Omnichannel marketing establishes a seamless and unified shopping encounter across a brand’s various sales touchpoints, encompassing physical stores, events, mobile devices, and online platforms. This approach relies on data and analytics to ensure uniformity whenever customers engage with the brand. Imagine operating a sock business. 

With an omnichannel marketing strategy in play, a potential buyer could discover appealing socks via social media, explore your online store’s offerings, and receive a discount coupon to purchase their preferred pair at your physical store. 

The essence of an Omnichannel Marketing Strategy revolves around prioritising customers and guaranteeing a consistent and harmonised experience across diverse devices and marketing avenues.

What is Omnichannel Marketing?

Omnichannel marketing pertains to a company’s presence across numerous communication avenues. These avenues encompass online platforms like websites, apps, social media, and email, as well as offline options like physical retail stores and corporate events.

In today’s landscape, audiences desire continuous interaction with businesses, both online and offline, utilizing stores, applications, and mobile devices. Furthermore, they anticipate that company communications will mirror an up-to-date understanding of their preferences and purchases. Omnichannel marketing addresses this demand by enabling businesses to present a consistent and well-informed message, ensuring a seamless experience through diverse channels. This, in turn, enhances the overall customer journey and bolsters customer retention.

Omnichannel vs. Multichannel Marketing

The notions of multi-channel and omnichannel marketing are both on the idea of engaging customers across different platforms, but they are not the same. Multichannel examines the particular channel and how the transaction will be carried out there. 

In contrast, omnichannel considers how to offer the optimal experience as customers switch between channels, taking into consideration the possibility that the customer journey may span numerous channels. Every engagement is a journey that ends in a conversion. Let’s dig deeper and understand more about Omnichannel and Multichannel Marketing.

Multichannel Marketing

The goal of multichannel, which is to spread content across many channels, is considerably more manageable. A multichannel strategy makes a brand accessible to prospects through the Internet, print media, in-person interactions, etc. 

The consumer can select the channel via which they wish to engage with the brand, but the content and interactions within these many channels are frequently quite compartmentalized. In light of this, multichannel is more representative of operations, utilizing all suitable channels, whereas omnichannel is more representative of the entire customer experience.

Omnichannel Marketing

In addition to making brands available through online and offline channels, omnichannel marketing also ensures a seamless, integrated experience across all of them. Omnichannel marketing provides a seamless experience, as customers travel between online and offline channels, devices, and messages based on former interactions. Organizations can adopt an omnichannel strategy that is consumer-centric and bears in mind the entire customer journey.

Examples of Omnichannel Marketing

• Starbucks

Starbucks’ omnichannel marketing strategy is excellent, in large part because of the Starbucks mobile app. The company made its rewards app the cornerstone of its omnichannel approach and one of the top omnichannel marketing examples, even though having a rewards program is nothing new in and of itself.

Customers receive a free rewards card after downloading the app, which they can use whenever they purchase at Starbucks. 

The ability to check and refill the rewards card via any channel—the app itself, in-store, on the website, or by smartphone—is what distinguishes the app from traditional loyalty programs.

One of the best examples of omnichannel marketing.

• Nike

Another company that successfully makes use of omnichannel marketing is Nike. The Nike app stands out as the actual success story for the sportswear company, even though their physical stores are becoming more digitally integrated. 

Customers may explore and reserve items at their local store using their mobile devices. They can also scan QR codes to pull up products, receive product recommendations based on past purchases, and have access to the newest products before anyone else.

The Nike app, which was first released in 2018, has been downloaded more than 250 million times, making it one of the best use cases for omnichannel retail success.

• Sephora

During the pandemic, Sephora successfully made the switch to online sales, demonstrating the effectiveness of its omnichannel marketing strategy. To give their customers a smooth purchasing experience, they merged digital and in-store interactions.

Here is how Sephora used an omnichannel strategy to put customers first:

• Visual Try-on and Colour IQ
• In-store product logs
• Personalised web experience
• AI Chatbot

Now that we have understood what omnichannel marketing stands for, Let us discuss the benefits of amalgamating omnichannel marketing into a marketing strategy.

Benefits of Omnichannel Marketing

Today, the majority of brands concur that an omnichannel marketing strategy may produce the best outcomes. Executing an omnichannel strategy is not easy. Since customers are used to receiving a constant barrage of messages from different brands, they are becoming more picky about the ones they want to interact with. The following advantages can be attained by developing omnichannel marketing strategies:

• Better User Experience: The customer experience (CX) is better because omnichannel focuses on the unique expertise across devices rather than the channel. Companies may increase sales and improve retention rates by putting the client first rather than the platform.

• Uniform Brand Strategy & Identity: Building a readily recognizable brand image and tone is necessary for developing a cohesive approach across platforms. Organisations should base this image on the requirements and values of their key audiences. Your brand strategy will be more thorough if you concentrate on the complete experience and use your brand standards to target each channel. This will result in more loyalty and a more precise message. 

• Growth in Revenue: The improved, diverse engagements that omnichannel marketing strategy offers at each stage of the buyer’s journey might help raise revenue because research shows that customers who engage with several touchpoints tend to be 30% more valued. Additionally encouraging loyalty, this more targeted messaging raises the possibility that a customer will use your brand again. Repeat customers often represent 40% of your sales even if they represent a smaller portion of your consumer base. 

• Improved Data Attribution: Going genuinely omnichannel should include your data analytics as well as how customers interact with your business. Brands can better understand the customer journey, and campaigns that are the most successful by measuring engagements across channels. Your strategy can make use of all of this data to develop better-targeted advertisements and maximize media expenditure. 

Conclusion

Omnichannel marketing focuses on delivering a seamless and uniform experience to customers over multiple marketing channels. When implemented efficiently, it can drive pretty amazing results in sales and customer reviews. 

Omnichannel marketing boosts the flexibility of any marketing campaign by targeting the relevant audience across multiple channels like online, offline etc. It differs from multi-channel marketing as it doesn’t only focus on increasing customer touchpoints but also connects the customer experiences over multiple channels.

Auburn Digital Solutions is one of the premium digital advertising agencies, having its headquarters in Mumbai. Incepted in 2013, the agency has more than 100 dedicated employees spread across different cities in India, including Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, Bengaluru, and Pune. They also have overseas offices based in Canada, and Dubai.

Get in touch with Auburn Digital Solutions today and experience a wide range of digital marketing services for your business.