Omnichannel Marketing: Understanding your Customer Journey

What is Omnichannel Marketing?

Omnichannel marketing is the practice of designing a customer experience that spans all the channels that your customers use to interact with your brand. This could include your website, physical stores, social media platforms, and more. The purpose of an omnichannel marketing technique is to create a frictionless customer experience that offers many avenues for satisfaction. An omnichannel strategy may let consumers buy online or in-store, or a combination of both – such as “Click and Collect”. Today, omnichannel strategies are used by many types of organisations, such as healthcare providers, retail stores, financial institutions, and technology companies.

Why is Omnichannel Marketing Important?

Revolutionise your business

Without a doubt, the pandemic fast-tracked the move online for consumers, and the omnichannel approach is what made it possible. Companies quickly pivoted their strategies to an omnichannel model, and those that were already omnichannel were and are the ones that fare better during times of adversity.

New Zealand’s accommodation and food services industry was one of the hardest hit by the pandemic. During the pandemic, many small business restaurants switched their focus to an online site. Those that did were able to accept orders online and specify a particular time for customers to pick up their orders. This meant customers had the flexibility to choose what to buy and when they wanted it, all from the comfort of home.

An omnichannel marketing strategy can help improve your business during times of uncertainty. Having multiple touchpoints could help keep your business afloat.

Improve your customer journey

Today’s customer journey is often fragmented and multidirectional. With omnichannel marketing, businesses can join the dots between each touchpoint. This gives customers a cohesive experience that is tailored to their individual needs.

Research shows that more than 50% of customers use a combination of three to five channels during their buying process or when trying to solve an issue. Omnichannel marketing also offers businesses more opportunities for customisation – such as personalised messages triggered by certain customer actions. By paying attention to each customer’s journey, omnichannel marketing helps businesses build trust and loyalty.

What are Omnimarketing Solutions?

Omnimarketing solutions are tools that help businesses implement omnichannel strategies. These include Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, email marketing platforms, mobile apps or push notifications. They allow companies to track all customer interactions in one place and apply the data to personalise their content for better customer experiences. Omnimarketing solutions can also integrate with other systems, such as Point-of-Sale (POS) and customer feedback tools.

Omnimarketing Strategies

When thinking about your business’s strategies, consider creating an omnimarketing marketing funnel. This means mapping out how customers move through different channels, such as website visits or social media interactions. By understanding customer journeys, you can identify where and when to engage with customers in each channel.

Things to consider when planning your strategy:

• Does your strategy engage across all channels? With an omnichannel ecommerce solution, you can connect customer experiences from online and offline channels. The market is ever-changing, and having the nimbleness to maintain your business without needing to fully replace your entire solution is crucial.
• Will it provide more customer choice? To create an engaging journey that is truly innovative and different, provide your customers with visibility and transparency across all your channels, so they can feel part of that journey.
• You’re trying to enhance the buying journey: Rapidly onboard new customers and make their journey as seamless as possible, arming them with the tools they need, i.e., their account information, buying history and more. Provide templates to make it easier for them to order items.

Take note of emerging platforms – with the increase of marketplace platforms like Facebook Marketplace and Amazon, omnichannel solutions should be able to harness these platforms to reach new customers.

Map of the Customer Journey

A customer journey map is an essential part of any omnichannel marketing strategy. It helps your business to understand the path customers take and how each touchpoint affects their decision-making.

Map out your customer journey by:

• Asking your customers how they prefer to buy: This can help you identify their needs, preferences and how they navigate through different channels.
• Researching customer feedback on existing channels: This will help determine areas of improvement or identify new touchpoints that could create a better customer experience.
• Listing out each step in the customer journey: Think about how customers move from one touchpoint to the next, what their pain points are and how you can help ease them.
• Analysing customer data to gain insights into behaviours and preferences: This will allow you to better target future campaigns and personalise interactions with each customer.

Think about combining your in-store experiences with digital experiences to provide loyalty and support to your customers.

How to Measure Success with Omnichannel Marketing?

Omnichannel marketing success can be measured by tracking various metrics, such as customer lifetime value, revenue per channel and average order value. These will help you understand the effectiveness of your omnichannel strategies and the return generated from each channel. As omnichannel marketing considers the multiple channels that customers interact with before making a purchase, a great way to measure omnichannel marketing success is through omnichannel attribution.

Omnichannel Attribution

An omnichannel attribution model can provide visibility of the impact of each touchpoint on customer decisions across channels. There are many different types of omnichannel attribution models depending on how they are credited to different channels for conversions. For example, some give all the credit to the first channel, some give all the credit to the last channel, and so on. Omnichannel attribution will also help you to measure which channels are working better in your omnichannel marketing strategy.

As omnichannel strategies evolve, it is crucial to measure success and continuously optimise your omnimarketing solutions for better customer experiences. With an understanding of what customers need and how they interact with different touchpoints, you will be able to create an omnimarketing funnel that not only meets customer needs but also drives sales and return on investment.

Examples of Omnichannel Marketing

Kmart New Zealand is one example of a company that had to move fast to meet changing customer needs. The omnimarketing funnel they created combines online and offline experiences with a seamless checkout process that allows customers to shop in-store and online with a click-and-collect option. With the customer top in mind, Stella Wang, the Online Manager at Kmart New Zealand, notes, “A lot of people hadn’t done online shopping before – so it’s more important to us to give the best customer experience from the first time they get onto the page.”

Sephora is the perfect illustration of a successful omnimarketing funnel since it has been using multiple channels for customers to shop on for quite some time. Sephora allows buyers to have an intimate view of their prior purchase history and provides notifications when their items are on their way. This type of transparency and convenience provides customers with a sense of control regarding their shopping experience – which makes them more likely to come back again!

Conclusion

Ultimately, omnichannel marketing is all about understanding your customers and their journey. Through omnimarketing strategies, businesses can gain insight into customer journeys and use this data to create more engaging content and experiences. Businesses can build better relationships with their customers, and drive more sales in the long run. It’s win-win!