Marketing
How omnichannel marketing can enhance your digital strategy
Find out why it is so important to focus on email marketing for a successful omnichannel marketing strategy.

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Let's do a quick activity.
Try to remember all the times you've used the internet today. Every Google search, every email you've sent and received, every time you pulled up Instagram or scrolled through your Facebook or Twitter feed. We ’re guessing it's a lot. And most of your customers are just like you.
In every search, email, or social media scroll lies an opportunity to grab your audience's attention. Omnichannel marketing is what's going to put your brand in front of your customers on all the platforms that matter to them.
So, what is it and how can you develop a successful omnichannel marketing strategy that allows you to connect with your audience wherever they are?
Table of contents
What is multichannel marketing?
Differences with omnichannel marketing
Better customer experiences
Automated personalization
Integrated marketing and customer service
1. Get to know your audience
2. Pick the best channel for your products
3. Develop new channels as capacity grows
4. Don’t overlook performance insights
5. Personalization and timing are key
6. Don’t neglect offline channels
7. Be mindful of regional channel preferences
8. Focus on email marketing first
1. Email promotes targeted and personalized communication
2. Email reaches a wider target group
3. Email allows you to send behavior-based emails
4. Email interactivity can offer a more consistent customer experience
5. Email is easy to integrate with other channels
Table of contents
01What is omnichannel marketing?
02How does omnichannel marketing work?
03What is the difference between omnichannel and multichannel?
04What are the benefits of omnichannel marketing?
058 tips for a successful omnichannel marketing strategy
06The role of email marketing in omnichannel marketing campaigns
What is omnichannel marketing?
Omnichannel marketing is a marketing strategy that works to provide your audience with a seamless, smooth, and hassle-free experience across all channels relevant to them.
In the modern digital age, people access the internet with multiple devices and through multiple platforms – and this allows for better connections and more control over the buying experience. The most successful organizations employ omnichannel marketing strategies to make these interactions a consistent, integrated, and effective experience for their customers.
Your customers are ready to interact with your business on different channels anywhere, anytime. The question is, are you ready to accommodate them and deliver an omnichannel experience?
An omnichannel approach seeks to continually advance each customer along their own journey as they interact with your company using their preferred media and technology channels.
How does omnichannel marketing work?
Omnichannel marketing methods involve meeting and interacting with your audience where they are. This applies to physical in-store shopping at your brick-and-mortar store, the devices they’re using, where they are in the customer journey, and their previous interactions with your company.
New generations have revolutionized the way brands connect with their audience. With millennials and generation Z making up a large portion of your audience base, you need to make your communication efforts more personalized and seamless across all channels.
In essence, omnichannel marketing is a customer-centric approach, rather than a company-centric approach. It requires you to see through your audience’s eyes and stand in their shoes.
What is the difference between omnichannel and multichannel?
Both multichannel and omnichannel marketing involve using multiple communication methods to reach, engage, and serve customers. Insisting they all must engage with you using one or two methods limits your reach.
The difference between omnichannel and multichannel lies in the level of integration and personalization between your communication channels, and how well you can automate this across all touchpoints throughout the customer experience.
Multichannel marketing lets the customer pick their preferred communication channel. Omnichannel marketing ensures that no matter how many channels that customer ends up needing to use, their experience always moves forward, building on what has already happened.
Pro tip: Customers shift from one channel to another as they try to find the perfect solution for their needs. Offering a consistent brand experience across all those channels is now a key element in your marketing strategy.
What is multichannel marketing?
In marketing terms, multichannel marketing attempts to reach every customer through their preferred channels of communication and interaction – whether that’s online searching, the phone, SMS, email, WhatsApp or other mobile apps.
Every single channel may have its own messaging, offers, calls to action, special deals, and ways to follow up. Each can function independently of the others. A large enough company could, in theory, have a team for email, one for the website, another for SMS, and yet another for social media.

While this approach may have some advantages, it can also have limitations when it comes to building a cohesive customer experience. Omnichannel marketing works to solve that.
Differences with omnichannel marketing
An omnichannel strategy seeks to interconnect what happens in one marketing channel and automate the sharing of customer data from that one experience to all your other channels.
That way, when a customer who prefers email decides to visit your website and then engages with a live chat operator to ask a question about a product, that chat experience doesn’t leave them feeling like a stranger.

The chatbot or customer service rep can see data from all previous touchpoints. They know the customer’s previous purchases. They can see what the customer clicked on in various emails, revealing their interests and needs. They can see their demographics, how long they’ve been a customer, and all sorts of other information.
The result is a far better customer experience. Each step in the process is further down the buyer’s journey, rather than having to continually restart from the beginning with each new interaction.
An omnichannel approach advances the customer relationship and makes them feel less like a stranger.
This is why we like to compare the customer journey in an omnichannel experience to the hero’s journey in timeless storytelling. This approach makes the customer feel like the hero.
What are the benefits of omnichannel marketing?
As you have probably already surmised, omnichannel marketing saves you money. It takes a lot more time to have to restart the conversation with every marketing or customer service interaction than it does to pick up where you left off. It’s just more efficient.
But in addition to that, omnichannel marketing offers several other benefits you can’t experience as easily using other approaches.
Better customer experiences
When customers have better experiences, they remain loyal, leave good reviews, and spend more. And an omnichannel experience is far better than any other.
When you’re using an omnichannel marketing strategy, the customer can feel it immediately because chatbots and customer service reps already know something about them – even in their first interaction. It makes the whole experience less stressful, faster, and more satisfying.
“We found that using multiple messaging channels can increase average campaign engagement by 35%, compared to when using a single communication channel.”
Lee Munroe – Head of Design at OneSignal
Automated personalization
Personalization also gives customers a better experience, because it makes them feel known. But personalization is hard to do well – across multiple channels – if those channels aren’t connected.
By integrating your various marketing channels and allowing them all to see what the others know about each customer in real time, the customer feels known and heard no matter how they engage with your company.
And any future marketing you send them can also be tailored based upon their prior interactions, no matter the channel.
Integrated marketing and customer service
If we’re honest about it, customer service is also marketing. Good customer service closes sales, prevents returns, increases positive word of mouth and online reviews, and solves post-purchase problems.
With omnichannel marketing, your customer service isn’t sitting in a separate silo from your marketing and sales channels. Each team can see the same information about every customer.

So, whether they’re calling about a sales email they just saw, sending an instant message about a new product on your website, or chatting with you about a problem with a previous purchase, you’re doing all of this with the same goal in mind – to serve the customer well and keep them coming back. That’s why omnichannel marketing works in so many online business contexts.
8 tips for a successful omnichannel marketing strategy
We understand that it may be confusing to devise a kick-ass omnichannel marketing strategy from scratch. However, to make things easier for you, we’ve listed a few tips that will help you get started.
1. Get to know your audience
First and foremost, you must be aware of your audience’s needs and interests.
Understanding what exactly makes your customers click is a prerequisite to creating a successful omnichannel marketing strategy. Find out which channels your audience is the most active on and then equip yourself with the right tools to help you convert your prospects into customers.
Ideally, you should tap into all the channels to determine the specific behavior patterns relative to each of them. The best way to boost conversions is by correctly identifying and efficiently filling the gaps in the buying process.
Remember, you should focus on interacting with your audience not only after they’ve made a purchase, but also before it. Proactive companies stay on their prospects’ mind by sending them personalized emails to highlight positive reviews of their products from other customers.
2. Pick the best channel for your products
For a successful, targeted campaign, you should be able to determine which channel is best suited for your product or service.
This is a good starting place as you work toward omnichannel marketing, because you can branch out from one successful channel to new channels and integrate them as you go, so your customers always have a consistent experience.
