Why ignoring omnichannel marketing platform Will Cost You Time and Sales.

The choice of marketing strategies has been debated for quite some time when it comes to digital. However, the approach saving time and improves your revenue generation is the one that you might be trying to find. Omnichannel marketing, here, has been a strategy that has enabled marketers to plan their marketing drives to enhance their revenue generation and save time as well.

Before we move forward and let you know about the benefits of omnichannel, let me explain what omnichannel is and how it works.

 Omnichannel Marketing and it's working

Omnichannel marketing helps you provide integrated and seamless communication to your users across channels and devices. Omnichannel aims to provide the convenience of reaching out to the users with immersive marketing messages and guides them at every step, starting from the brand discovery to conversion and beyond. Moreover, omnichannel communication is also a great way to build loyalty among your users and retain them for multiple conversions.

So, how does it work? Omni channel marketing works by understanding the user data and their online behavior, and communicate with them according to the touchpoints they are active.

Let's consider an example to understand how an omnichannel experience looks. Let's say you are looking to buy a dress for an upcoming event and start the journey by looking for it on the internet.

Since you want to look perfect for the occasion, here is how your conversion would probably look like:

1. a) You would go to the internet and search for the kind of product you are looking to buy via your PC or mobile. After checking out the search results, you finally head to the website that matches your criteria to get a better look at the products they are offering.
2. b)     Next, you might want to know more about the brand or the product you are about to buy, so you decide to get some feedback about it from some friends or relatives. However, along with asking your people about the brand, you might also look for more reviews from people who bought the product. Thus, you search for the brand on social media or check out the website to look for reviews and posts about the product from people with similar tastes.
3. c) When you have quenched most of your doubts and queries, you would head back to the website and decide whether to buy the product. Once you have finalized your decision, you add the product in the cart, make the payment, and finally checkout.

As you can see, you have traversed a lengthy path, covering multiple touchpoints. It is quite possible that you browsed your internet, had a chat with your friend over social media, accessed your email to check new messages at some point since discovering the dress till you checked out. Omnichannel marketing looks to collect insights by sending you communication via all these channels and looks to gather insights from your response. For example, you might not open an email from the brand you discovered but could be much appreciative if they send an app or web notification with a high-quality image and description of the dress you have interested in and engage with it. Moreover, you might take time ranging from hours to days before you place an order. An omnichannel strategy would help the brand to keep the product in front of you through marketing communications until the point you convert.

However, omnichannel marketing also takes care of making your communication interactive and immersive. For instance, if you keep seeing the same message about the dress everywhere you go, or irrelevant products from the same website, you would be pretty irritated with their communication soon.  Yet, if you see a variety of communication and recommendations that are relevant to you, the chances that you will be engaged increases.

Now that you know what omnichannel does let's check out its benefits. If you have still not adopted omnichannel marketing, these benefits might be able to convince you otherwise.

1. Revenue growth – Omnichannel helps you to improve your revenue generation by providing relevant communication to your users based on their buyer-persona. Therefore, the chances that they will be converted becomes quite high, thereby adding to revenue generation.
2. Improves retention: Omnichannel marketing doesn't end at conversion and looks to engage the users even after converting to perform repeat purchases according to their interests. Omnichannel uses the browsing behavior of the users to create product recommendations or event triggers, which allows you to convert your users over and over again.
3. Better personalization: Omnichannel helps you to personalize your marketing communication with more relevant products and recommendations that are based on user intent, rather than pushing products to them for purchasing. Moreover, you can have a better understanding of the events or actions that trigger the conversion for a particular segment of users and leverage it to improve your sales.
4. Improved collection of user insights: Omnichannel works across devices and marketing channels. Therefore, you have a better understanding of the user behavior, the devices they are active on most, and the channels they use most often. Subsequently, you can design your marketing communication that caters to each of these factors and provide better visibility and experience to the users.
5. Optimization of marketing budget and ROI: Since your marketing drives become more directed towards the users based on their actions and interests, you can save on spending unnecessary budget on promoting products that have a lesser chance of converting them. In order words, rather than sending multiple product messages and hoping that they buy one, you can now send messages showcasing the products that you know they would buy for sure. Not only marketing budget, but it also saves you the time of creating multiple campaigns and analyzing them over time.

What Next?

Omnichannel aims at providing a seamless and integrated experience to your customers. It improves brand visibility, makes the marketing funnel smoother, and invokes brand loyalty among your users. Moreover, it makes the overall marketing process immersive and helps you optimize your marketing budget. If you still choose to ignore omnichannel marketing, it would cost you time and money and reduce your brand impact in the longer run.