A quick guide on how to build a successful omnichannel marketing strategy, delivering seamless customer experiences across all touchpoints.
If you sell online, it’s pretty likely that you’ve already heard the term ‘omnichannel’, but what exactly does it mean? Much more than just an eCommerce buzzword, omnichannel describes a holistic approach to marketing that aims to create a seamless and integrated customer experience across all of your brand’s touchpoints. Bringing together digital channels such as online stores, websites, mobile apps, social media, and email marketing, as well as offline channels including physical stores, phone calls, and even direct mail, the approach can provide a consistent and personalised experience wherever and whenever a customer interacts with your business.
For instance, a customer browsing your online store might receive a personalised email with a discount code, subsequently visit a brick-and-mortar store, and find that the in-store customer advisor can access their browsing history and offer personalised recommendations.
As such, omnichannel marketing depends on a deep understanding of customer behaviour as well as robust software systems that can connect data across all channels. By leveraging relevant, timely customer data and integrating online and offline touchpoints, businesses can deliver a truly personalised and engaging experience that nurtures customer loyalty, uplifts conversion, and ultimately drives business growth.
This brief guide will empower you to put together your own omnichannel strategy, but before we get started, let's explore some essential terms…
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) - Relied on by many big brands and retailers looking to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty, a CRM is a digital system that’s used to manage customer interactions and data across the entire customer lifecycle.
Single Customer View (SCV) - This is used to describe a 360° profile of each of your customers that combines all data from a wide range of sources, such as a CRM, social channels, email marketing data, and analytics platforms.
Touchpoints - Every interaction that a customer has with a brand - including everything from online store visits and social media engagement, right through to customer emails, phone calls, in-store experiences, and more - are often described as touchpoints.
Hyper-Personalisation - This is a type of advanced personalisation that makes use of vast amounts of real-time data, AI, and machine learning to empower online retailers to tailor their marketing messages, shopping experiences, and promotional offers to individual customers.
Attribution - If you’re involved in digital marketing campaigns, you’ll already be familiar with this term, as it describes the process of identifying and measuring the impact of different marketing channels and touchpoints across a customer journey. Attribution usually highlights which actions and campaigns most significantly contribute to sales and/or conversions.
Conversational Commerce - This is a customer-centric approach to shopping that leverages AI-powered conversations to guide buyers through their purchasing journey with your brand. This can involve chatbots, messaging apps like WhatsApp, or voice assistants such as Alexa, enabling personalised interactions and removing buyer friction.
Customer Data Platform (CDP) - A CDP is a software solution that collects, consolidates, and manages customer data from a range of diverse sources to create a single, comprehensive customer profile.
Real-Time Data Processing - This describes the immediate collection and analysis of data to enable dynamic responses to customer actions, allowing retailers to deliver personalised experiences such as instant chat support, targeted offers, and customer-centric website content.
Online-to-Offline (O2O) - This is a shorthand way to describe marketing strategies that bridge the gap between the digital and physical worlds, seamlessly connecting online experiences such as browsing an online store or retail app, with offline actions such as in-store pickups, product trials, and offline events.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) - Used across a wide range of industries, KPIs are measurable values that summarise the success of projects, campaigns, and strategies. When looking at omnichannel activities, they can include metrics such as customer retention rate, average order value, customer lifetime value, website traffic, conversion rates, and social media engagement.
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)- Often relied on by large-scale businesses, an ERP is an integrated software system designed to manage core business functions, such as finance, HR, and inventory.
The terms ‘omnichannel’ and ‘multichannel’ are sometimes - mistakenly - used interchangeably, and although both approaches aim to engage shoppers across multiple platforms, the key difference is how these channels are interconnected.
In multichannel marketing, brands use various platforms to promote products and services, but each channel operates independently. While this can be hugely effective, managing channels in isolation can sometimes create a fragmented customer experience. For example, a shopper might see an ad for shoes on Instagram, receive an email from the same brand promoting shoes they’re not interested in, and then discover that the prices on the online store don’t match the prices shown in the ad and email. This not only risks frustrating customers, but can also cost your business all-important sales.
Omnichannel marketing, on the other hand, is much more strategic and aims to connect all customer touchpoints - both online and offline. For example, a customer might browse shoes online, receive a personalised email with a discount code, and then visit a brick-and-mortar store, where the sales assistant is already aware of their preferences and size. Seamless and effective.
In short, while multichannel marketing focuses on maximising reach and revenue through various platforms, omnichannel marketing prioritises a consistent, familiar and personalised experience across all channels.
Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you create and execute a revenue-boosting omnichannel strategy. While achieving omnichannel excellence takes a lot of time, effort, and ongoing refinement, implementing key principles now will lay the foundation for long-term success, ultimately helping you to build customer loyalty in a highly competitive market.
1. Map the customer journey
Understanding your customers’ journey - covering everything from initial brand discovery right through to post-purchase - is an essential element of omnichannel marketing. By meticulously mapping out how shoppers engage with your brand at every step of the way, you can gain invaluable insights into their needs, preferences, and pain points. This involves identifying every interaction a customer has with your brand, from initial awareness to aftercare, and gathering as much relevant information as possible to paint a clear picture of the complete purchasing process.
To really understand your customers:
Carry out regular customer research through surveys, interviews, and data analysis to understand shopper behaviour, as well as their preferences and barriers to purchase.
Frequently analyse and leverage CRM data, marketing analytics, and social media insights to identify key touchpoints for your brand.
Use attribution tools to understand how each marketing channel and/or touchpoint influences customer decisions.
Create visual maps (Post-It notes are a great starting point!) that outline the customer experience across all channels and touchpoints, highlighting key interactions and areas for improvement.
2. Create a single source of truth
Another crucial omnichannel step is bringing together customer data from all channels into a single source, which involves plugging info from platforms such as CRM systems, analytics tools, social media apps, and point-of-sale systems into a central hub. The unified data view offers a much more in-depth understanding of each of your customers, capturing their interactions, preferences, purchase history, and online behaviour. By centralising this data, you can refine and tailor your marketing efforts, develop more personalised connections with your customers, and ensure consistency across all touchpoints.
To centralise your customer data:
Invest in a CDP that’s specifically designed to collect, unify, and manage customer data from diverse sources, providing a real-time, 360-degree view of each individual.
Integrate data from all channels and ensure seamless data flow between all touchpoints, including online and offline channels, to create a complete and accurate customer profile.
Maintain data quality by regularly cleaning, deduplicating, and enriching customer data to ensure accuracy and reliability.
Utilise the data insights to personalise marketing campaigns, improve customer service, and make data-driven decisions that enhance the customer experience.
3. Bring together your brand messaging
A cohesive brand experience is essential, and in line with the golden circle marketing theory, the ‘why’ behind what you do should be evident across every channel. To build trust and strengthen recognition, ensure your brand voice and values are reflected consistently across all touchpoints, from website copy and social media posts to in-store experiences and customer service interactions.
To cultivate a unified voice and experience:
Develop clear brand guidelines that document your brand’s voice, tone, visual identity, and key messaging principles to ensure consistency across channels, while taking care to avoid monotonous repetition. Remember that the message should always be the same, however the words can vary.
Train your team to ensure all employees, from marketing and sales to customer service, genuinely understand and radiate your brand.
Carry out regular brand audits and review all touchpoints to ensure consistency, identify areas for improvement, and make changes and improvements where needed.
4. Create a connected ecosystem
Seamlessly linking your marketing channels and operational systems is at the heart of a successful omnichannel strategy, as it ensures that shoppers can enjoy a frictionless experience, even when switching between online and offline touchpoints. Whether customers are browsing your eCommerce site, interacting with your brand on social media, or shopping in-store, every interaction should feel interconnected and consistent.
To link your channels and systems:
Integrate online and offline systems such as your eCommerce platform, CRM, POS systems, and other relevant technologies to enable data sharing and build a single customer view.
Offer consistent experiences across all channels, including synchronised product availability and pricing, however remember to customise CTAs so they’re channel-appropriate.
Utilise conversational commerce by enabling customers to initiate and continue conversations across different channels (e.g. start a chat online and continue it over the phone).
Make sure your ERP system integrates smoothly with your brand’s eCommerce, CRM, and inventory management platforms to ensure consistent product availability and pricing across both online and offline touchpoints.
5. Personalise every touchpoint
Hyper-personalisation is key to delivering meaningful and engaging experiences. By leveraging customer data and going beyond basic segmentation, you can create tailored messages, offers, and interactions that resonate with individual preferences and needs. From personalised product recommendations to targeted promotions, every touchpoint offers an opportunity to not only streamline the purchasing journey but also make customers feel genuinely valued.
To tailor the customer experience:
Leverage data from your CDP and other sources to segment customers and personalise interactions, focusing on demographics, purchase history, browsing behaviour, and other relevant factors.
Harness the power of AI and machine learning to recommend products and services in real-time based on individual customer preferences.
Deliver personalised messages across all channels that are more likely to engage and create stronger connections with shoppers.
6. Automate for scalability
Automation is an absolute game-changer for omnichannel marketing, and will empower you to manage multiple channels and touchpoints much more efficiently. By automating key tasks, retailers can maintain on-brand messaging, save time, and provide a smoother, more aligned experience for customers while also scaling up operations.
To streamline your omnichannel efforts:
Invest in marketing platforms that can automate tasks such as email campaigns, social media scheduling, and targeted customer messaging.
Use smart chatbots for customer support to provide instant assistance through automated interactions, helping resolve common queries and frequently asked questions around the clock.
Streamline your order fulfilment process by automating inventory tracking, order processing, and shipping to not only ensure timely deliveries but also consistent, on-brand messaging.
7. Measure and refine
As with any marketing strategy, regular evaluation and refinement of your omnichannel approach is vital. By measuring KPIs and analysing customer feedback, you can adjust your strategy and ensure that it remains aligned with evolving customer needs and your broader business goals.
To track and optimise your strategy:
Ready to get started?
Building a successful omnichannel strategy is an ongoing journey, but the rewards – increased customer loyalty, higher revenue, and a stronger brand – are well worth the effort.
By following the steps outlined in this guide, you can lay the foundation for an omnichannel approach that delivers seamless and personalised experiences across all touchpoints.
It might seem overwhelming, but you don't have to go it alone. Visualsoft can help you every step of the way. Our team of eCommerce experts has the knowledge and experience to guide you in developing and implementing a winning omnichannel strategy - contact us today for a free consultation and discover how we can help you unlock the full potential of omnichannel marketing.
Kickstart your omnichannel strategy with Visualsoft here.