As technology continues to blur the line between online and offline interactions, omnichannel marketing aims to enhance consumer experiences across all of the physical and digital channels customers use to interact with brands.

But simply catering to the many ways people connect with your business is not enough to create a cohesive and dynamic customer journey. Gaps and inconsistencies can hinder business growth and create uneven experiences.

To make an impact and reap the benefits, your brand needs to implement an omnichannel marketing strategy that takes best practices and future trends into account.

What Is Omnichannel Marketing?

So, what is omnichannel marketing and why is it necessary? Put simply, omnichannel marketing is a strategic effort to coordinate a business’s presence across both online and offline channels.

Brands that excel at omnichannel marketing offer seamless connected experiences , such as live web and text chat support alongside physical and hybrid experiences like ordering products online to pick up in-store.

What Are the Benefits of Omnichannel Marketing

Now let’s answer the question “What is omni channel marketing?” in terms of the benefits it provides.

omnichannel marketing rewards businesses for creating a cohesive, customer-centric approach across diverse channels. Here’s how. 

Enhanced Customer Experience

Don’t underestimate the power of ease and convenience. Making the customer journey as smooth and hassle-free as possible greatly contributes to customer satisfaction and stickiness. 

Improved Brand Consistency

omnichannel marketing reinforces your brand identity and makes relationship-building easier. With unified messaging and branding across all touchpoints, your customers can truly understand and resonate with your business rather than feeling confused or indifferent. 

Optimized Data-Driven Decision Making

Informed decisions are impactful decisions. Leverage rich customer data from key channels (analyzed at scale) to tailor your marketing strategy for optimized results.

 Increased Customer Engagement

Having an engaging conversation hinges on understanding and responding to an individual’s interests and needs — and omni channel marketing is based on the same principles. Gaining insight into customer behavior allows you to stimulate engaging interactions that lead to more dialogue (and more business).

Stronger Relationships

Personalized experiences lead to higher customer satisfaction, cultivating loyalty and making your brand a mangent for repeat business. 

Sales and Revenue Growth

A cohesive omnichannel approach simplifies the purchasing process, among other things. This increases ease boosts conversion rates by removing excuses for consumers to drop-off before buying.

Essential Building Blocks of Omnichannel Marketing

Creating Consistent Content and Interactions

An effective omnichannel strategy fosters consistency by prioritizing serving up the right content, to the right person, at the right time, via the right channel. There are several variables to consider, especially with consumers routinely engaging in an overlapping blend of digital and physical interactions. Without the right tools and a data-driven approach, there’s a wide margin for error. 

Personalizing the Customer Experience

While consistency is an essential component of omnichannel marketing, so is the quality of what you’re delivering. By creating a personalized experience for your customers, your business ensures they receive high-quality, relevant content tailored to their individual needs and preferences — whether they’ve explicitly stated them or not. 

By using customer experience signals for marketing, you can leverage real-time data to track, understand, and optimize the customer journey at every stage with a high level of specificity and intentionality. 

Ensuring Brand Consistency

What is omni channel marketing without brand consistency? Imagine that each touchpoint is a piece of the puzzle that makes up your entire brand. If the pieces are mismatched, the picture never quite comes together. Inconsistency risks leaving your customers confused and unsatisfied.

Implementing an Omnichannel Strategy

Before elevating customer engagement and driving business growth through omnichannel marketing, you need a fundamental understanding of the customer journey. Without knowing the ins and outs, you’ll struggle with implementation and risk squandering precious time and resources. 

1. Understand Your Customers

Market dynamics are always shifting. Your target audience is made up of complex individuals with different needs, preferences, and motivations. Developing a comprehensive understanding of your customers while navigating shifting market dynamics will require gathering data from multiple sources, including: 

• Market research: Leaders go beyond capturing basic demographic information to collect real-time insights across customer segments
• Surveys: For gathering direct customer feedback  to shed light on customer needs and expectations
• Signal analysis: Bring together customer insights from across sources — from online reviews to customer support interactions — to get a clear picture of the customer experience 
• Behavioral intelligence: Use digital customer experience technology to understand how your company’s web and app experiences are affecting engagement, sentiment, and conversions
• Social listening: Get a snapshot of how customers and consumers really feel 

2. Identify Key Channels

Identify the channels where customers are already interacting with you and where those channels overlap with one another, and evaluate the customer experience of users interacting with your brand using these channels. 

3. Determine Customer Touchpoints

In omni channel marketing, customer touchpoints range from online checkout processes to customer services interactions over the phone. Conduct an audit to determine each customer touchpoint in the customer journey and flag any areas that are inconsistent or need improvement.

In an audit, you might discover conflicting brand messaging, broken links on your website, long waits for customer support, poor mobile optimization, and lack of payment options in-store. Identifying these areas are the first steps to improving them. 

4. Segment Your Audience

Another way to put the data you’ve gathered on your customers to good use is through segmentation. Segmenting your audience based on specific, detailed criteria such as behavior analysis, preferences, and other demographic information, will allow you to tailor the omnichannel experience more effectively.

5. Create Personalized Experiences

Understanding the distinct characteristics of each segment allows you to develop personalized experiences that resonate, captivate, and engage. By aligning with the specific needs and preferences of each buyer, you’ll enhance their experience at every stage of their journey. 

Research shows that 61% of consumers are willing to spend more money with a business offering customized experiences — with a whopping 82% confirming that personalized experiences influence the brand they choose at least half the time when shopping.

It’s safe to say that a personalized approach is an expectation, not a nice-to-have. 

6. Ensure Consistency

Consistency is critical, especially when it comes to omni channel marketing. No matter which device your customer is using or what channel they’re frequenting, they expect the same seamless experience — so make sure you’re delivering it. Consistency is key to building trust and reinforcing your brand’s identity for more engaged and satisfied customers. 

Best Practices for omnichannel Marketing

We’ve answered the question “What is omnichannel marketing?” and helped lay the groundwork for implementation based on a comprehensive understanding of your customers. Now it’s time to set the stage for a sustainable process of continuous customer engagement.

The following best practices will help integrate omnichannel marketing into your business operations to drive growth.

Add an Omnichannel Customer Experience Management Solution to Your Marketing Tools

Leverage a comprehensive platform to unlock end-to-end optimization of the customer journey. The tool you choose should integrate customer interactions across all touchpoints to ensure your business has a unified view of the customer experience.

With omnichannel data capture and analysis capabilities, a customer experience management platform allows businesses to optimize interactions with customers across various digital and in-person channels like email, social media, mobile, in store, and more. It’s a game-changer for understanding customer motivations while streamlining operations and personalizing experiences.  

Integrate All Channels

Whether someone walks into your store, follows your business on social media, or browses your website, your messaging, branding, and customer service should be consistent. Get aligned on both marketing and sales channels for an elevated omnichannel experience.

Use Data and Analytics

As we’ve explored, data fuels any high-performing omnichannel marketing strategy. Use AI-powered analytics to make informed decisions with tools like Text Analytics and Speech Analytics, which allow you to parse customer interactions for meaningful insights and take data-driven action in the moment at scale.

Whether interpreting large quantities of written feedback, customer service chat conversations, online reviews, and more, or shedding light on agent performance over the phone at contact centers, these advanced tools help you ensure every interaction informs your strategy and next actions — without hours of toil.

Create Personalized Customer Journeys

Through the power of customer data and segmentation, your business can offer targeted and relevant content at every stage of the journey as part of your omnichannel marketing strategy. 

Crafting a personalized customer journey can look like a product recommendation based on browsing habits to customized email campaigns that hit customers’ inboxes at just the right moment. What matters is that you target your interactions so they’re relevant to the stage your customer is at. 

Prioritize the Digital Experience

Even primarily brick-and-mortar businesses need to contend with the fact that the digital experience is central to customer interaction and revenue growth. A comprehensive digital experience strategy should aim to integrate various touchpoints without introducing friction or clunkiness. There should be smooth transitions from websites to mobile apps and beyond.

Whether it’s empowering visitors to complete tasks efficiently online (thereby reducing call volumes) or creating a pipeline of loyal customers, prioritizing the digital experience can increase retention and advocacy, ultimately driving business growth. 

It’s not only about crafting an online presence, but creating intuitive, personalized experiences in real-time to engage and convert digital visitors. 

Orchestrate Omnichannel Customer Journeys

Experience orchestration turns customer data into transformative, personalized journeys that integrate interactions across all channels for a cohesive experience. Omnichannel feedback is captured to conduct an in-depth, contextualized analysis that lets businesses respond to customer needs in real-time for the biggest impact.

Experience orchestration benefits include driving leads and sales, better upselling, proactive outreach opportunities for customers at risk of churning, and easier insights-sharing across teams. Understanding this customer-centric approach can boost operational efficiency, enhance business outcomes, reduce service costs, and foster strong, long-term customer relationships.

Case Study: Rent-a-Center Increases Sales by Focusing on the Omnichannel Customer Experience

Rent-a-Center operates in the retail space, with over 2,400 stores across the US, Puerto Rico, and Mexico, serving over a million customers. The brand also employs over 17,000 people. That’s a lot of moving parts.

By harnessing the power of Medallia’s omnichannel customer experience tools to gain a deeper understanding of the customer experience across all touchpoints, Rent-a-Center vastly improved both sales and performance. Here’s a sampling of the brand’s impressive results:

• 54% increase in Net Promoter Score® (NPS), a significant and measurable increase in customer satisfaction and loyalty.
• 19% growth in customer base, achieved by leveraging insights from customer feedback across several channels.
• 28% higher sales in top-performing stores, demonstrating that locations with the highest customer satisfaction outperformed others in year-over-year growth

Future Trends in Omnichannel Marketing

As the omnichannel marketing landscape is one of constant evolution and flux, it’s important to not only stay on top of current trends, but be prepared for future ones. Here’s what we see on the horizon.

Digital Experience

As we touched on, the boundary between physical and digital customer experiences continues to blur. Brands will need to increasingly focus on optimizing online and in-app experiences to cater to consumers who prefer researching, comparing, and/or purchasing products online. If you fall behind on delivering seamlessly personalized digital experiences it will be difficult to catch up and compete — especially with leading brands.

Customer Loyalty

To nurture your customers’ commitment to your brand, you need to make the experience of interacting with your brand as streamlined, intuitive, and satisfying as possible. Integrating omnichannel marketing into your business operations will simplify the customer journey and make customers come back again and again for the same consistent, elevated experience.

Connected Experiences

Connected experiences are the harmonious integration of customer interactions online, in-app, and in-person. These represent the future of omni channel marketing, where all facets of a business work together to create a unified experience. To create connected experiences, start by breaking down organizational silos, incentivizing collaboration across all departments, and leveraging AI and data analytics for predictive, personalized customer interactions. 

AI and the Omnichannel Experience

Contrary to popular belief, using AI can unlock a more human touch and will continue to supercharge omnichannel marketing by automating data analysis and personalizing customer interactions across channels. 

Artificial intelligence — by which we mean techniques like machine learning, natural language processing, and predictive analytics — helps brands efficiently transform customer feedback and behavioral signals into context-aware responses that ensure each interaction is relevant and personalized. Leveraging AI technology and striking a balance between automation and personalization will allow your business to scale while working smarter, not harder.

Medallia Is Your Secret Weapon for Optimizing the Omnichannel Experience

An omni channel marketing approach — built on the pillars of visibility, measurement, personalization, and optimization — is essential for growth in today’s digital-forward market. 

Medallia offers the expertise and innovative solutions necessary for creating a robust omnichannel strategy to ensure a seamless customer experience. Connect with a Medallia expert today to find out what steps your team can take to fuel your omnichannel customer experience and accelerate customer and financial outcomes..