The whole point of an omnichannel system is to remain consistent, so it’s imperative that anyone touching your marketing strategy knows what’s going on. Inform your people of the changes, why they’re happening, and help them to adjust. This will smooth out the process and make things easier for everyone.

 2.  Review your customer behavior and consider the following questions: 

• What aspects of omnichannel marketing would make things convenient for my customers?
• When is the best time to send messages to my customers?
• How can my channels work together to bring a more integrated experience?

When it comes to reviewing your sales funnel, it’s important to involve external people and request real customer feedback. This will help you to set up an omnichannel marketing strategy that is based on the needs of your actual customers.

3. Appropriately target your customers. A significant part of getting your omnichannel marketing strategy right is targeting and personalization. The best way to do this, of course, is to have a strong data collection system in place.

In addition, we recommend that you segment your audience. It makes it easier to send personalized messages by having smaller groups based on similar traits, such as profile data, campaign engagement, and shopping behavior.

4. Test, analyze and test again. After each campaign, it’s important to measure its performance. Did it do better than the last campaign? Why did it do better or worse? What can you improve in your campaign to improve the results of future campaigns? If you find a way to answer these questions, you can identify ways to make your future campaigns better.

We understand that not every business has the resources to collect data and develop an automated targeting system. But luckily, there are services out there, such as Omnisend, that will provide you with a centralized platform to do it all. 

Takeaways

Omnichannel marketing requires more work than multichannel marketing, but it will be way more beneficial to your business in the end. The adjustment may seem hard at first, but the more you work on your omnichannel strategy, the easier it will become and each adjustment that meets customer needs will increase customer loyalty.

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