“Your brand is a story Unfolding across all customers touch points”
– Jonah Sachs
A Primer on Omnichannel Marketing
While it’s easy to pass off ‘omni channels’ as a fad, they’ve come to be increasingly relevant with recent market shifts.
We’re transitioning from an older strategy of taking products directly to customers, to more personalized and cost-effective communication with consumers over several channels of preference.
The effectiveness of print media, ads, and email campaigns are on the decline as multi-device marketing today reveals itself as the way forward for marketers.
Getting Started with OCM
From the outside, OCM is a cross-channel business model meant to enhance the customer experience across the entire bandwidth of devices and socializing platforms. This fits in well as marketers tend to streamline their platforms as a swimlane by focusing on each one of them, and have their own structure and goals.
It helps businesses integrate channels at the back end, bringing marketers closer to understanding customer behavior and journey, while also helping configure messages based on interests of consumers.
Marketers can then collect data across different social networks and know what channels and times work best for outreach. When clients make in-store purchases, messages or emails are automatically sent out with offers, rewards, and coupons for similar products. Retailers too, can use OCM to track their customer’s shopping frequency, allowing customers to collect points and feel rewarded for loyalty.
Steps to get started with OCM:
Enumerated here are just some of the things you should do while switching to OCM.
#Step:1: Analyzing Data
Analyze your data and check in on which channels your consumers use to connect with your company. Conduct surveys for this, or even ask them directly.
Then, compare notes to validate inferences from data.
#Step:2: Staying Connected for Marketing
Your omnichannel engagements are only as good as the online presence they build-off. So be sure to put yourself out there.
#Step:3: Updating Data
Stay on top of data in the CRM platform to ensure consistency inwards.
#Step:4: Viewing Data over the CRM platform
Invest in cloud-based CRM platforms that update automatically, so teams with access can directly view the data from anywhere and make synchronized changes.
#Step:5: Using channels to view journeys
Allow consumers to integrate or pull in data from channels to curate personalized journeys.
#Step:6: Answering customer questions
You’ll need dedicated response teams and knowledge articles for customer answers that help out immediately and project concern.
#Step:7: Reordering the content on customer interest
Analyze the metrics, data and deliver more personalized content and service throughout the entire journey.
Some Striking Advantages of Omnichannel Marketing:
Omnichannel business processes can lead to better customer experience by successful campaigns, integrated business process, brand visibility and better analytics of organization.
Let’s take a look into some advantages that businesses can achieve:
Data collection and Analysis
Businesses can collect data from different channels like shopping carts, social media, and analyze data so that they can personalize content based on customer interest.
Customer segmentation, Campaign designs
Analyze the consumer data that’ll help you find ideal customers, separate them according to their choice, and create better campaign designs.
Elevated brand visibility
This helps to place your message across different channels promptly, whether it’s plastered over a mobile screen, online storefront, or in-store.
Cost-effectiveness
Businesses can drive marketing campaigns and deploy your resources more efficiently within budget.
Highlighted below are the benefits of measuring and tracking in OCM.
Here goes!
Competitive Advantage
It allows businesses to outperform their competitors by measuring the relevant metrics like comments, shares, follows, likes, and much else. Beyond that, it also focuses on traffic and conversion metrics.
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
It is the cost of winning a customer to purchase a product or service. Customer acquisition costs often relate to customer lifetime value, which is an asset for the company.
Metrics helps you understand how, where, and when a business should spend his marketing budget.
How Tracking Plays a Central Role in OCM:
Tracking allows businesses to measure customer interaction, satisfaction, brand awareness.
It collates views on new products or services and aggregate collections of data that allow you to view insights like email opens, clicks, undeliverable messages online. It also helps in analyzing the effectiveness of Campaigns in OCM.
Lead and Contact records provide information about different aspects that impact the social media and campaigns conducted. Analytics provides reports on time-based engagement for aggregate, email, or subscribers data.
The omnichannel also automatically tracks all real-time website activity, ad clicks, SMS, email clicks, submissions around your existing website. Then combine a predictive scoring tool with the tracked data to identify leads that need to be urgently addressed.
Further down, custom scoring involves a process builder to check Email opens and clicks, helps in classifying your leads and contacts. Landing pages activity helps you to track interactions such as web form submissions, white paper downloads, trail subscribes, and many more. It sets custom Lead Score after a form submission and when the subscriber interacts with emails or with web submissions, his score increases.
Marketing Cloud offers a kind of tracking to build a profile automatically to highlight product interests in the mind of the lead. This makes the lead click on a particular product or service and connect with the business and become a sales-qualified lead.
In Retention and Discovery
Tracking plays a vital role in OCM by bridging the gap between online and offline media channels, providing digital coupons, which is one of the excellent approaches to retain customers across channels.
More controversially though, tracking tells you whether the customer has arrived at a store or is surfing online. That said, combining location data with handset data helps customers to reach your stores or sites and products easily. Collecting data through online surveys help know views about new products.
Aside from this, customers get information about recommendations, history of the product if people have it previously, product availability, its review, ratings, and many more.
In Email Tracking:
Email tracking, like the name suggests, is a process of tracking Emails sent to customers based on interest. Most email tracking tools capture data, based on location, time of email sent, links, and attachments if any.
It also enables you to see whether your first email is interesting enough for the recipient to open or not. You can check if the contact has opened your email multiple times in one day.
Ideally, if they haven’t opened the first, they’re unlikely to open future follow-up emails, so you should stop there without sending them further. Further down, email tracking helps you save time by preventing unnecessary follow-up emails, both for representatives and recipients.
In Lead Tracking:
It is a process of categorizing prospective customers on individual actions. By tracking from initial touch till the end, you’ll understand campaigns, your sales and marketing process as a whole. It tracks the basic information of lead such as first name, email address, title, company name, company size, and many more. It also tells you about how actively a lead is engaged with the company and does their activity reveal strong, immediate, and relevant interest or not. Later the team will then determine a scale of scores and find out which profile attributes and which activities contribute to them to get the attention of leads, till is set till the lead becomes a sales-qualified lead.
Listed below are some important aspects which has to be considered while following the lead tracking process:
Verdict
Omnichannel marketing provides customers completely integrated experiences from the first touchpointon. Aided by tracking and analytics over several rubrics, the strategy distills the message you intend to project.
Marketers are brought closer to measures of satisfaction levels of customers and identify which brands take their attention, and opinion for new products also.
If the marketing and tracking levels are disjoint, audiences may become less likely to engage with your brand, resulting in lowered loyalty and purchases. Hence, it’s safe to say that both of these are co-dependent.