The difference between multichannel and omnichannel

Customers today are constantly connected. Brands are available to them all the time, on every device, and through multiple channels. They get email offers on their laptop and see ads on social media on their mobile device, to name just two potential instances.

But are those different experiences consistent? Considering it takes a customer only seconds to make an informed decision about a brand, marketers need to get it right every time - or get bypassed for another brand that does.

Multichannel means having a presence on more than one channel - a website and a mobile app, for example. Omnichannel (omni is Latin for “every/all”) means integrating and orchestrating experiences across those different channels to create seamless and engaging user experiences when they count most. It’s not merely what customers appreciate, it’s what they expect.

Taking an omnichannel approach to your marketing ensures you’re reaching the right audience at the right time, with a consistent message across the board.

Omnichannel creates loyal customers

Engage your customers through relevant experiences

Let’s say you’re delivering your brand message to your customers via email only. It might drive some engagement - but how much more are you missing out on? An omnichannel approach continually enriches the relationship and keeps customers coming back for more. You’ll get to know your customers better as they move along their journey, which in turn helps you reach them with increasingly meaningful interactions over time.

Instead of just receiving an email, imagine customers browsing products on your mobile app later in the day and seeing content related to the content they engaged with in the earlier email. A few days later, they visit your website and see additional suggestions and promotions based on what they browsed in your app.

To increase the frequency and effectiveness of your customer engagement, your digital experience platform should, for example, allow customers to initiate a purchase from a social channel on their mobile in the morning and then complete the transaction from an app on their tablet later that day.

Consistency leads to loyalty

An omnichannel approach gives you the ability to reach out to your customers with a consistent message across various channels, and at different points in their day or their purchasing cycle. Try following up that email we mentioned earlier with a delayed push notification to remind the customer to take advantage of a limited-time offer to show them you’re tuned in to their intentions.

The more relevant and consistent your messaging is, the better the chances you’ll cut through the noise to catch - and keep - customers’ interest.

Campaign greatness starts here

Coordinate and orchestrate your campaigns

Customers are comfortable interacting with a multitude of digital channels and easily bounce between them. The truer this becomes, the better your marketers need to get at leveraging these ever-increasing opportunities to connect and guide customers through their journey.

They need to reach people wherever they are and at just the right moment with relevant digital content. It’s the kind of precise coordination that usually entails juggling with disparate content management, campaign setup, email, tracking, SEM and marketing automation systems, making it easy to drop the ball.

Having one unified platform turns marketers into maestros. They’ll be able to orchestrate customer interactions across all channels and harmonize the customer experience, all within a single environment. 

Get involved in each customer’s journey

Customers interacting with your brand are on a journey. If you’re going to entice them along the way, you need to know where they are and what they’re doing. Data from different channels, devices, and interactions doesn’t help you get the big picture if it’s siloed.

To get a holistic view of your customer journey, every interaction needs to be stored and aggregated with data from other systems, like your CRM. You need to gather and track real-time information about where visitors are coming from and which channels they’re using to access your campaign content.

You’ll start to gain insights into their past and current experiences and understand where they are on their buying journey, so that you can deliver the right messaging when they’re most receptive to it. 

The best campaigns are personal

Customers like a brand that remembers them, pays attention to their needs, and serves up well-timed, relevant experiences to match whatever stage they’re at, on whatever device they’re using. The more you can personalize a customer’s experience, the closer you’ll get to winning them over.

Track key success metrics

When it comes to strategizing your digital marketing campaigns, you can’t know what you can’t see. A good platform lets you tap into data on visitor engagement on every channel, in real time. You can then use those insights to plan and execute campaigns that match the real business value of each engagement. 

Test and optimize

You’ve strategized and deployed a digital marketing campaign that should be reaching your customers with engaging content at the right place and time, every time. Great! But just before you break out the champagne, you should evaluate your campaign’s effectiveness and pinpoint any areas where you might fine-tune performance.

The right solution will allow you to deploy A/B testing and optimize your content and experiences in a flash, without the need for massive development efforts.

Unless you’ve got lots of extra time on your hands, you need an environment that allows you to make campaign tweaks or pivots on the spot based on the results of your analytics, without having to get IT or third-party agencies involved.