Meeting customers where they are is no longer a nice-to-have; today, it’s a must. Omnichannel marketing is all about satisfying customer expectations and streamlining the experience across all channels.
B2C companies know how important it is to stay connected to their audience across multiple touchpoints. Rather than just being present and engaging on multiple channels, omnichannel marketing requires thoughtful cohesion, integration, and personalization that carries throughout the entire customer journey.
So how do you choose the right channels and create a seamless experience that not only draws customers in, but keeps them coming back?
Omnichannel marketing delivers a consistent and personalized experience across every channel—whether it’s social media, email, in-store, or even text messaging.
Research has shown that omnichannel campaigns outperform single-channel by over 3x.
In this blog, we’ll discuss what omnichannel marketing is, best practices for achieving omnichannel marketing excellence, and the best channels to focus on for B2C brands.
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What is omnichannel marketing?
An omnichannel approach aims to create an excellent, effortless, and cohesive customer experience across all channels. Regardless of the channel a customer uses, their experience should be both integrated and consistent.
When developing omnichannel efforts, companies must have the capabilities to market to, sell to, and serve customers across the channels that their customers use.
As consumer expectations have risen, customers expect excellent experiences and instant access to information—no matter what channel they choose to interact with your business.
Omnichannel marketing promotes a business across the right channels and platforms for their audience with cohesive, relevant messaging and branding.
McKinsey research on omnichannel experiences shows that over 50% of B2C customers engage with three to five channels when making a purchase.
This points to the vital importance of creating and unifying effective marketing messaging across channels.
By marketing across channels and platforms, marketing teams can reach their target audience where they are, when they are ready, therefore increasing conversion rates.
Omnichannel marketing also incorporates customer data in a way to optimize messaging and customer experience. For example, crafting emails that are personalized to customer profiles so that the messaging is more personalized.
This optimization should flow throughout the customer journey. Another example: once the customer is engaged with an agent or employee, they should already know who the customer is, what they’ve expressed interest in, and how to best serve them.
Why omnichannel marketing?
Benefits of omnichannel marketing include:
- Greater reach of marketing messages as companies are able to reach consumers wherever they are.
- Improved customer experience (CX) that prioritizes customer needs and preferences, making it effortless to interact with your brand.
- Faster speed to lead by making your brand readily available across channels.
- Increased revenue generation, with research showing 287% higher purchase rates with marketing campaigns that use three or more channels.
- Higher engagement rates; an Omnisend study showed that omnichannel campaigns saw an 18.96% engagement rate, over three times that of single-channel campaigns’ 5.4% engagement rate.
In fact, 70% of marketers say that omnichannel marketing significantly improves ROI.
Omnichannel marketing builds across the customer journey in a way that both understands and predicts customer emotions and pain points.
Building a cohesive omnichannel marketing strategy
With that in mind, omnichannel marketing only produces its best results when efforts are thoughtful, consistent, and cohesive across channels.
There are three vital aspects to consider:
a) Focusing efforts on the right channels. It’s best to limit your efforts to a few channels at first and ensure that the experience is smooth before branching out to more channels.
b) Choosing the correct channels. Be sure to first understand your audience so it’s clear which channels will engage them best, and thus be most effective to focus on.
c) Creating marketing messaging that is consistent across channels. Omnichannel marketing does not work as it should if efforts are not both consistent and integrated; it’s imperative that companies unify messaging, creating a seamless customer experience throughout every channel.
“Many companies try but fail to build an omnichannel experience for every channel and customer. Leaders should instead limit their focus to the top two or three cross-channel customer interactions.”
– Jorge Amar, Raelyn Jacobson, Becca Kleinstein, and Allison Shi, McKinsey & Co
The best marketing efforts, including omnichannel marketing, focus on value.
When crafting effective omnichannel marketing, your team must understand your marketing audience, including their specific needs and priorities. Then, drive value within your marketing as well as your company’s unique customer experience.
Multichannel vs. omnichannel marketing
Many businesses today engage in multichannel marketing, but not yet in omnichannel marketing.
With multichannel marketing, companies aim to reach consumers with their brand, but the experiences on each channel may be different.
For example, most marketers already use multiple channels. A company could have great social media marketing and a beautiful website, use direct mail, and perhaps even SMS marketing—but if these efforts are not consistent, it’s not omnichannel marketing.
Omnichannel puts the customer experience first, unifying the experience and integrating multiple channels. The brand and experience is seamless across channels.
In multichannel, customers can engage with your brand in a variety of ways, but these options are not synchronized in a way that makes interaction seamless across channels.
Across all available channels, omnichannel marketing creates a connected experience.
As omnichannel marketing uses multiple channels, it is a form of multichannel marketing, but multichannel marketing is not necessarily omnichannel marketing.
Integrating omnichannel marketing
As digital marketing evolves and customer expectations rise, omnichannel marketing helps to deliver a modern customer experience that better meets expectations.
Customers expect to receive personalized and consistent messaging across channels.
If you’re creating an offer or promotion, it should be present on every channel so that every customer sees it. If someone starts their customer journey on social media, any agent or employee that they talk to next should have access to prior interactions and conversations to create consistency within the journey.
Best channels for omnichannel marketing
The best channels for omnichannel marketing can be tricky.
It’s important for businesses to hone in on which channels their specific customers prefer the most in order to prioritize omnichannel marketing efforts.
Here are a few of the most common and effective channels and how to use them:
1. Social media. Start targeting your customers where they spend time, as almost all consumers use some form of social media. There are a couple of important things to keep in mind with social media:
- Think about what’s working for your brand and factor in customer data to pinpoint which social media channel is best for your customers. Some products and brands do better on Instagram, while some perform better on Facebook or LinkedIn. This also has to do with your target audience and what they prefer.
- Whatever channels you choose, ensure that you are being consistent across all of them. Be sure to interact with your audience with the same voice, responding to any inquiries in a timely manner. When creating posts, be sure to use branded visuals and colors, as well as consistent messaging across social channels.
2. Email marketing. Emails are great for personalization and keeping your customers up-to-date with your offerings.
- Be sure to segment your email list for different customer profiles. From there, you can tailor topics and messaging for different groups.
- Ensure that messages are consistent between social media and emails. For example, if you send out an offer, broadcast it on both. This way, you’ll get the greatest reach.
3. Website and blog. Ensure your site is user-friendly and optimized—this is a key part of the digital customer experience.
- Keep things error-free, accessible, and easy to navigate.
- Digital assistants can help keep the customer experience smooth and answer any customer questions—just be sure that you choose a quality one that won’t create more frustration.
- Lastly, make sure your branding is consistent across your website, blog, and any other channels you choose.
4. SMS marketing. Open rates for text messages are about 98%, making SMS a highly-engaging marketing channel. A few things to keep in mind:
- While messaging must be consistent across all channels, be sure to tailor your messaging for SMS—keep it short and sweet. As opposed to emails or even social media, SMS messaging will be the shortest.
- Marketing blasts over SMS are likely to be read, but two-way conversations are the most engaging way to use SMS. (Tools like Verse are useful for this!)
- Unless you’re holding a two-way conversation with the customer, don’t text customers more than three times in 24 hours.
Though it is helpful to be present on a variety of channels, don’t rush to add new channels to your strategy without considering your customers first.
Remember, the goal of omnichannel is to add value and streamline the customer experience—not just increase marketing reach.
For this reason, don’t forget to:
- Build omnichannel marketing around your customers and their journey.
- Ensure best practices are in place within each channel before expanding to new ones.
Best practices for omnichannel marketing
There are three best practices for omnichannel marketing that should be employed across every channel.
1. Consistent messaging in omnichannel marketing
Maintain brand voice and message across channels. However, it’s also important to mix it up between channels in the appropriate ways.
It’s important to use consistent overarching messaging across channels, but steer away from repeating word-for-word across channels.
For example, if you have an announcement, it’s great to post on social media and send it out with your email newsletter. For each, the messaging can be the same, but make sure to mix up your wording depending on the platform.
CTAs for different platforms will also be different in order to create a seamless experience. For example, CTAs on your website will be different than on social media. Most of the time, people aren’t going to book a meeting through a public social media post—but they will on your website.
Stay away from copy and pasting or duplicating content. Keep things consistent, clear, and appropriate for the channels you’re using.
2. Data and analytics to optimize performance
Track and use data to measure performance and optimize strategies for each channel, as well as your omnichannel strategy as a whole.
While you should measure success on each channel to make sure your audience is engaged, retained, and growing, don’t forget to analyze the whole strategy.
Ask questions like:
- Where are people starting and ending their customer journeys?
- How many people are completing the journey? If not, where are they dropping off?
- Are people engaging more on one channel than another?
3. Personalization in omnichannel marketing
Omnichannel efforts should personalize the customer experience across channels, including any virtual and in-person appointments.
Customers should receive marketing offers and communications that are tailored to their profile.
Personalize marketing messaging based on known customer data such as purchase history, demographics, and intent.
A study by Adobe and Forrester found that companies that create personalized experiences grew revenue 1.7 times faster and increased customer lifetime value 2.3 times more than other companies in one year.
Personalization in omnichannel marketing requires:
- Creating and matching customer profiles to individuals
- Customer journey mapping to serve the right content at the right time
- Proper technology to track customer behavior and segment customers
- Training for customer-facing employees to ensure that employees understand customer journeys and have access to the correct data at the right time
4. Customer feedback for omnichannel marketing
For successful omnichannel marketing, businesses must understand customer intentions across channels.
It’s vital to listen to customers and adapt based on their feedback, including interactions, behaviors, and preferences.
You can do this through data analysis: looking at customers’ digital behavior and what people are engaging with.
Another helpful way is to ask customers directly through surveys.
If possible, collaborate cross-functionally with customer-facing teams, such as customer service and support, to gain real insight into what customers are saying.
Achieving excellence in omnichannel marketing
By adopting these best practices and leveraging the right channels, you can create an omnichannel marketing strategy that truly resonates with your customers.
Remember, the goal is to provide value while meeting your audience wherever they are.
Whether it’s through engaging social media campaigns, tailored email outreach, or texting, the key is consistency and connection.
At Verse, we’re here to help you elevate your omnichannel efforts and streamline your customer experience.
Verse helps you make the most of your hard-earned marketing leads with instant customer engagement, consistent follow-up, and customizable nurture.
Verse is a fully-managed, AI-enabled SMS platform that handles texting your leads and prospects for you, providing two-way texting and fully-managed, customizable, omnichannel communications.
Ready to connect with more customers effortlessly? Learn more about Verse today.
FAQ: Omnichannel marketing
What is omnichannel marketing?
Omnichannel marketing is a strategy focused on creating a seamless and consistent customer experience across all channels. Whether a customer interacts with your brand via social media, email, SMS, or in-store, their journey should feel integrated and personalized.
How does omnichannel marketing benefit my business?
Omnichannel marketing helps you:
- Reach customers on their preferred platforms.
- Improve customer loyalty through consistent experiences.
- Increase conversion rates with personalized, data-driven messaging.
- Boost ROI, as research shows omnichannel campaigns outperform single-channel efforts by over 3x.
What are the best channels for omnichannel marketing?
The best channels depend on your audience, but common ones include:
- Social media to stay connected with your customer base.
- Email for personalized updates and offers.
- SMS for high open rates and quick communication.
- A user-friendly website for consistent branding and accessibility.
How can I get started with omnichannel marketing?
To start, focus on:
- Understanding your audience and their preferred channels.
- Prioritizing consistent messaging and branding across channels.
- Using data to personalize and optimize customer interactions.
- Starting small with key channels and scaling as your strategy matures.