In my last article, I wrote about the reasons why your single-channel direct-to-consumer (D2C) digital and social media marketing may be hitting a wall with diminishing returns. I also introduced a powerful strategy for breaking through that wall: omnichannel marketing. Now let’s dive into that a bit deeper.

First, I want you to think about all the potential opportunities your customers have to interact with your products and brand on any given day — on social media or Amazon, via email, TV, radio, outdoor, and in person. Now consider this: Google research tells us that a buyer requires 7 hours of interaction across 11 touchpoints in 4 different locations before they decide to purchase.

1. And even that might not be enough to break through the clutter. Which means that if you’re focusing your marketing on just Facebook or Amazon or another single channel, chances are you’re going to hit that wall sooner rather than later.

That’s where a robust omnichannel strategy comes into play. Before we delve into it, let’s clarify a common misperception. Omnichannel is not to be confused with multichannel. True, multichannel marketing employs more than one channel for campaigns, but that’s where the similarities end. With multichannel marketing, there’s little to no differentiation or personalization in the marketing content used across various channels. Valuing quantity over quality, multichannel casts the widest net possible to drive up customer engagement.

Omnichannel marketing, on the other hand, is much more strategic and therefore more effective. An omnichannel strategy employs multiple channels that may include email, digital and social media, mobile apps, SMS, TV, radio, podcasts, web, influencers, print, outdoor billboards, retail, and more to reach and attract customers. But unlike multichannel marketing, omnichannel takes a completely customer-centric approach driven by data about consumer behaviors, preferred channels, and where the consumer is in their customer journey.

Leveraging this data, an omnichannel marketer will know exactly which message to show customers, using the best channels at the best time to do so. As such, omnichannel marketing becomes a highly personalized experience that generates a much higher conversation rate.

The power of omnichannel to drive conversions and sales can be attributed to a number of other factors, as well. By leveraging multiple channels and capturing consumer data from each one, omnichannel marketing provides much greater visibility into how customers engage as they switch from one channel to the next. This data can come from CRM and email platforms, website analytics, paid searches, SEO and key-word tracking, social media analytics, mobile apps usage, sales or call center teams, and more. All this data provides insight into customer motivations and dynamics at each touchpoint, allowing you to create campaigns that specifically address those needs.

An omnichannel marketing strategy also allows brands to make sure they’re creating a unified, consistent, and seamless customer experience and messaging across all channels. This works effectively to increase brand awareness, recognition, recall, and loyalty which in turn leads to repeat sales.

Even better, omnichannel marketing has a butterfly effect. Much like compounding interest that allows your money to grow over time, omnichannel campaigns also have a compound benefit that builds with each layer to propel your marketing into 10X mode. When you make a change or enhancement to one channel, the ripple effect extends across all your channels so that that they’re continually reinforcing each other. This butterfly effect also means that your omnichannel marketing campaigns end up reaching audiences who might otherwise never encounter your brand or products.

If this all sounds too good to be true, just take a look at the numbers. Research reveals that companies with well-defined omnichannel customer experience strategies achieve a 91 percent higher year-over-year increase in customer retention rate than organizations with no omnichannel strategy.

2. An analysis of more than 135,000 campaigns sent in 2021 — representing more than 610 million messages — showed that marketers who use three or more channels in a campaign received an astounding 494 percent higher order rate that those using a single-channel campaign approach.

Continue Reading -> Introducing the 10X Power of Omnichannel Marketing