An effective omnichannel marketing campaign can be a powerful tool to drive customer engagement, build brand loyalty, and increase sales.
The overall customer experience is what needs to be top of mind with omnichannel marketing. The focus is to drive conversions through delivering value. Trying to put yourself in the shoes of your customers can often help businesses shift their priorities when it comes to executing their campaign.
It’s not all about what you want to get across to your customers, but what your customers want to hear from you. If you can get into that mindset then the rest should begin to flow.
But like with any campaign it’s not as easy as just coming up with ideas and sending it away. Customers have a lot more access and choice than in the past. They do so much more research before they decide what to buy and who to buy from.
You need to take the time to put the customer and ways to add value at the core of your campaigns before you pull the trigger.
Tools for Omnichannel Campaign Execution
Omnichannel marketing campaigns include several different aspects to ensure that it is a successful one. A consistent and effective customer experience across several different channels should be the outcome.
Quality Data
Any marketing campaign that you run should always begin with your data. Rich, up-to-date and relevant data means you can make reliable assumptions about your customers. This will result in more successful campaigns. Poor or incomplete customer data will make it impossible to engage with your customers in any meaningful way.
Where you get your data from, what you collect, and how you collect it is an important part of building strong omnichannel marketing campaigns.
The more data you collect the better, of course. The best way to get that data is by getting it directly from your customers in the form of zero party or first party data.
Collecting zero party data isn’t as complicated as it may seem. Generally, customers are happy to give up their information, providing there will be a value exchange. Quizzes, social media polls, post purchase surveys, and pop-ups are great ways to collect it. You can find out more about how to collect zero party data here.
This value insight can be combined with the party you collect on your customers to get a complete view of their interests and behaviours.
First party data comes from tracking your customers’ behaviour on your app or website. Use web and app analytics, look at your previous digital marketing campaigns and social media analytics. These will all give you an understanding of your customer behaviours and preferences.
When all that hard work is done, make it as easy as possible for yourself to put that data into action. Businesses that use a customer data platform will populate their campaigns quicker and more effectively. It’s almost impossible to gain any meaningful and timely insight with data spread across multiple silos.
The reason CDPs are so effective is because data is stored in one place and is being constantly updated. They serve as the central repository for all customer data, including customer profiles, purchase history, interactions, and preferences.
Identifying the Right Channels
Omnichannel marketing campaigns work because it revolves around the customer and their preferences. And an important aspect of these campaigns is not only what you say to your customer, but how you deliver it to them.
When it comes to omnichannel marketing, it’s not necessary to use every single channel to communicate with your customers. Their data will point very specifically towards the channels they interact with most.
Whatsmore, each channel serves a different purpose for your customers. Because of this, you need to add an extra layer to your omnichannel marketing campaigns. Tailor your messages and content to suit each channel and you’ll see a lot more interaction.
Blasting the same message through every channel will only dilute your message and annoy your customers.
Personalise the Omnichannel Experience
Relevance is essential to the success of your omnichannel marketing campaigns. That means both your messaging, recommendations and content must appeal to the needs of the customer. 91% of consumers prefer shopping with businesses that send relevant offers, products, and content to them.
You must personalise every customer’s experience to suit their tastes. Personalisation, as far as your customers are concerned, isn’t a nice to have, it’s a need to have.
Personalisation is much more than just “Hey {first_name}!”. It’s all about understanding how customers are interacting with your brand, on which channels and what they are consuming or buying. Then providing them with an experience that compliments that. This is why having a deep understanding of your data, having it up to date, and ready to use straight away is so important.
And the deeper you go into your data, the more personalised you can get. Your customers will notice when you are working hard to communicate with them on their terms.
At the same time they will notice when you’re not making the effort. With so many other options available your customers can easily go elsewhere. You don’t get many chances with consumers to impress. One bad experience and they are likely to walk.
You need tech that has real-time data processing capabilities in order to give your customers a truly personalised and unique experience. Tech providers out there that process data in batches are not real-time providers and will hinder your efforts to personalise messages and content.
Automation
You can create far more sophisticated campaigns when automation plays its role in omnichannel marketing.
But there are a few other areas where automation helps out.
Automation can help integrate different marketing channels and touchpoints, creating a seamless customer experience. For example, automated email campaigns can be triggered by specific customer actions on the website or social media platforms.
It can also help to optimise the timing and frequency of messaging across different channels. By using data analytics tools, businesses can determine the best times and frequencies to send messages to each customer segment. This can increase the likelihood of engagement and conversions.
Customer service can be improved through automation by providing quick and personalised responses to customer inquiries and complaints. For example, chatbots can be programmed to answer common questions and escalate more complex issues to human customer service agents.
Automation can help businesses conduct a/b testing across different channels to determine the best messaging, offers, and channels. Businesses can analyse the results of a/b tests and optimise their future campaigns accordingly.
Learn and Iterate
Your job is never finished. There are always ways to improve your campaigns. Businesses need to keep a close eye on how their omnichannel marketing campaigns are performing.
As great as it is to see things going right, it’s equally, if not more important to identify what is going wrong. You will learn a lot more from what you don’t do well as opposed to what you do.
Continue to tweak your campaigns as you go and use the learnings to improve your future ones.
To learn more about omnichannel marketing and how Xtremepush can help you execute them, book a demo with the team today.
