Omnichannel is one of the top buzzwords in digital marketing, but it’s also much more than a short-term trend. Omnichannel marketing is already disrupting practices in nearly every sector, and its impact will only continue to grow over time.
If you’re not familiar with omnichannel strategies and how they contribute to a multichannel marketing approach, you’re already falling behind the competition. This article will cover everything e-commerce marketers need to know about omnichannel marketing.
What is omnichannel marketing?
Some marketers assume the words “multichannel” and “omnichannel” signify the same thing, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Multichannel and omnichannel refer to two completely different kinds of strategies—all omnichannel campaigns are multichannel, but only some multichannel campaigns are omnichannel.
Multichannel strategies simply involve more than one marketing channel, while omnichannel strategies involve the way those channels connect. While multichannel marketers view each channel as another platform for the same messaging, omnichannel marketers use each channel to make the customer journey as smooth as possible.
Businesses with omnichannel strategies put the customer at the center of the campaign and move each lead through the sales funnel. Every interaction with your brand is automatically recorded and stored for use in future targeting. This allows for greater personalization in nearly every ad.
Implementing omnichannel strategies for e-commerce
You might be reluctant to adopt an entirely new approach to e-commerce advertising, but statistics show that omnichannel marketing performs significantly better than single-channel. In fact, omnichannel campaigns achieve more than three times as much engagement and 250% more purchases compared to single-channel campaigns.
Adopting omnichannel strategies within your business leads to more immediate sales as well as better long-term engagement. It’s one of the most effective ways to update your marketing practices and start achieving better results. If you’re still using just one channel, you’re at a significant disadvantage relative to omnichannel marketers.
Moving to an omnichannel approach can be confusing, but businesses have access to more solutions than ever to streamline this process. These are some of the most important omnichannel tips for e-commerce marketers to be aware of in 2019.
Focus on Customer Data
Omnichannel marketing revolves around the customer experience, so gathering the right information about each customer is vital to your success. Fortunately, there are a number of omnichannel marketing services that make it easy to gather and use customer data.
The first step toward understanding your customer experience is visiting your own website and interacting with your brand on every channel. You should know what the shopping process is like before making any changes. Remember to note any pain points or slowdowns in the experience.
In addition to using your site yourself, you should also gather direct customer feedback to learn more about how your audience views your brand. You can get more responses by offering discounts and other incentives to users who take the time to answer your questions. For example, reach out on social media to get feedback easily. In fact, there are free social media tools that make the process of gathering data from your customers engaging and easy.
Personalize Your Messaging
Personalization is one of the most important elements in any campaign, and omnichannel marketing gives you the tools you need to develop even more effective personalization. Collecting relevant customer information also helps you identify audience trends and continually optimize your strategies.
Rather than sending the same ad to your entire audience, you should use segmentation tools to divide subscribers into smaller lists based on your data. Marketers use everything from age and demographics to previous shopping and campaign behavior to fine-tune their audience segments and further personalize their content.
Once you’ve set up audience segmentation, you can start working on automation workflows that target customers based on specific triggers. Welcome sequences, for example, introduce new subscribers to your brand. Abandoned cart sequences are designed to bring users back after leaving something in their cart. These and other automation workflows enable you to move the customer journey forward.
Split-test everything
Every campaign has room to improve, and the best e-commerce marketers are constantly looking for new ways to differentiate their brands and improve their ad performance. Split-testing is one of the most effective methods of self-evaluation, and it’s easy to set up A/B tests using most marketing automation services.
You can use split-tests to compare results with variants of the same ad by making small changes between two versions. If you’re deciding between two product images, for example, set up an A/B test to determine which one leads to more purchases. Make sure to change just one variable—otherwise, it will be impossible to tell which individual changes to make.
Split-testing works for nearly any element including send times, subject lines, headers, calls to action, and more. You can set tests up in just a few minutes, so there’s no downside to testing each ad and trying to identify your best strategies. Over time, this will help you improve your approach to all facets of omnichannel marketing.
Get your entire team to buy-in
Having your teams work separately might work for single-channel or multichannel marketing, but you’ll need strong communication to succeed while using omnichannel tactics. It’s also critical to set up good information sharing practices between departments to ensure that every interaction is accounted for in the customer profile and easily accessible for all staff involved.
Omnichannel marketing depends on focused customer experience, and you can’t hope to achieve that if your team isn’t effectively collaborating. Company culture and employee engagement are even more important when it comes to running an effective omnichannel campaign.
Everyone involved in marketing and sales should feel that they have a clear role in your company’s practices. It’s critical for every employee to understand the importance of their work toward improving the customer experience. Let them know that you value their efforts and ask how you can help them achieve their goals.
Most e-commerce vendors are at least somewhat familiar with omnichannel marketing, but only a few understand how to take full advantage of the opportunities it offers. These tips will help you get started with omnichannel marketing and achieve the results you want more quickly.
Combine & analyze data from every channel
Once you followed the guidelines above and launched your omnichannel marketing campaigns, the next step will be to analyze their performance. But gathering and building a strong and reliable report can be overwhelming as you multiplied the sources of data. But, worry no more, there are tools out there that help you automate your reporting, from the data connection, alerts to dashboard update.
To drive your marketing campaigns and grow your e-commerce business, you need a tool that enables you to bring and combine all your business data in a single place. ClicData is the right fit for small and medium-sized businesses and really easy to start with. 100% cloud-based, you can create your account for free and get started.
1. Bring all your data in a single place
Use our connectors to e-commerce, marketing, CRM, social media and databases to pull all your data in our built-in data warehouse. With over 250+ possible data connections, whatever the tools and applications you’re using, we got you covered!
2. Get the real version of the truth with real-time reports
Manual reporting is no longer cutting it if you want your marketing campaigns to be really efficient. What’s the point of doing anything if you base your decisions on outdated data? Automating everything surely will change your life for the better:
- Data refresh: schedule your data refresh routine. Every day at 8:00 am, every hour or up to the minute. You decide!
- Real-time alerts: set up alerts whenever certain thresholds are reached to always stay on top of your KPIs and take the right action.
3. Create your dashboards and share them with your team
You can build custom and insightful reports with our 50+ visualization options and interactive charts. You can build different level of visualizations: an overview with your key metrics, and then drill down to more detailed reports for each channel – Google Ads, Youtube Analytics, Facebook, Instagram… And so on.
You can also create interactions between your charts to dig deeper into your data and get actionable insights. Then, present your dynamic dashboards and the latest data during your meetings with our LiveLinks.
In this dashboard example, we combined marketing campaigns and financial data to calculate the ROI and Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV). See more dashboard examples here.
Related Post: Powerful e-commerce analysis for your WooCommerce data
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