Omnichannel marketing is an excellent way to create a rapport between you and your customers. By creating a seamless, integrated customer experience, you’re ensuring that the message your customers receive will always be relevant, fostering customer loyalty.

There are four main things that you’ll want to keep in mind as you establish your omnichannel marketing strategy.

 

1. The Whole Company Needs to Be Behind Your Omnichannel Marketing Strategy

For omnichannel marketing to be effective, the whole company needs to support the strategy together. While many people think implementing an omnichannel strategy would only implicate the marketing team, sales and customer support are critical to making this work.

Since a great omnichannel strategy is centered around your customer, data about your customer is also centralized. This centralized data is useful for each person that works with sales, merchandising, marketing, and UX/UI to name a few.

The sales team needs to have information on the customer’s purchases and where they’ve engaged with your brand online. You want customer support to be able to see precisely what the customer purchased, when, and what kind of issues they’ve had in the past.

Customers are likely to reach out on a multitude of channels, so being able to have this centralized data and seeing exactly where, how, and why

Each of the teams should have access to the customer data and be able to communicate and exchange information between them to assure a unified customer experience.

 

2. Gather and Analyze Data Around Your Customers

As omnichannel marketing is centered around the customer, it’s critical that you understand your customer and their experience. After all, if you don’t know how your customer experiences your brand, how can you improve that experience?

 

Revise your Processes

Review the customer journey as though you were the customer. It also helps to narrate what you’re doing aloud while navigating your site to see any errors or friction you might encounter.

It’s time to review each and every aspect of shopping with your brand as a customer:

  • Research popular products on Google
  • Complete an order
  • Interact with customer service
  • Submit a support ticket to see response time
  • Engage with your brand through social media

Look for areas where you could improve. Regularly test your processes and ensure that customers are having a smooth experience with your brand.

 

Ask for Feedback

Check in with your customers and request feedback regularly. This can be done in multiple ways through an omnichannel experience and at several points throughout the customer journey.

One place that you can get feedback is post-purchase. Ask customers to review the product they just purchased, and if necessary, offer some kind of an incentive to get that feedback.

While asking for feedback post-purchase is a great idea, each touchpoint you have with your customer is an opportunity to gather feedback and data from your customer.

 

3. Segment Your Customers for Precise Targeting

Segmentation is critical to an omnichannel strategy, as it helps you craft messages that are more relevant to your customer and their needs.

There are three main ways to segment your customers:

 

Recent Purchase Behavior

Segmenting your lists by recent purchases can help you pinpoint where the customer is in their customer journey. For example, you can segment your customers by when they made the last purchase. You can re-engage them if they haven’t made a purchase in a while.

You can also personalize cross-selling campaigns. For customers who have made recent purchases, you can cross-sell them on products that will complement their recent purchases.

Segmenting by shopping behavior allows you to specifically target the customer based on their latest interaction. Your message will resonate better with the customer, providing better open, clickthrough, and order rates.

 

Profile Data and Demographics

You can really personalize your communication as you segment by the type of customer. For example, you wouldn’t recommend winter coats to the customers in Florida.

However, for customers living in Wisconsin, winter clothing may be very appropriate. You may want to create winter clothing offers for the customers in Wisconsin.

In the same vein, you also wouldn’t suggest women’s clothing to your male customers. It’s not going to make sense to your customer, and your message will end up feeling more like spam.

 

Recent Campaign Behavior

Customer activity helps you reactivate inactive customers with tantalizing deals. For example, you can send emails to the people who didn’t open your last email a separate email and change up the subject line to be more enticing.

For instance, if you recently ran a promotion for winter boots over the last few weeks, you could segment your list to include women between 30-40 who purchased boots within that campaign. You could target only those customers who opened your every email in that campaign, and send out a cross-sell recommendation for boot socks or leather polish. In this way, your email campaigns can feel more personalized.

Remember that segmentation has to achieve a goal. It makes no sense to keep the exact customers in each segment.

 

4. Make Frequent Tests As You Go

As you implement an omnichannel strategy, it is important to test your efforts at each stage. It can’t work if your customer data isn’t updated and measured as you go.

Monitoring how customers react to your campaigns will allow you to discover whether your female customer prefers SMS campaign sent on Friday evenings or emails sent on Saturday morning.

Data about your customers and campaigns will help you optimize your campaigns over and over. Tweaking your campaigns improves them and you create a more cohesive message that your customer loves.

 

Wrapping Up

Customers are more inclined to purchase through an omnichannel experience. Most of them are now expecting one. It is important to give customers what they want.

For an omnichannel marketing strategy to be effective, it is essential that you get everyone on board, learn as much as you can about the customer, and personalize the messages that you send to each customer. As you do each of these things and test your results, you’ll create a better customer experience.

When customers are the central part of marketing efforts, they respond by engaging more with the brand and making more frequent purchases, rewarding you for your efforts. .