Today, customers need a variety of touchpoints across several channels trustworthy enough to purchase. With customers becoming more and more omnichannel in their shopping habits, online stores and retailers need to adapt and offer omnichannel strategies.
But how can brands create a truly omnichannel experience? How do you create an experience that personalizes its messages based on how your customer interacts with your brand?
This guide will explain what omnichannel marketing is, why it matters, and three steps to help a business implement it into their digital marketing strategy.
What is Omnichannel Marketing?
With all the sales jargon in the market, it can be easy to get things mixed up, especially when it comes to multichannel vs omnichannel marketing. Multichannel marketing is when a business uses two or more channels to interact and communicate with their customers and leads. The company analyzes customer data and uses that information to tell the various channel teams what they need to share with their channel users.
However, multichannel marketing employs its channels in a way that is segmented and siloed. In contrast, omnichannel marketing channels adapt in real-time to the way customers interact with individual channels, personalizing the experience.
While both omnichannel and multichannel marketing utilize multiple channels to interact with customers, the omnichannel option uses those interactions to determine what it should send to them. This way, you can implement different tools for text messages, emails, and other channels to send the most relevant information to your customers based on where they are in their customer journey.
In essence, multichannel marketing has the company dictate what is sent through its channels, while omnichannel marketing has the customers guide the channel through the use of automated software. This will help to curate a better experience since omnichannel software can identify the optimal messaging for them based on data and workflows.
Why It Matters
The biggest draw of omnichannel marketing is its use of automated software to streamline channels for your business and customers. Since you need to contact your customers on various channels, automation can handle them for you. This leads to multiple benefits for your business.
As shown in the image above, people view saving time, lead generation, and an increase in revenue as the three biggest benefits provided by marketing automation. Since omnichannel marketing uses automation software, it will also give you these benefits. Each one can help your business in a different way.
- Saving time: as the software handles messaging, you can have your employees work on other things.
- Lead generation: automatically find new people that you can invite to interact with your channels.
- Increase in revenue: most businesses strive to grow and make a higher ROI!
As you use omnichannel marketing, you can send relevant messages and invites to your leads and customers. This then allows them to see what your business offers, how it can benefit them, and why they should make a purchase.
Three Steps for Implementation
Now that you recognize the importance of omnichannel marketing, you might want to know how you can prepare your business to implement a strategy. After all, just buying the software won’t help your business: you need to identify what you want to do with it and manage your software spends too. We have three steps to help you implement it.
- Communicate and Discuss
First, your business should spend some time communicating internally to make decisions concerning your omnichannel marketing strategy. Take the time to meet and communicate with your managers, marketing teams, and anyone else affected by digital marketing. This way, you can ensure that everyone understands the new strategy and their roles in the process.
Since nearly 75 percent of employees miss out on the most important pieces of information, you need to make sure that you minimize this in your own company. Take the time to ensure that everyone knows what’s going on. This way, they can ask questions to avoid misunderstandings while giving you suggestions to improve the strategy.
Remember that each of your teams has valuable experience with marketing, so make sure that you listen to their ideas. Take the time to talk with others and hear what they have to say so that you can apply the best ideas available to your omnichannel strategy.
- Identify Your Channels
As your business incorporates omnichannel marketing into its digital strategies, you need to identify which channels you will use. These statistics show that social media, websites, and email marketing are some of the best channels for digital campaigns. While you should use these channels, make sure that you identify others that might benefit your strategy, too.
The other channels you use should depend on your customers and the data that you collected about them. You can use these questions to help yourself identify some of those channels.
- Which of my channels have the highest metrics?
- Are there channels that my customers prefer when it comes to customer service?
- Do my customers ever request the integration of any channels?
It comes down to incorporating the best channels while also offering those that will benefit your customers. For example, if your customers prefer to send text messages, then try and update them about deals and news through that channel. As you identify their needs when it comes to digital marketing, you can find the best channels for your strategy.
- Prepare Your Workflows
After you identify the channels you want to incorporate, you can plan out workflows for your marketing strategy. Workflows let your automated software know what it should do based on the interactions of your customers. For example, if one of your customers ignores text messages but opens emails about deals, then it will stop sending texts and start focusing on emails.
If you need a few suggestions for automated workflows that you can use through email, then look at the statistics above. With order confirmations, the first workflow shown above, you can include a deal on your website and links to your social media pages in that email. This way, the order confirmations encourage your customers to interact with your other channels.
Since workflows are the backbone of your omnichannel strategy, make sure that you spend some time identifying which ones you will use.
Joturl as Omnichannel Marketing Tool.
JotURL is one of the most versatile omnichannel tools that can be found online.
Thanks to its features, it is able to better serve all the strategies for your digital marketing campaigns.
Many marketers, growth hackers, entrepreneurs, companies and startups successfully use JotURL making the most of its omnichannel power.
In fact JotURL is not only a tool for creating tracking links, it can also act as a url shortener, it can create deep links, it is used for lead generation on all social media, it can boost your Instagram profile thanks to InstaURL, it also has truly efficient customer targeting and remarketing features.
JotURL is a 360 ° tool that fits perfectly within the description of an omnichannel tool.
Instead of using ten different programs on ten different landing pages, JotURL allows – within its dashboard – to recreate all the solutions and strategies for your projects.
Final Remarks
Omnichannel software provides a variety of automated tools to help your online marketing run smoothly. Not only do you want to make your strategy effective, but you also want to provide an integrated experience to your customers.
As you apply the three steps of implementation mentioned in this article, you will prepare your omnichannel strategy so that your business can implement it as soon as possible.
Cheers!
By Omnisend & JotURL Team
