The Omnichannel Experience: 4 Ways Omnichannel Marketing Can Boost Your RoI

Omnichannel experience is a buzzword that can be heard across retail. But omnichannel marketing is far from being just a buzzword. It’s the most effective way to strengthen your relationship with the customers— offering them frictionless service across a range of platforms and devices.

Let’s take Starbucks for instance. The brand is known for its world-class coffee, but more importantly, it has earned the reputation of being the top player in the omnichannel experience game. The coffee chain allows its members to reload their Starbucks card through multiple channels— from their app, in-store, or through the website. The change is automatically updated across all the channels.

Ola is another great example. You don’t have to worry if you forgot to carry cash. You can quickly fill your ola e-wallet with money even as you’re in the cab and the driver will automatically receive his payment once the ride is complete.

Omnichannel Marketing – The Key To A Seamless User Experience

The beauty of the omnichannel experience is that it is not bound to a single channel. It offers a uniform experience to a customer across different platforms and devices. Most importantly, it’s the perfect way to provide both convenience and customization – two things that today’s customer really looks for in a brand.

Today, customers leave their footprint online with every transaction they engage in— from their browsing behaviour to their choices and preferences. Making sense of all this data can be quite an enormous task for the brands. With omnichannel marketing, marketers can understand the pattern of the data and tie all of it together in a way that it creates a meaningful and personalized experience for the customer.

For example, if you find that your targeted ads for a particular product are working exceptionally well in a specific area as compared to another, you can revisit the inventory of your products and ensure that more quantity of that product is available in the location that has a higher demand. This way you can streamline your logistics and ensure that your customers are not left disappointed.

What Else Can Marketers Do With Omnichannel Marketing?

Apart from creating a seamless experience for your customer, omnichannel marketing offers several benefits that can drive sales and boost your company’s revenue.

Helps you to understand your customer

Understanding your customer is extremely crucial because you cannot create a personalized customer journey without knowing your customer well. Omnichannel marketing provides data on your customer’s behaviour and preferences based on how they interact with brands. This gives you a much clearer picture of how to target them.

Helps in retaining customers

Ecommerce companies that offer an omnichannel experience witnessed 90% higher customer retention than those that provided single-channel experiences. With omnichannel marketing, you can engage with your customer on their preferred channel by sending them relevant messages. You can also use retargeting across various platforms to bring your customers back to your platform.

Helps in engaging with customers

Engaging with the customer can be quite a challenge especially when you are vying for their attention along with the several apps on their mobile phone. You could face a greater challenge if your app is not used frequently. That’s where omnichannel marketing comes in. It helps you think like a customer and push relevant content to them on their preferred channel. This keeps them hooked in the long run. Omnichannel marketing offers you the tools means to analyze the customer’s behaviour and preferences, and send them content according to their preference.

How Do You Boost RoI Using Omni-Channel Marketing?

A study conducted by Aberdeen Group Inc revealed that companies with a robust omnichannel strategy were able to retain 89% of their customers as compared to the companies that used single-channel strategy who could retain just 33% of them. Omnichannel marketing, when done right, can help you improve your revenue. Here are a few ways in which you can use omnichannel marketing to boost your RoI.

Use consistent messaging across all channels

A study by Interacting Advertising Bureau (IAB) showed that consistent messaging across multiple channels could increase the purchase intent of the consumers by 90%. Your customer will reach out to through any channel. Hence, identify what you want your customers to know and train your marketing, sales, and customer support teams to deliver a consistent message.

Once you have trained your customers, identify the kind of assets your customers will need throughout the customer lifecycle and offer it to them with a touch of personalization. Personalize the content right from acquisition to support to increase customer retention on your platform.

Provide an overall consistent experience to the customer

According to a study by SDL, 60% of the millennials expect consistent brand experience across channels — whether it’s in-store, online, or mobile phones. Omnichannel marketing equips you to go beyond messaging to create a consistent experience for your customers across all the channels.

There is no single way to create that experience because your customer could interact with you through any touchpoint. They could shop online and pick the product from the nearest store or purchase something from the retail store and get it shipped to their address. They will also be interacting with various departments of your company – from offline salespeople to online customer care.

It is, therefore, crucial that all your departments are trained and work in coordination to provide an exceptional and consistent service to the customer. As Amit Tandon, VP of HealthKart told us in one of our Growth Marketing sessions,  “A consistent experience is the one thing that will increase the Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) and lead to customer retention and loyalty over time.”

Ensure continuity in communication

While consistency in messaging and experience is crucial for the success of your omnichannel strategy, continuity is another factor that marketers must keep in mind while planning the omnichannel marketing strategy. Let’s assume a customer has added an item to his cart and has forgotten to complete his transaction. There’s a good chance that your customer doesn’t remember the abandoned cart.  You can remind the customer to complete it by sending them personalized emails, push notifications and remarketing messages. A good omnichannel strategy can directly increase conversions by preventing a disconnect in communication.

Integrate data-driven marketing into your strategy

In a study by Forbes Insights and Arm Treasure Data, 40% of the executives surveyed said that personalization has helped them to maximize their sales. Data-driven marketing omnichannel platforms like MoEngage can provide you with all the necessary information about the customer, their behaviour, and their preferences. You can use this data to personalize the buyer’s journey and to deliver the right message to the right audience using the right channels. It will also help you to engage and retain more customers to your platform.

Conclusion

According to a 2015 study by IDC, omnichannel shoppers demonstrate 30% higher lifetime value than those who shop using one channel.  In an era where acquiring new customers is becoming prohibitively expensive, brands like MopEngage providing customers with a uniformly superlative experience is no longer an option— and omnichannel marketing is one of the most effective ways to get there.