Omnichannel Marketing (Benefits)

Omnichannel marketing is a multichannel sales approach that integrates traditional and digital media to synchronize communications and align content across all marketing channels to provide seamless and consistent buyer’s experience. The integration between distribution, promotion and communication channels on the back end enables customers to enjoy a unified seamless experience with a consistent brand image, message, and all-around experience across all customer touchpoints no matter where they shop from; shopping online from a desktop or mobile device or even in a brick-and-mortar store. Omnichannel marketing’s goal is to create high-quality customer relationships that will propel customers to take action. It focuses on customer experiences as a whole, allowing customers to easily access information from any of the customer touchpoints since all channels are connected to each other.

Omnichannel marketing strategies have become one of the key driving factor of future in-store and online shopping experience. Brands with omnichannel customer engagement strategies retain an average of 89% of their customers. This could increase their customer lifetime value by up to 30%. In comparison, brands with weaker omnichannel customer engagement has approximately only 33% retention rate.

Benefits of Omnichannel Marketing:

· Boosts Customer Loyalty & Retention

Providing customers with seamless consistent experiences across all channels create trust between the brand and its customers. In addition, customers usually buy from the brands they trust. Hence, this enhanced customer’s experience will increase customer’s loyalty. Since customer trust the brand, it will encourage repeated purchases and hence increase customer retention as well.

· Strengthens Brand Recognition

If a brand has been delivering a consistent message across all its sales and marketing channels, be it in-stores or online, consumers will subconsciously notice these stuffs. Whenever they see the specific message, the brand’s logo will come to mind, vice-versa. This psychological factor helps customers to better recognize and remember a brand. Thus, whenever customers want to purchase something, brands that they remember will then pop up in their heads and they will then proceed to make their purchases from these brands.

· Greater synergy across all sales & marketing channels

The integration of front-end, back-end, online and in-stores creates better synergy across all channels and connects all the interactions and conversations between the brand and its customers without losing data or context. For instance, if a customer bought a clothe online and decided to return it upon receiving, he/she could visit the physical store to return it or create a return slip online and mail it back to the warehouse. This is made possible because of the brand’s integrated processes. Customers’ data can simply be pulled out in seconds by the company and returns can be processed fast and easily.

· Better data collection & analysis

Since all customer’s touchpoints are connected/linked, brands are able to collect and unify customers’ data from the various channels. These data include cookies, shopping carts, mailing lists, locations, social media, etc. Brands can analyze such data and understand their customers better; customers’ purchasing behaviours and interests. This helps brands to better position their campaigns and will in turn lead to higher conversion rates.

· Cost effective

After collecting and analyzing customers’ data, brands can utilize those insights to better deploy resources and create marketing campaigns that will attract relevant customers. If the brand knows which are the sales or marketing channels that generates higher conversion, it can deploy more resources towards those channels to maximize conversion and reduce resources for those channels that do not fare as well in terms of conversion rate. This helps the company to use its resources more appropriately to increase conversion rate.

As we can see, the omnichannel marketing requires a lot of work and effort to provide customers with the best experience. However, in the long run, it will be worth it as the above benefits all lead to the increase in revenue. Hence, I think that omnichannel is here to stay and may be the way to go!

Cheers,

Dayna.T