Shopping for products, exclusively at an online store, is a behaviour of the past.
Customers are now habitually interacting with brands, multiple times, both on and offline, before going anywhere near the “buy now” button.
Prompted by the pandemic, we’ve seen, first-hand, with our eCommerce clients that this trend is only growing.
Voice activated devices, wearables, and virtual reality, as well as social media purchasing, curbside pickup and other emerging technologies, have meant that a marketer’s priority is to be everywhere their customer looks.
That being said, customers still expect a seamless experience from one device to the next, presenting marketers with the challenge of not only being present across channels, but also ensuring each channel is connected.
This is what differentiates omnichannel from multichannel marketing, which though similar, is not quite the same thing.
Multichannel marketing shares content across as many channels as possible to achieve maximum engagement, with the channel at the centre.
Omnichannel marketing successfully links all your channels to work harmoniously together. Platforms share information without duplication, and every individual customer’s journey can be tailored to their current buying stage, creating a much more relevant and higher converting digital experience.
The key is that your customer becomes the centre of your marketing strategy, rather than the channel.
The results speak for themselves. According to Worldplay, omnichannel shoppers spend between 50-300% more than single channel shoppers.
So how do you get started?
We’ve laid out 5 steps to setting up your omnichannel marketing strategy so that you can create a seamless customer experience.
1. Plan the full customer experience first – In order to create an omnichannel experience, you need to understand how your customers interact with your brand. We’ve always found that creating a customer map is a great start, and will allow you to easily see all the avenues your customers are coming from alongside the different channels and content they see before hitting “buy”.
You may have a couple of different customer personas who need to engage through different channels and with specific messaging. Consider all the stages your customer may encounter your brand, through social media posts, an in-store visit, an abandoned cart email, and the post purchase process.
If you’re just getting started with omnichannel marketing, we’d suggest you focus on a small number of key channels that you want to link together so that you have a good foundation to build on as you acquire more customers.
You may want to consider how you can improve the experience within platforms that are used most, i.e. introducing chatbots for customers to reach out to your team early in the buyer process.
2. Use data to segment your audience so you can personalise content– The most successful omnichannel strategies are personalised to each customer.
Understand where and how they like to shop, the decision stage they tend to be at for each platform, the messaging they most relate to and the biggest pain points for each segment. When doing this, you define where you need to show up, when, and with what message.
You’re going to want to separate your repeat customers from your new customers, to make sure the messaging is appropriate.
3. Create content for each stage – One of the biggest pieces of work involved in omnichannel marketing is curating the content. This is always something we see with eCommerce clients who are experiencing growth, have an international customer base or are delving into a content strategy for the first time.
You’ll need content for each buying stage to nurture your audience through to a purchase decision. Putting in workflows to help manage this content process on scale can put you ahead. This is where your personalisation skills will really come in handy – you can take a look at ways to do this in our previous blog.
4. Make sure the context is right – Crucially, if you’re delivering content through an omnichannel approach, you need to make sure the context makes sense. For example, you’ll lose a lot of customers if they’re forced to fill out huge forms on small devices and may be perturbed from making large purchases using a voice activated device.
You’ll also want to be mindful of the lifecycle of that particular customer. Are they a brand new customer, ready to purchase or a regular buyer? Delivering the wrong messaging can give poor customer experience, and is a relatively easy fix.
5. Get the right tech tools – Omnichannel marketing means creating a lot of content, across multiple channels and managing a large amount of data. Because of this, you need the correct technology designed not just to be the best in the industry but the best for your business needs.
As such, Nemetos works with clients from conception to completion, understanding how your business works and then selecting technology which then fits into your current processes, rather than adapting the business to a new technology.
Ready to get started?
An omnichannel marketing strategy will help you to improve your customer experience and in turn leads into conversions on your site. You can expect to see better engagement throughout your customer journey and more repeat custom if this is followed through post purchase.
If you’re looking to implement an omnichannel strategy or would like to find out more about how this could look for you, we’d love to chat to you. Schedule a video call with us.
