Omnichannel Marketing: How to Get Started for Ecommerce?

We’ve all heard people throw around the phrase “omnichannel marketing,” but you may not understand how exactly an omnichannel approach differs from the usual multichannel marketing. In fact,

What Is Omnichannel Marketing? 

Omnichannel marketing is designed around creating a seamless experience for your customers that integrates their actions across a range of platforms. Each of these websites, apps and other areas of interaction support your brand’s message. 

The consumer of 2019 is omnichannel by nature. They are bouncing between channels without even being conscious of the fact that they’re doing so. All the while, they’re interacting with brands expecting their customer experience to be unified and relevant. 

This is because omnichannel is where marketing was always destined to go. Once we began blurring the lines between digital and brick-and-mortar, omnichannel was an unavoidable eventuality. 

This makes it easy for new leads to engage with your business across both physical and digital media while consistently moving through the sales cycle. While omnichannel marketing is similar to multichannel marketing, there are a few key differences that are important to highlight. 

Multichannel vs. Omnichannel Marketing 

Both multichannel and omnichannel marketing involves customer interactions across a range of platforms, but only an omnichannel approach connects those platforms and allows changes in one to reflect on the others. 

Think of multichannel as putting the brand at the centre of the strategy. That brand reaches out to customers across several channels like an octopus. While the brand is conscious of what each of those tentacles is doing, each tentacle isn’t conscious of what the other is doing. 

This means that a customer might interact with the brand on one channel, and at the next channel no longer have a relevant message because the two channels aren’t communicating with each other. 

In omnichannel marketing, the octopus is replaced by a circle with the customer in the centre, where they belong. Each of these channels communicates with each other, so after a customer interaction, they automatically update their next message. So when the customer interacts with the next message, they’ll have a relevant message triggered based on how they interacted with the previous channel, regardless of the next channel used. 

A purchase made on your web store, for example, will change which ads are shown to that user on every platform they use. This encourages a holistic strategy in which every time a customer interacts with your brand further personalizes the way ads are tailored. 

The Benefits of Omnichannel Marketing 

Multichannel marketing is a great way to step up your marketing strategies, but omnichannel marketing can take those tactics even further and maximize your return on investment. 

Research indicates that omnichannel marketing is the best form of customer outreach and consistently delivers better results than a simple multichannel approach. You’ll notice consistent improvement as you implement more and more omnichannel principles into your marketing tactics. 

Image Source: moosend

In fact, Omnisend recently published the 2019 Omnichannel Marketing Automation Statistics Report, which cited some interesting benefits to adopting an omnichannel marketing strategy. Not only does is engagement higher for marketers using three or more channels in their campaigns, but the purchase rate jumps by 250%. 

In fact, customers appreciate an omnichannel strategy so much that they spend more too: customers who interact with an omnichannel campaign end up spending 13% more on average. 

Customers interacting with these campaigns don’t just spend more, they’re more likely to become loyal customers. Brands using three or more channels in their campaigns enjoy a 90% higher customer retention rate than brands using just one channel. 

Getting Started with Omnichannel Marketing 

Given the benefits of omnichannel marketing, it’s no surprise that you might look into how to start becoming more omnichannel yourself. 

Once you’ve decided to utilize the potential of omnichannel marketing, the next step is looking for ways to streamline and optimize your strategies. These are some of the most effective tips for companies starting out with omnichannel marketing. 

Omnichannel marketing isn’t going away anytime soon, and it’s crucial to integrate these strategies into your campaigns in order to stay ahead of the competition. These tips are a great way to move your business toward an omnichannel approach. 

It might seem complicated to do, however, there are far more omnichannel tools today that make this strategy more accessible to retailers that aren’t Amazon. 

By putting your customer first, targeting, and testing, you can create an omnichannel marketing strategy that’s sure to build a loyal customer base for your e-commerce brand.