Nowadays, are you aware that a huge number of shoppers swing across multiple channels at a time? Yes, they don’t only swing across shops, they swing across multiple channels while shopping as well. In most cases, shoppers end up buying stuff online, even while present in a queue at a retail store. This is the reason why most retailers have gotten to recognize and utilize omnichannel marketing for their respective businesses.
Retailers have now been enlightened that to be at the top, they need to offer consistent and quality services to their customers in a way that is convenient for them. As a retailer, it’s high time you got in touch with omnichannel marketing and utilize it in improving your customer experience and boost your ROI as well.
Omnichannel marketing, being a regular topic among today’s marketers, you might have heard about it, or not. However, in this article, you will be reading through all you need to know about omnichannel marketing and automation.
What Is Omnichannel Marketing?
Omnichannel marketing is known to be marketing across various channels, aimed at providing consistent, and convenient shopping for customers. Still don’t get it? The idea is to create customer-centric communication with your target customers by utilizing various channels including emails, push notifications, etc.
In most cases, multichannel and omnichannel marketing get confused with each other, but they shouldn’t. However, irrespective of how similar they are, the two marketing strategies are different from each other. Similar to omnichannel marketing, multichannel marketing uses various channels for marketing alone. The top priority of multichannel marketing is offering choices for consumers, and not offering consistent shopping.
Omnichannel marketing is bound to a similar concept, and it doesn’t necessarily suggest using all the available communication channels. Omnichannel marketing and automation involve utilizing the channels so that each of them becomes part of a whole shopping experience.
Building An Omnichannel Marketing And Automation Strategy
Reviewing how most businesses created a strong omnichannel marketing and automation strategy to improve their customer experience, you will be able to see that certain guidelines were followed. Via websites, mobile apps, etc, various successful businesses have made it more convenient for customers to purchase items, book services, and so on, without queuing up to be attended to. Before you create a strong omnichannel marketing and automation experience, you should as well have an excellent strategy.
Plan The Customer Experience
Get to know your target customer’s channels, as well as their behaviors on all channels, then you map out a detailed plan based on the customer experience at all points.
Utilize Database While Strategizing
With the aid of online search results from customers, you will be able to know the behavior of your customers and provide solutions to their respective needs. You might as well minimize the churn by using the provided data properly.
Segment And Personalize The Journey
As you have gone through the provided data, you can now place users in the category they belong to based on their behavior. By doing that, you can easily personalize the interaction for each of your subscribers.
Be Right With The Context
The context is a critical aspect of an omnichannel marketing and automation strategy. An audience receiving the wrong message at an inappropriate time might make the users not engage with you. Be sure the context you wish to send aligns with the user’s activity and send it at appropriate times, mostly at active hours.
Choose The Right Marketing And Automation Tools
Utilize the right marketing and automation tools to carry out your strategy from start to finish. Be sure you conduct thorough research before choosing the one best for you.
Your Business Should Be Customer-Centric
This is a very crucial step to be considered, because, with untrained employees that are not able to provide consistent customer experience, there’s no kind of strategy that might help you.
Benefits Of Omnichannel Marketing And Automation
Various benefits can be derived from omnichannel marketing and automation. Ranging from convenience to brand improvement, let’s look at what omnichannel marketing and automation have to offer to our businesses.
Makes Things Convenient For Subscribers
For omnichannel marketing and automation to work for you, you are required to create a strong communication medium that would let you freely communicate with subscribers on various channels, at all stages of the journey. With that, vital information from you will be received by your subscribers in the most convenient manner.
Let’s You Keep In Touch With Customers
If the phone number and email address were provided by customers, then you will be able to reach them via emails and SMS. Your customers are likely to view and read these messages via their desktops when working or from mobile phones while going home, during breaks, evenings, or on weekends. Credits to omnichannel marketing and automation, your promotional emails and SMS is likely not to slide unnoticed.
Reduces The Chances Of Losing Subscribers
In most cases, some subscribers may not be active on their respective channels for a while, don’t freight, this doesn’t necessarily mean that they have been lost forever. Even if a subscriber starts using a different phone number, you will still be able to reach out to them via their emails. Applicable to if a subscriber starts using a new email, you can reach them via their phone numbers.
Makes The Brand Reach Out To The Public Easily
With omnichannel marketing and automation, you will be able to reach out to people who are active on any chosen marketing channel with appropriate messages, which in turn boost sales and revenue.
Offers Better Automation Possibilities
You will be able to automate your marketing by utilizing all the available data you have on your customers in your automation system. This is best for customers, given that they can interact with your brand via available channels and select the ones best for them.
Integrated Channels Available For Omnichannel Marketing And Automation
Using Emails seems to be easier, but it doesn’t make it less effective. Also, email is not the only available channel for reaching out to customers about your business. As of today, business brands use multiple channels such as Viber, SMS, various social media platforms, and emails as well to reach out to subscribers concerning their offers.
A key point to note here is that there’s no sort of competition going on among these marketing channels. Customers who provide their email address will receive emails from the brand, as well as opt-in Viber users, and customers who didn’t provide their email addresses or don’t use Viber will get notified via SMS. This way, a brand can notify all obtained contacts. This is a great way businesses use omnichannel marketing and automation to boost their revenue as well as transactions.
Adopt Omnichannel Marketing And Automation Strategy For Your Business
Starting with omnichannel marketing and automation is as simple as choosing a marketing platform that is best for your business. Getting started? Here are things to look for in a marketing and automation channel platform:
- Go for platforms that let you personalize interaction with customers.
- Platforms that provide marketing campaigns.
- Platforms that can create customer profiles.
- Platforms that collects all necessary data
- Platforms that see all customers being valued.
However, you should make time to analyze your customer journey. Go through the data you have acquired and try as much as you can to learn more about your customers. With that done, then go for platforms that help customers interact properly with your brand.
Conclusion
To create a strong omnichannel marketing and automation strategy, businesses should adopt various channels like emails, Viber, SMS, and various social media platforms, as earlier said. There are no mandatory rules in regards to the tools businesses should utilize and how they should use them, but it all depends on the kind of business you run, as well as your target audience.
However, the idea is to be creative enough to have a better approach to customer interaction. As of today, customers can interact with businesses via emails, social media, websites, etc. But in reality, customers make use of few channels to interact with businesses, given that it’s convenient enough for them. Hence, businesses should adopt more channels to their marketing and automation strategy to be able to reach out to a better audience. This is why they need our expert team at thinkprile to help them break down their omnichannel marketing and automation so they can get more out of their brand.
