Five steps for digital marketers to deliver an omnichannel experience to customers

You're listening to your favorite song on your phone, enjoying the music, and singing the lyrics. Suddenly, your phone dies without warning.

Feel stopped? No worries. You switch to another device—your TV, smartwatch, or laptop—and continue listening from wherever the song left off. Back to the party. Yay!

This isn't an ad for Spotify; it's simply an example of a delightful and continuous omnichannel experience that we enjoy every day.

What is an omnichannel experience? 

An omnichannel experience is a consistent and continuous experience of the content you interact with across all media and channels. In the above example, an electronic device is a channel and music is content.

Let’s see how the concept of an omnichannel experience can be applied in marketing to delight your customers at any touchpoint where they interact with your brand.

What is omnichannel marketing? 

Omnichannel marketing is all about creating and delivering a continuous and cohesive content experience to audiences across all the channels through which they interact with your brand. Channels include both online and offline media like websites, emails, social media, webinars, newspaper ads, brochures, and online and in-person events.

Examples of omnichannel marketing 

Omnichannel marketing for a boutique (B2C model) 

Nancy owns a boutique that sells skincare cosmetics. Nancy collects details from visitors, such as birthday and special anniversary dates, as well as which products they're interested in. She feeds the data into a marketing platform that automatically sends a greeting email to the visitors on their special days with a coupon code to buy the products they showed interest in at a 20% discount.

Omnichannel marketing for an ecommerce store (D2C model) 

Jake sells sports equipment and accessories online through a website and mobile application. He targets shoppers who have abandoned their carts by sending them relevant push notifications on apps and showing ads on social media.

Omnichannel marketing for a software company that develops payroll automation (B2B model) 

Zylker Tech sells a payroll automation software application to small and medium businesses (SMBs). SMB owners who signup for the email newsletter and open at least five emails in the series get an invitation to attend the paid webinar for free. Active attendees in the webinar who participate in the polls get a free one-on-one consultation with automation experts to improve their existing payroll processes.

Why do you need omnichannel marketing? 

Make your content stand out: In omnichannel marketing, the pieces of content you create are personalized for each audience member and not made for mass appeal. This makes your content unique and more relevant to your readers.

Focus more on educating the audience and not on selling: Your content is usually aimed at educating the audience and enabling them to evaluate your solution. This positions your brand as a thought leader.

Reach your audience on their most convenient channels: Customers are likely to interact with your content and take action if you reach them on the channel where they're most comfortable interacting with you. This brings more engagement to your campaigns and leads to more sales.

Find prospects who are interested in doing business with you: Omnichannel marketing involves creating and disseminating varieties of content that offer deeper insights that only active seekers interact with. This attracts more serious buyers and fills your sales pipeline with business-qualified leads.

Five steps to delivering omnichannel marketing experiences 

1. Create a marketing map for delivering an omnichannel experience 

Study all the channels, campaigns, and content through which your audience interacts with your brand. Determine which ones have delivered the best and worst results.

Based on your findings, create an omnichannel marketing map for your brand. For instance, if promotional blog posts distributed via email have worked well in getting more engagement rates, then you should use that as one of the starting touchpoints in your marketing funnel.

From there, build a marketing journey for your audience. For example, you can link your emails to a relevant blog post, where they're invited and incentivized to click on the webinar registration form.

In this way, you're constantly engaging with your audience members by providing them with relevant information and a connected experience.

 2. Gather all your data into one place 

Once you have the necessary data, like campaign performance, engagement rates, and the behavioral characteristics of your audience, unify all of this marketing data on a single dashboard.

By doing so, your marketing teams get better visibility into your marketing environment, can correlate different datasets, and create audience-centric marketing campaigns.

A unified marketing platform like Zoho Marketing Plus enables marketers to build, measure, and manage all their marketing data on a unified dashboard, which enables them to make data-driven decisions in managing their marketing efforts.

3. Unite sales, support, marketing, and other CX functions 

Your audience members' interactions with your sales, support, and other customer-facing teams are also core touchpoints and have a significant impact on delivering omnichannel experiences to your audience members.

Standardize every customer communication that goes out from your organization. This entails including your brand's logo and color motifs in emails and other content, using consistent messaging and language, showing empathy, and anything else that reflects your brand's dedication to the customer.

Make it a mandatory practice for sales, support, and every other customer-facing team member to study customers' prior interactions before initiating any form of communication with them.

 4. Set a goal for measuring your omnichannel marketing 

The ultimate goal of any business is to make money. One simple metric you can use to measure your omnichannel marketing is your number of product purchases or service signups.

Other metrics to measure your omnichannel marketing are the amount of engagement you receive on webpages, campaigns, and social media posts and your company's customer happiness score.

Omnichannel marketing is different for each business. Determine the right goals for your business and implement them across your organization.

In a unified marketing platform like Zoho Marketing Plus, you can quickly create simple dashboards to measure your omnichannel marketing from existing templates.

5. Keep experimenting 

There are no playbooks for implementing a successful omnichannel marketing strategy. Marketing funnels and journeys work differently for different businesses and yield distinct results.

The best way to understand and implement an effective omnichannel marketing strategy for your business is to experiment with and implement what works well. One easy way to test your omnichannel marketing is to gather feedback from your audience.

Do so via online forms and surveys, or by interacting with them over the phone or in person. Create people-focused rather than metric-focused campaigns—because if the audience is happy, the metrics will reflect it.

Read more on Omnichannel Marketing.

Read more on Omnichannel engagement features of Zoho Marketing Plus