What Is Omnichannel Marketing in Ecommerce?

Omnichannel marketing has become fast-rising as it improves customer experience and skyrockets conversion rates. An omnichannel approach involves unifying customer interaction across multiple channels.

For example, after searching for chocolate cake online, you click on a result on the first page. Later, when scrolling through Instagram, you could see an ad related to the website’s offer from earlier — a great practice of omnichannel marketing.

An omnichannel marketing strategy allows you to create a personalized customer experience because each customer wants different things. Moreover, research has proven that omnichannel customers will buy 1.7 times more than those from a single channel. 

So what is omnichannel marketing, and why is it important? Keep reading to find out!

Definition of Omnichannel Marketing

Breaking the word omnichannel into two helps us understand that ‘omni’ means all, translating to ‘all channels.’ Simply, the term means that all channels are acting together. 

Online sales without boundaries.

Reach customers from around the world with your own online store.

Sell globally

Omnichannel marketing involves developing strategies to give customers a unified and seamless experience across all channels. The main objectives of omnichannel marketing include:

• Delivering a prompt and consistent message with your brand across multiple channels at each customer journey stage.
  
• Improving customer service by providing a memorable customer experience for your customers. 

It’s important to note that omnichannel marketing goes beyond just “acting together.” It also involves ensuring that these channels provide a seamless experience where customer data and preferences are consistently applied across all touchpoints.

Benefits of Omnichannel Marketing

With omnichannel marketing, you say the right things at the right time. You are not giving repeat customer offers meant for yet-to-convert prospects. The omnichannel marketing strategy allows for a frictionless customer experience and other big benefits.

Let’s see them below:

• Improving customer experience and loyalty.
• Delighting and attracting the right customers.
• Gaining valuable customer insights.
• Engaging customers even after purchase to boost their loyalty.
• Boosting sales.

If a customer stumbles upon your ad on Instagram, clicks, and lands on your website, omnichannel marketing allows them to keep seeing offers from you across active channels.

Omnichannel vs. Multichannel Marketing

Omnichannel and multichannel marketing are two distinct approaches for interacting with customers all over the internet.

In this section, we outline the differences between them so you can understand the two in detail.

What Is Multichannel Marketing?

If this is your first time seeing multi-channel marketing, you may have thought it was the same as all-channel marketing. Not to disappoint you, but they are two distinct terms. 

Multichannel marketing involves using more than one channel to promote your business. However, unlike omnichannel marketing, it doesn’t include a unified experience. 

It just involves using TV, social media, print,  email, billboards, and brick-and-mortar stores to sell to customers without merging their experience. 

For example, you may see a Facebook ad from a brand telling offering a 40% discount. But when you check Instagram, you may not necessarily see an ad from that brand. Then, when you check their page, their latest post could be urging customers to repeat purchases. This simply means that the brand uses multiple channels but hasn’t integrated each medium.

How Does Multichannel Marketing Work?

Multichannel marketing works by identifying the target market and choosing the proper channels to target them. These may include brick-and-mortar stores, content marketing, social media, email marketing, paid advertising, and more.

You need to develop marketing messages tailored for each channel and track each channel’s performance separately. Also, you should adjust each channel strategy as time goes on. Unlike omnichannel, multichannel marketing aims to expand brand reach and amplify conversion per channel.

What Is Omnichannel Marketing?

Like multichannel marketing, omnichannel marketing involves multiple channels but allows integration to create a unified customer experience. Simply put, as customers move through your active channels, their experience is singular and unique to their needs.

Whatever they see on your site, brick-and-mortar store, and Facebook page aligns with their journey.

How Does Omnichannel Marketing Work? 

Here is an overall picture of how omnichannel marketing works.

Following a customer purchase from your walk-in store, your client received a text message to confirm their purchase. While browsing through Instagram, they saw a juicier offer telling them to buy another item for a limited 80% discount. This way, you get them to repeat the purchase effortlessly. 

The overall difference between omnichannel and multichannel marketing lies in their objectives. Multichannel optimizes for marketing per channel, while omnichannel optimizes personalized customer experience along the customer journey. Both are significant and can impact your business positively.

Components of an Effective Omnichannel Marketing Strategy

There are several factors to consider before creating an omnichannel strategy. Without these components, your marketing strategy may not yield results. 

Don’t leave any of them out for a seamless and cohesive marketing approach.

Integrated Marketing and Sales Channels

You should choose multiple channels where your customers are active and make your products the first on their minds. By integrating these channels, you are not forcing your brand on them. 

It’s a more seamless experience across Instagram and Twitter through SMS push notifications or emails. Your sales channels, including online stores, brick-and-mortar stores, and mobile apps, are also more focused on conversion. 

Developed Operational Workflow

To succeed with omnichannel marketing, you need to be intentional and organized. You must carefully develop marketing strategies and also use customer relationship management (CRM) systems well. 

A disorganized omnichannel marketing will lead to poor results, so it is essential to streamline your company’s operations.

Packaging

Customers are shopping to get their products. How about you personalize the packaging to their experience using thank-you cards or mentioning how they found you? Also, ensuring timely delivery adds to the entire omnichannel experience. 

By integrating marketing and channel sales, you will cater to your audience across various platforms without choking them. Personalized packaging and timely delivery also boost customer experience, making each interaction with your brand memorable.

Examples of Successful Omnichannel Marketing Campaigns

We’ve outlined some great examples of omnichannel marketing below. They have all adopted an integrated marketing approach and have exceeded customer expectations. In this fashion, they skyrocketed customer loyalty and drove sales.

Let’s have a closer look at how they’ve used omnichannel marketing for success.

Nike

Nike has built a successful business with omnichannel marketing for years. It uses both offline and online means to unify the customer experience.

It uses an ever-growing platform of content, offers, and community interactions, like its SNKRS and Run Club apps, to ease in-person meetups. Nike also provides an app for individual workouts that transcends shoe and apparel lines.

Best Buy 

Best Buy has both a walk-in store and an online shop. It improved the in-store experience with its smart home technology solutions paired with free in-home advisory service.

It also has a mobile app that lets customers scan to shop. Customers can pick up from the store, smoothing the customer experience.

Sephora

Sephora makes use of omnichannel marketing to create a personal experience for their customers. It uses customized push notifications, ensuring customers can book in-person consultations effortlessly. 

Its powerful in-store technology enables employees to find customer favorites and suggest products they might try next. They also offer consistent beauty tips with the brand experience and free makeovers. 

With the Sephora app, customers can keep a wish list, track past purchases, and scan items while they are in the store. These unify customer experience and have helped the brand gain a 100% increase in mobile orders.

You can see how omnichannel marketing can help you to become a top player in your industry if you do it right since customers are the center of every business.

How to Create an Omnichannel Marketing Plan

It involves developing a cohesive strategy that integrates the selected marketing channels to provide customers with a unified experience.

Guide to Creating the Plan

Below is a step-by-step guide on how to create an effective omnichannel marketing plan:

• Understand Your Audience: Firstly, you should’ve researched and drawn out a buyer persona. It should detail their preferences, behaviors, and expectations across different channels. And consider using analytics tools and customer feedback to understand how customers interact with your brand.
  
• Define Your Goals: Is your business at the point where it can afford omnichannel marketing? After answering that, outline your overall marketing goals clearly to see if omnichannel marketing should be your next step. This is because it requires intentional and concise efforts. Goals can include customer engagement, brand awareness, sales, and retention.
  
• Choose Your Marketing and Sales Channels: Based on customers’ preferences, where should you integrate omnichannel marketing? Based on your research, do you need to build a mobile app? You can always start by experimenting and later go big.
  
• Integrate Data and Technology: Use a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system to centralize customer’s data. This way, you ensure seamless data integration across all channels and gain a holistic view of customer interactions.
  
• Consistent Branding: You should maintain consistent branding elements such as logo, colors, and messaging across all channels. It ensures a unified brand voice and makes you memorable to customers.
  
• Personalization: Personalization is the soul of omnichannel marketing, so it cannot be overdone. You need to tailor content, promotions, and suggestions based on individual preferences and behaviors.

Lastly, it is essential to consider smooth communication between channels. For example, a customer should be able to start a transaction on one channel and complete it on another without hiccups.

Extra Tips

If you need some extra help when creating an omnichannel marketing plan, you will find the following tips helpful:

• Implement Automation: Omnichannel marketing is impossible without ecommerce automation. You need technology to streamline the customer experience and ensure timely and relevant communications.
  
• Measure and Analyze: You also need to develop KPIs to align with your goals and measure them regularly.
  
• Optimize and Iterate: Optimize your strategy based on omnichannel results, data insights, and customer feedback.

Lastly, ensure that your team is trained to understand and implement the omnichannel strategy.

The above steps can help you to create an effective omnichannel marketing plan that boosts customer experience and positive business outcomes. Always allow for flexibility as market dynamics and consumer behaviors change.

Tools and Technologies to Support Omnichannel Marketing

To support omnichannel marketing effectively, you can leverage a variety of tools, mobile commerce integration, and technologies. They can help you integrate, automate, and optimize your marketing efforts.

Here are some of the key types of tools and technologies you should consider:

• Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software: It centralizes customer data from various channels and promotes personalization and insights into customer behaviors.
  
• Content Management Systems (CMS): This supports the creation, management, and optimization of content across different platforms.
  
• Marketing Automation Platforms: These tools automate marketing tasks and workflows, ensuring consistent messaging across channels.

Also, by using omnichannel commerce solutions, you can leverage many different channels where your target audience is active.

Common Challenges and How To Overcome Them

As with every other marketing strategy, omnichannel marketing has its challenges that you need to be aware of. 

Let’s review them below:

• Complex Data Integration: Effective omnichannel marketing requires extensive data integration from different media. These include mobile apps, websites, email campaigns, social media, and in-store interactions. Integrating the data across all of them could be daunting as they have separate data formats and structures.
  
• Consistency Across Channels: It won’t be easy to be cohesive in messaging, personalization, and branding across multiple channels. Inconsistency can lead to a lack of trust and hesitation from potential customers.
• Privacy and Data Security: Some customers will likely feel you are evading their privacy if they keep seeing ads related to a product they only searched once. Or maybe they aren’t interested but keep seeing your ads. 

Consider retargeting customers who have shown interest more than once. Because if you are not cautious enough, it could result in a data breach lawsuit.

The main goal of omnichannel marketing is to personalize the customer experience, but it can be challenging to create a smooth, personalized experience even after segmenting customers.

To resolve this, segment customers based on data and behavior into smaller, more manageable groups. 

Measuring Success in Omnichannel Marketing Tools and KPIs

You can’t tell if you’ve had successful omnichannel marketing without measuring key metrics.

Below, we will provide you with the most important metrics to follow:

Average Order Value (AOV)

This is the average amount the customer spends. Calculate it by dividing the total worth of sales per customer. A high AOV indicates that customers are making larger purchases. 

Meanwhile, a lower value AOV shows that customers may have increased but are buying less expensive items. Either way, it tells you what products to focus on in omnichannel marketing.

Buy Online, Pickup in Store (BOPIS)

As a business owner, you will see cases where customers order online but prefer to pick up. Omnichannel marketing ensures that when customers come to pick up, their experience is similar or even better. 

Also, you have to ensure stock data remains updated and that customers’ orders are packed once they order. It would be messy for customers to order online and come to pick it up only for it to be sold out.

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

The CAC should massively drop with omnichannel marketing. It’s the cost used to get a new customer. To lower your CAC, consider each channel and compare the efforts and resources spent there. 

For example, you could spend more time and money selling on Facebook than on Instagram, but your primary traffic source could be Instagram. This means you should focus more on Instagram.

Customer Lifecycle Value (CLV)

The Customer Lifecycle Value (CLV) tells us how much a buyer will spend in your shop till they stop buying from you. It’s calculated with the formula: CLV = Average order value x Number of monthly transactions x Retention period.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) measures the possibility of a customer recommending your brand or store to another person. A high NPS indicates that your customer service is top-notch.

It’s important to remember all of these when tracking your omnichannel marketing performance, especially the CAC and CLV. They tell you if it’s worth acquiring customers through omnichannel marketing.

The Future of Omnichannel Marketing

One thing about a marketing strategy that focuses on customers is that it will rarely fade. Well, that is if it keeps being affordable for most businesses, especially small-sized ones. 

For now, the omnichannel landscape is rapidly changing, and we will show you the aspects that are affecting its future. See some key trends below.

The Role of Artificial Intelligence (AI)

The power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has touched every area of life. But in the world of business, it has helped give customers more satisfaction. It does so by assisting efforts like that of the omnichannel retail strategy. 

First, omnichannel marketing focuses on data leverage, and with AI, firms can quickly and easily analyze and gain deep insights. This results in better targeting and sending the right message to deserving buyers. We can surely say AI has assisted in ecommerce personalization.

For example, say you want to suggest products to customers automatically. This means you won’t manually go through customers’ records before knowing what they like. With AI, it is possible to predict customers’ likes using ecommerce customer journey mapping. The technology is so powerful that it allows you to track customers’ activities on your platforms. 

Personalization at Scale

In omnichannel marketing, personalization has always been a super important focus. But it has been tough to tailor every customer’s experience. The process has always been about grouping customers into segments. This way, it is more likely that customers can get deals and recommendations based on their interests. 

Creating dynamic content also helps achieve this. It’s a case where businesses can make edits to their messages in real time depending on customers’ actions. 

As an illustration, if a customer were to visit the same product page a couple of times without buying, they might receive a discount through email later. 

A deep omnichannel analytics and reporting process also allows you to see gaps and areas of growth.

Omnichannel and Sustainability

More consumers are becoming invested in ethical products and sustainability. To give such people a wholesome experience, you need to account for their interests. 

This means there would be a shift in social commerce strategy. More companies will share how they are contributing to the safety of the planet to win customers. Companies of all sizes are focusing on green products and educating customers to preserve our earth. 

Lastly, using a unified commerce platform is sure a great way to live and breathe sustainability. It helps you put all your sales in one place and aids in running your business smoothly. Both of these are ethical traits that reduce waste. 

Conclusion

We explained what omnichannel marketing is and discussed some of its benefits. From the differences between omnichannel and multichannel marketing to trends of omnichannel marketing components, the future of marketing lies in our ability to create a unified customer experience. 

Examples of successful campaigns by giants like Nike, Best Buy, and Sephora show that omnichannel marketing is dynamic, can drive sales, and fosters brand growth. 

On top of that, we discussed creating an omnichannel marketing plan and the possible challenges you can face with it. With the right tools and strategies, businesses can overcome the hurdles to deliver a unified marketing experience.