Omnichannel Marketing Guide: What Is It and How To Implement the Strategy?

What is omnichannel marketing?

Omnichannel marketing is creating a seamless and consistent experience for customers regardless of the interaction medium, including online and offline spaces. It’s like you keep having the same long thread of conversation about the same topic with your friend in a messenger, via phone, and then IRL. Omnichannel marketing works on a similar principle but, instead of a friend, you interact with a business.

Here’s an example of that in action. Imagine that you visited an online store, subscribed to its newsletter, but didn’t buy anything. After that, you got a browse abandonment email with a discount code but decided to postpone the purchase. Then, you came across a targeted ad on a random website suggesting the same thing you browsed or a similar item from the same store. Finally, you scrolled Instagram for a while and came across a bunch of fun Reels from this very brand and reviews showing this product. You come back to the online store and get a pop-up with a discount that is better than the one suggested in the browse abandonment email. 

As you can see, omnichannel marketing is paying attention to everything and making each channel a part of your unified strategy.

For example, Starbucks introduced loyalty mechanics not just for regular clients who buy directly in coffee shops but also those who order Doordash delivery. This group of customers receives notifications via email — like this one we found on Really Good Emails.

Multichannel vs Omnichannel: Where’s the border?

Wait a minute, if I have an Instagram account, a website, and a newsletter, am I doing omnichannel marketing without knowing? Most likely, nope — omnichannel marketing goes beyond *just having* several content outlets to promote your products. 

Let’s explore the differences between omnichannel marketing vs multichannel marketing. We put these in the spreadsheet below so you get a better grasp.

Still confused? Here are some more examples:

• An aspiring musician posts new album teasers on TikTok, pitches album singles to journals and playlist curators, and invests in outdoor ads to get more traction before the release. This is multichannel marketing.
• For the second album, the same musician invests in outdoor ads to get more Spotify pre-saves. The loyal fans who pre-saved the release got an email with a discount code for the ticket to his next show. Then, he runs targeted ads promoting the vinyl record for those who listened to the album. It’s a small step but it’s still a great example of omnichannel marketing.

Benefits of omnichannel marketing

You might think: “Omnichannel marketing requires so much customer data, and syncing all the content across all channels is a handful, and also isn’t it intrusive and creepy?” You’re somewhat right — omnichannel funnels can be incredibly convoluted, and privacy concerns also exist. For example, 52% of Americans are eager to stop interacting with a company that doesn’t allow them to opt out from tracking their personal data.

Still, there’s a solid number of benefits to the omnichannel approach — let’s dig deeper.

Unified experience

As we mentioned, omnichannel marketing is very customer-centric. When you implement the omnichannel strategy, you don’t just think of how you should present a product or which content you post. This approach implies thinking from the user experience (UX) and customer experience (CX) point of view. You’ll have to ask questions like:

• How easy is it for your customer to find the item they want or the current order status?
• Do they have to switch between multiple channels to find certain information required to complete a transaction? 
• Do your customers struggle to get help from your company in case of problems?
• How frictionless are the switches between channels if needed?

The influence of omnichannel marketing on customer satisfaction is proven by numbers. According to Gartner, seamless channel transitions drastically improve all customer experience outcomes like satisfaction scores, positive word of mouth, and customer retention.

Creating an omnichannel experience is just reasonable — according to McKinsey, most people are omnichannel shoppers.

Enhanced personalization

We’ve talked a lot about email personalization because we know a thing or two about emails. However, personalized newsletter content has its limits — you can do a lot more. Here’s a great example.

Gibson, the famous guitar manufacturer, launched the Gibson App — a mobile app for guitar practice packed with useful tools like a metronome, a tuner, and other stuff you might need. It’s also integrated with the YouTube channel Gibson TV. The mobile app data is then used for tailoring product recommendations on other channels like the online store, targeted ads, and emails. Finally, the brand started using the data they got from offline customers visiting their flagship store in Nashville. 

The takeaway is, the omnichannel approach doesn’t just imply you personalize everything — it also gives you more data for personalization in the first place. That way, you can do even better personalization in newsletters and whatever you’d like.

Improved customer loyalty

Personalization this, personalization that, but do customers really want it? Let’s check out some papers.

According to Medallia, 61% of consumers agree to spend a bit more time with a company if the experience is tailored to their needs. If that doesn’t convince you, here’s another fun number from the same study — 82% of customers claim that personalization (or lack thereof) drives their online shopping choices in at least half the cases.

Finally, according to Twilio Segment, Gen Z folks want better digital experiences — they “broke the marketing funnel,” demanding a more conversational approach instead of pushy marketing tactics. And that’s what omnichannel marketing is for.

So, to address the question, yes — your customers want a tailored experience and they’ll stay for it.

Here’s a practical example from Ryan McDonald, COO at Resell Calendar:

Higher sales performance

You can be a cool and hip marketer thinking of implementing omnichannel marketing but your boss rightfully cares about one thing only: money. Do all these measures actually increase revenue?

The short answer is yes. Omnichannel communications increase the order rate by 494%. Also, given how omnichannel marketing affects customer retention, it also increases customer lifetime value — which means you’ll get more money from one person.

For example, Feel Good Contacts managed to improve the average order value by 40% by leveraging the omnichannel power — they engaged customers across social ads, emails, web and mobile push, and other channels.

Better analytics

We’ve discussed the advantages of omnichannel marketing for businesses and their customers — but there’s also a hidden perk for marketers as well, which is better analytics.

See, when you’re doing multichannel marketing, you keep the email engagement data in your ESP, the website data in Google Analytics, the SMS and push notifications data — somewhere else… Meanwhile, omnichannel marketing implies that you keep all the data from all your channels in one huge data center, which means:

• Easier data management — you’ll have one “master system” so it’s easy to find all the necessary customer information.
• More detailed analytics — you’ll see cross-channel transition and interaction patterns for more effective marketing efforts in the future
• Easier ROI calculation — since you have the entire customer journey data in one place, the revenue attribution is easier, so you’ll end up calculating a more realistic single-channel ROI and redistribute further investments more efficiently.

Key challenges of omnichannel marketing

Despite all the brownie points, let’s face it: omnichannel marketing is a huge headache for everyone involved. Let’s explore the main problems you might face during implementation.

Technology integration

If you’re managing more than one channel, you probably use a bunch of marketing automation tools: a bulk email service, a CRM, a CMS for your website or an e-commerce tool for your online store, Google Analytics or another analytics tool, a payment system… You can’t just pick one app to do everything. 

Sure, there are very complex omnichannel platforms with loads of features for every possible marketing task — but they’re pricey, they have a steep learning curve, and sometimes aren’t user-friendly. And if you opt for several tools, you need to set up integrations — native, via Zapier, or API. Setting up an infrastructure like this will require a lot more effort than just starting a newsletter.

Resource demands

Another problem that might arise is that implementing omnichannel marketing will require a lot of different resources, such as:

• Increasing your marketing budget to pay for new software
• Hiring and onboarding new marketing department employees with specific omnichannel-related skills — marketers, developers (for API integrations and working with data), analysts
• Restructuring the marketing department — uniting teams or moving people to new projects
• Establishing new processes so people responsible for different channels are less isolated from each other

Data management

Since omnichannel marketing is very data-driven, get ready for challenges related to customer data management like:

• Moving all the data from different channels to one source
• Standardizing the data so every customer record has the same set of parameters in the unified format with no spelling errors
• Making the data easily accessible by your marketing software and employees from marketing and sales departments
• Protecting the data from breaches and misuse
• Adhering to GDPR
• Only storing and using the data you actually need
• Preparing the physical infrastructure for storing such a large database — paying for more cloud storage space, renting servers, or buying your own ones

Customer journey mapping

A customer journey map is the outline of every touchpoint with your brand from learning that you exist to becoming a regular and an advocate. Traditionally, in single-channel or multichannel approaches, customer journey maps are pretty straightforward. Here’s an example:

1. A customer interacts with a native ad infotainment article on a popular website and finds out about your company.
2. Then, they go to the website and see a pop-up inviting them to subscribe and get the discount for the first purchase.
3. They subscribe to the newsletter, get the welcome discount code, and make their first purchase.

The omnichannel approach implies that there will be tons of other touchpoints between those we highlighted in bold. For example, they abandon the cart, go to your brick-and-mortar store to check out the products, leave without buying, read reviews, come across the items they browsed in targeted ads… That makes planning content creation and other marketing stuff way harder!

How to build an omnichannel marketing strategy

Omnichannel marketing is challenging but not impossible either. Let’s learn how to develop an omnichannel strategy for your business.

Define objectives

That’s what building a marketing strategy always starts from. Obviously, the end goal of every marketing campaign is getting more revenue. However, you still need to define how you will increase the revenue — by acquiring more new customers? By increasing repeat purchases? By increasing the average order value? 

Here’s why it’s important. Firstly, while you define objectives, you might find out that you can do the same thing cheaper and faster — and maybe you don’t need omnichannel marketing. For example, you can increase repeat purchases simply by offering free samples with the first order; your customers might like some of them and order the full-size thing later. 

Secondly, when you know your goals, your choice of channels, content, and whatever else you need becomes limited — you’ll have a clearer vision of what to do. It’s particularly important when you’re going to do something as costly and labor-intensive as omnichannel marketing.

Map the customer journey

As we mentioned, customer journeys in omnichannel are less straightforward. Customers are moving between channels to and fro — in this situation, dozens of diverse pathway scenarios emerge. Here’s how to make it a little easier:

Firstly, limit the number of channels. If you cover everything but badly, it won’t work out — omnichannel doesn’t mean “every channel”. Think of a limited list of channels you’d like to implement, improve, and integrate. This can depend on many things from where the CX bottlenecks are to where your audience actually prefers interactions. For example, if your business is targeting senior generations, forcing them to download a loyalty program mobile app is inconsiderate — meanwhile, it will absolutely work for Gen Z customers.

Another reasonable thing to do is to group channels by CJM stages. Think of this: will your customers read reviews long after they purchased something from you? Will they interact with support if they don’t know your business even exists? Cross-channel shifting has its limits, so grouping your channels by traditional customer journey stage makes sense. The next step in such mapping is thinking about smaller cross-channel journeys within each stage.

Prepare your martech stack

The next step is choosing the software to operate your omnichannel marketing machine. It all boils down to getting three groups of tools:

• Data storage. You need a powerful centralized customer data platform (CDP) that integrates with all the other tools you’re using. This database will contain all the customer data you have, including offline purchasers.
• Channel management. It depends on your list of channels and may include an ESP for email marketing automation, a CMS or an e-commerce tool for your online store, a chatbot builder, a digital payment system, and so on. Ideally, you wouldn’t want to have separate apps for each minuscule task or one huge app that is too convoluted to use. 

• Analytics. Some channel management tools already provide statistics but it’s usually not enough. For example, email tools only show what happens in the email itself — the conversion rate and the revenue per email will stay unavailable. That’s why you might need external software specifically for collecting and visualizing all sorts of metrics.

Create your content strategy

Now, that’s the exact reason why you defined objectives and mapped (although very diverse) customer journeys! Without that preparation, you won’t have even a blurry vision of the content you need to create and post or send. Here are some things to consider while creating the content strategy.

Automate everything you can. A good thing about automation is that it creates the dialog feeling but you only need to set it up once, little tweaks excluded. Triggered emails, transactional push notifications — as many things as possible should work without you.

Reuse content. Omnichannel marketing requires tons of content but it doesn’t have to be 100% unique all time. Want to save time on email production? Craft an HTML email template in your builder of choice. Shot a great promotional video for YouTube ads? Use stills from it for social media, website banners, and other static visuals. Wrote a longform article for your blog? Great, now you have a baseline for TikTok video scripts and at least one text-heavy Instagram post.

Be platform-specific. Omnichannel marketing means consistent and barely interrupted messaging across channels but you still have to adjust to the specifics of each platform you’re using. Here’s an obvious example: you can’t send long-reads via SMS.

Wrapping up

Omnichannel marketing is basically data-driven marketing on steroids — its main aim is creating a unified conversation with the customer across all platforms. It’s not for the weak but it can boost your revenue in no time. Here’s how it can benefit your business:

• A better customer experience due to the absence of friction.
• Enhanced personalization — not just in emails but everywhere.
• Improved customer loyalty — if it’s pleasant to interact with you, customers will stay and come for more.
• More sales — it’s proven that omnichannel marketing increases average order value.
• Better analytics — this type of marketing will force you to keep all the cross-channel data in one place.