While the term omnichannel marketing is used a lot, few companies actually create consistent brand experiences at scale and across channels. There’s a good reason for that — building and implementing an omnichannel strategy is a difficult process that requires:
- A clear view and understanding of the entire customer journey across all touchpoints.
- The ability to reach customers on various channels with contextual content, messaging, and product recommendations.
- The implementation of new processes and (for some companies) new martech solutions.
In this guide, we’ll cover the process of building a successful omnichannel strategy and putting it into practice. We’ll also explore examples of successful omnichannel strategies and the impact they had on revenue and return on investment (ROI).
What is an omnichannel strategy?
An omnichannel strategy (also called a cross-channel strategy) outlines how a brand uses different marketing channels to reach customers in a timely, engaging, and relevant way. The channels can be both physical — like brick-and-mortar stores or branch offices — and digital — like social media platforms, email, SMS, or chatbots.
The key to a successful omnichannel marketing strategy is to have all in-person and online channels working together to create a personalized experience. Conversely, with a standard multichannel strategy, different customer touchpoints are working in isolation, resulting in a disjointed brand experience.
Imagine an eCommerce brand that has a website and mobile app, while also using channels like email, SMS, and WhatsApp to reach customers. A solid omnichannel strategy ensures that the brand’s customers will always see timely and relevant product messages and recommendations across each of these touchpoints.
For example, the email campaigns are personalized based on what customers browsed on the site, the messages across SMS and WhatsApp are based on how customers react to emails, and so on. This allows customer journeys to evolve in real-time, depending on customers’ needs and preferences.
Put simply, an omnichannel approach ensures all channels work together to create a consistent experience. This leads to improvements in key metrics like customer satisfaction, revenue, conversion rates, retention, and more.
4 steps for creating an effective omnichannel strategy
Omnichannel marketing can encompass so many touchpoints and use cases, making it impossible to provide a “one-size-fits-all” strategy for all businesses.
However, there are four key steps that pretty much any marketing team can go through when implementing their omnichannel approach. It all starts with having reliable customer data for segmentation and analysis.
#1 Identify key customer segments
Marketing segmentation is the process of grouping customers together based on shared traits and characteristics. This process is essential for your omnichannel efforts because it ensures they’re targeted at the right audiences.
Fortunately, most digital marketing solutions today offer at least some type of segmentation features. For example, Insider has 120+ segmentation attributes, including traits, behaviors, and preferences. The attributes are spread across three different audience types:
- Standard, which include characteristics like locations, demographics, devices, and operating systems.
- Predefined, like leads, cart and browser abandoners, customers who’ve interacted with your brand on a specific channel, and more.
- Predictive, which are created by our AI algorithms, like customers with a discount affinity, with a high likelihood of buying or engaging on a specific channel. Note: If you haven’t used this type of segmentation, we highly recommend checking our guide to predictive marketing.
With Insider’s rule engine, you also set segmentation parameters around sessions, exit intent, and even customers’ local weather. You can get more granular by writing custom rules depending on your needs.
Put simply, you have complete control to find the most important customer segments for your business.
However, we know from experience that many brands struggle in this regard because their customer data is scattered across disconnected systems, like CRMs, CMSs, email and SMS platforms, ad networks, analytics tools, and so on. This makes accurate segmentation extremely difficult and time-consuming.
That’s why Insider also lets you aggregate your data with our customer data platform (CDP). The CDP can unify customer data from any online or offline source into a single convenient database.
It also creates detailed, 360-degree profiles of all your customers that contain essential insights, like their:
- Names, demographics, and contact details.
- Affinity towards certain products and categories.
- Channel interactions and purchase histories.
- Channel reachability and preferences.
- And much more.
Not only does this make segmentation easier (because all your data is in one place) but these profiles also serve as a perfect foundation for analyzing customer behavior and launching personalization campaigns.
For more on this topic, check our guides to:
#2 Find out which channels your customers are using (and how)
One of the biggest benefits of data unification and segmentation is that you can get an accurate view of key characteristics and behaviors, like channel reachability and usage.
For example, you can use Insider’s analytics capabilities to get real-time insights and performance reports into the performance of individual channels.
You can start with something as simple as a channel reachability breakdown that shows you what percentage of each segment (VIPs, inactive customers, and so on) is reachable on a specific channel like email, SMS, or push notifications.
From here, you can dive deeper into how important segments prefer to be contacted on each channel. This is possible with our message frequency analytics which help you determine the optimal frequency per channel.
Finally, you can build detailed reports to track each channel’s performance and how that changes based on the omnichannel campaigns you’re running. These reports can include key metrics for each channel like delivery rates, open rates, click-through rates (CTR), and revenue.
In short, Insider’s analytics features let you eliminate guesswork with data-driven insights into the channels customers are using, how they prefer to be contacted on them, and their needs, interests, and pain points.
#3 Engage them on these channels with personalized messaging
Once you know which channels customers are using, it’s time to start reaching out to them with timely and relevant messages.
You can use a collection of single-channel solutions for this — e.g., an email and SMS marketing tool, a push notification solution, a website personalization platform, and so on. However, this approach can drastically bloat your martech stack, which, on top of costing a lot of money, leads to overly complex workflows.
Another option is to use a unified marketing platform like Insider that supports 12+ channels under the same umbrella. For example, here are a few ways Insider can help you reach customers on key channels with personalized content, messaging, and product recommendations:
- Personalized on-site product recommendations. Our platform’s AI Smart Recommender can automatically deliver relevant product recommendations to each customer on your site. This is crucial for maximizing profitability by increasing conversion rates and revenue. Note: Adidas used our Smart Recommender to drive a 13% increase in homepage conversion rates and a 7% boost in product page conversion rates.
- Email personalization. With Insider, you can easily tailor each email with targeted product recommendations, cart reminders, and more. You can even use AMP emails to create interactive experiences and let users browse products, answer surveys, and book events without leaving the email. Note: Remix used Insider’s email automation functionality to increase first purchases by 104% compared to the previous quarter.
- Messaging channels. Channels like SMS, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger can be extremely effective due to their high open and conversion rates. Insider lets you personalize your communications across them based on customers’ interests and preferences by sending targeted price drop alerts, event reminders, and more. Note: Vogacloset used Insider’s WhatsApp marketing capabilities to increase their conversion rates and achieve a 30x ROI.
- Online ads. Insider lets you target the detailed customer segments you build with relevant ads across Google, Facebook, and TikTok. This is a great way to expand your omnichannel strategy across social media and search ads, while optimizing your ad spend. Note: Pierre Cardin used this strategy to reduce cost per acquisition (CPA) by 67%.
#4 Connect all touchpoints into a consistent customer journey
As you can, there’s a lot that goes into creating a successful omnichannel strategy. However, there’s still one element missing — the ability to tie all touchpoints together into a cohesive omnichannel customer experience.
This is where customer journey builders come into play. These solutions enable you to build and automate complex omnichannel campaigns using no-code drag-and-drop editors.
For example, Insider’s Architect is a customer journey builder that can help you deliver personalized, timely, and relevant messages to all users across all touchpoints. This includes the creation of all sorts of automated flows, like:
- Email welcome sequences.
- Upsell and cross-sell flows across email and messaging channels.
- Cart recovery campaigns across your website and push notifications.
- Complex omnichannel journeys spanning different cha
