Leads, prospects, and customers of today move from device to device and from one digital channel to another when interacting with the brands they follow.
Americans use, on average, 4.3 different devices per day to browse the internet. Also, the average number of social media accounts a person has in 2020 is 8.6. Making sure your customers have an excellent experience of your brand on both mobile and desktop devices and all digital channels is vital to your growth and success.
In this article, we look into omnichannel marketing, we’ll understand what it is and how it helps your brand’s lead nurturing and customer retention. We’ll then go over the step-by-step process of creating a long-term omnichannel marketing strategy that creates a seamless user journey across all platforms. Let’s begin!
What is omnichannel marketing, and why is it important?
Omnichannel marketing creates an integrated, consistent brand presence across various digital channels such as website, social media, paid ads, email campaigns, and offline channels such as retail stores, PRs, events, and so on.
The purpose of omnichannel marketing is to create a seamless customer journey through a familiar brand environment on all of these channels.
As customers today use multiple platforms to interact with a brand, it is vital that omnichannel marketing provides a fully optimized customer experience across each.
Also, today’s customers may begin interacting with a brand on one channel – say, their social media page – and continue where they left off in their retail store. What omnichannel must provide is consistency in voice, tone, and messaging when interacting with a customer on both.
A quality omnichannel marketing strategy wins new and retains old customers. It also matters because it:
- Helps create a positive user journey at every stage of the customer lifecycle.
- Reduces customer churn.
- Drives and builds a positive brand reputation.
- Boosts revenue.
Let’s now look into the steps necessary for creating a bullet-proof omnichannel marketing strategy.
Gain an understanding of your target audience and their needs.
You need to understand your audience and their customer journey before creating your omnichannel strategy.
Understanding what motivates your consumers, where they are coming from, what they’re looking for and questions they have is the basis of customer-centric omnichannel marketing.
This is also a vital step in creating a seamless cross-channel experience for your users.
To create a fitting customer journey, do some target audience research by looking into your Google Analytics demographic metrics. Also, gain an understanding of your existing channels’ user experience by walking in your customers’ shoes and posting on your social media channels, clicking through your links and paid ads, and so on.
In general, focus on:
- Your audience’s general pain points and solutions they are looking for.
- The solutions and brands they are already using and endorsing and what their experiences with them are.
- Exploring their purchase behavior, ie. unmet needs, buying motive etc.
- Conducting a survey to learn more about your audience.
Create customer segmentation.
In order to provide a highly personalized customer experience, you need to categorize your target audience into corresponding segments according to their age, level of education, location, income status, specific issues they’re facing, and other criteria.
Segmenting your audience into different groups paves the way for personalized marketing campaigns and messaging you can aim at each group.
Segmentation is an integral part of your omnichannel marketing strategy and every company does it differently, depending on its needs and nature of business.
You may want to perform customer segmentation based on:
- Users who look at certain product page on your website.
- Customers that subscribe to your email newsletters.
- Visitors that haven’t bought anything in months.
- Prospects that abandon their online shopping carts.
A broader audience segmentation includes these categories:
- Demographic: Information such as gender, education, age, family size, occupation, etc.
- Psychographic: Predetermined details such as social class, lifestyle, general attitudes, and tastes.
- Geographical: Your audience’s general location.
- Behavioral: Stats on user behavior, device choices, shopping habits, website usage, etc.
Choose customer-centric tools.
Next, you need to choose tools and utilities that are viable and relevant to your business and are customer-centric.
This is important because these tools will define where marketing changes and updates across all channels will take place.
These tools include:
- Content management systems that let you create and publish content in one place. Content is a vital part of the user journey and your conversion funnel as it educates prospects and offers solutions to their pain points.
- Customer relationship management system (CRM) that nurtures your customer relation efforts, thanks to intelligent help desk solutions, metrics, insights, and feedback about your customers’ behavior online.
- Quantitative and qualitative analytical tools for all your digital marketing analytics needs.
When considering tools that will help you achieve consistency across all touchpoints, don’t forget to include the most vital aspect of an integrated online experience: responsive web design that ensures a unified website experience on laptops and mobile devices.
Personalize your customer experience.
Omnichannel marketing’s personalization must form a coherent narrative across all the channels your business is using.
Having acquired a better understanding of your customers, created segmentations, and adopted the right tools, you need to plan your customer’s experience.
At this point, you need to come up with a detailed plan of how you want them to flow across all the different touchpoints and channels.
Your CRM and social listening data can help you with this strategy: insights into your customers’ online behavior will inform the creation of fitting personalization programs that address their needs.
The customer segmentation you have previously performed will show common behavior patterns for different customer groups. You can tailor your marketing and content to each and send email campaigns with different messaging that hits their spot.
Marketing automation tools will save you considerable time and effort in sending out highly personalized content to your audience.
Finally, you need to train your staff to be highly customer-minded and offer consistent and customized assistance to your prospects and existing customers.
How to boost your ROI with omnichannel marketing?
Omnichannel marketing that provides a best-in-class experience for customers will generate a positive return on investment.
To create such an omnichannel strategy that provides superior customer experience and boosts ROI, bear in mind these four best practices:
- Consistent messaging: Your business messaging must be consistent in tone, style, and copy across all stages of the user journey – from your marketing and sales teams’ pitches to your staff and blogging.
- Integrated and personalized customer experience: A consistency in customer experience improves the customer lifetime value. Different customers interact with a brand in different ways, which is why it is important to be able to deliver a personalized experience to them on multiple touchpoints.
- Data-driven marketing: This will help you understand your target audience and be able to engage with them on all the right channels.
- Continuous communication: Communication continuity guides users across all available channels.
Omnichannel marketing strategy takeaways.
Omnichannel marketing nurtures your brand’s leads and prospects by establishing a unified user journey through consistent messaging and visual identity.
This strategy improves your brand image, boosts revenue, and reduces customer churn while improving user retention and engagement rates.
Every omnichannel marketing strategy should begin with a total understanding of your target audience and their needs, before moving on to customer segmentation, choosing appropriate tools, and personalizing your customers’ experience.
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