Omni-channel marketing is today reshaping the way companies engage with their customers. As a result of this shift, it is fast emerging as a critical channel for managing commercial operations across all industries. Omni-channel marketing involves leveraging real-time customer data and drawing actionable insights from the large swathes of raw data to serve customers, with initiatives designed to their diverse and evolving needs.

Omni-channel marketing can effectively and significantly address issues such as inconsistent customer experience, fragmented customer data, siloed marketing efforts, limited customer engagement, channel conflicts, and limited customer insights. The significance of omnichannel marketing is that it can provide customers with highly personalized, well-optimized experiences for each touchpoint and journey stage. For example, a pharmaceutical company may deploy data from a customer’s/ patient’s previous interactions, such as browsing history on their website or engagement with their mobile app, to deliver targeted and relevant content via mail or social media channels. This correspondence may include educational materials about a specific condition or treatment, reminders about upcoming appointments, or personalized offers for prescription refills. The omnichannel implementation allows companies to leverage channels across all divisions (marketing, sales, service, commerce, etc.) and determine the most impactful engagement action based on each customer’s previous interaction.
Omni-channel Marketing: Enhancing Customer Experience,

Personalization, and Brand Performance

Omni-channel marketing is a potential game-changer for businesses, as it can offer many benefits beyond traditional multichannel approaches. With seamless integration across channels, personalized interactions, and cohesive brand strategy, omnichannel marketing transforms how companies engage with customers and drive meaningful results. What does omnichannel marketing do to enhance customer experience?

Enhance the Customer Experience: Before omnichannel emergence, customers received messages that were not always relevant to the context of the current customer journey stage. These messages were delivered across several static channels and often missed essential touchpoints. Omnichannel marketing is ground-breaking in providing seamless, contextual, and highly integrated experiences across all customer touchpoints. Omnichannel execution drives agile and intelligent content that responds to customer actions in the timeliest and most engaging manner in the channels that are most relevant to the customer journey.

Create a Custom-made, integrated Channel Experience: Multichannel marketing cannot provide an integrated channel experience in real-time through the next best channels. Omnichannel marketing ensures that relevant channel touchpoints are deployed at critical moments in each customer journey stage for optimal channel engagement.

Improve Personalization: The most valuable characteristics of any omnichannel program are its ability to put each customer journey step in context and provide personalized interactions based on historical preferences. Omnichannel deploys complex rules and machine-learning models to set up the framework for meaningful personalization.

Deliver a Cohesive Brand Strategy: It can be challenging to review adherence to strategic goals and objectives for a brand when executing multichannel campaigns. Omnichannel marketing helps ensure that all channel and tactic implementations align with the brand strategy, vision, and overarching communication objectives.

Key considerations for setting up an omni-channel campaign and its execution

Setting up an omnichannel campaign requires intense planning and execution capabilities. The key considerations to keep in mind while executing omnichannel campaigns include the following:

  • Invest in solid data management capabilities: Creating a customer 360 view at an individual level is only possible with reliable data management. Companies must be willing to invest in data management if they are committed to developing the right platform and ecosystem to collect, store, manage, and process data across multiple sources. Most omnichannel implementations include a mix of in-house and enterprise tools, including data warehouses, data storage, customer data platforms, data management platforms, data lakes, and privacy management solutions. Companies can either build a stack of standalone tools or invest in integrated platforms that leverage the best of custom and standard industry features.
  • Build personas and customer journeys: This stage involves developing personas and customer journeys to understand which channels and touchpoints are the most logical targets for omnichannel campaigns. Teams can leverage various persona- and journey-management tools to establish ongoing and predictive journeys for omnichannel implementation.
  • Determining inputs for the decisioning engine: The next stage for developing a campaign involves deciding on the customer, channel, and content (the 3Cs) for execution. This decision process uses data from the established data management ecosystem and customer journeys. Steps in this process include:
  1. Filter target customers based on omnichannel use cases.
  2. Decide on channels for activation of filtered targets.
  3. Leverage available content types across chosen channels.
  • Generate and activate next best actions: The “decision engine” takes in finalized 3C inputs and applies business rules and machine learning models to generate the next best actions. These actions are then activated as campaigns across multiple omni-channel tools, such as marketing, sales, service, and commerce. These campaigns are monitored for budget, pacing, response, and other factors.
  • Review and optimize experiences: Finally, the impact of omnichannel campaign actions is monitored regularly according to pre-defined metrics. Omnichannel use cases should all be revisited based on customer adoption and feedback to improve the overall value and provide a seamless customer experience.

Organizational alignment

Omni-channel marketing is emerging as today’s most actionable marketing trend. The ability to track each customer’s journey and target them with personalized, data-driven offers has many applications across industries. While multiple commercial groups like sales, marketing, customer service, and others follow their own specified goals, the time has come to use each latent interaction across established channels as a potential trigger for actions across business units. Thanks to advances in data, technology, and marketing tools, companies can now target customers with predictive next-best actions in real-time. Testing and investing in multiple use cases across key personas is the best way to realize the benefits of an omni-channel approach.

Organizational alignment is often seen as a critical impediment to omni-channel success. But once companies align their teams, resources, and investments in an integrated manner, there is no doubt that omni-channel will be seen as the most critical driver of customer engagement.

Linkedin
Disclaimer

Views expressed above are the author's own.

END OF ARTICLE
Opinions