Omnichannel marketing allow customers to have ready access to information and move between devices and channels during the buyer journey. It also offers your audience a completely constant and integrated brand experience, which upraise the best brands from the rest.
Here are some steps that can help you to develop and maintain significant, successful customer relationships across multiple channels.
1. Create Buyer Personas
Create customer identities for perception on what pleases and displeases your audience. Make rich personas by considering purchasing habits, priorities and behaviors across channels.
Try to understand the diverse types of buyer’s journeys that your shoppers go through in order to create a premium customer experience. Ask your customers the following questions to gather this data:
- What information sources do you trust?
- Before you purchase (product category), what criteria are you looking for? How do you find that information?
- How do you find out about new products?
- What made you want to buy (your product)?
- What do you find so appealing about purchasing?
With the above questions, it’s easy for you to determine the best suited channels where your brand needs a strong presence as well as a consumer decision making funnel.
2. Identify and Prioritize Customer Channels
Omnichannel is about giving customers the option to choose how they want to get in touch with your brand. A great way to discover what’s working is to listen to what your audience is saying across channels.
Survey your audiences. Ask your QA team for input. Organize agent pivot group sessions. Navigate new channels to approve your strategic presumptions and make important adjustments before rolling out. Here are some ways to identify and prioritize customer channels:
- Create a listing of the channels that you are using currently across the organization.
- Recognize how you are listening and connecting with your customers across all of those channels. In this way you will be able to determine who’s doing what, how they’re doing it and how it intersects with what you’re doing.
- Ask your customers about their preferences and ensure to honor those preferences as you move forward.
Then, use this data in accordance to your customers needs, expectations and habits.
3. Consistently Follow-Up
To reach your target customers, it is essential to follow them continuously across various channels with abandoned cart follow-up, proximity notifications, reminders about offers so as to enhance customer engagement & finally get a conversion. You can also send your existing customers a follow up email that involves personalized suggestions so as to encourage repeat purchases.
4. Leverage the Power of Marketing Automation
Creating a flawless and personalized brand journey for each customer is immensely labor intensive - unless you have a way to automate it.
Omnichannel marketing automation uses high powered technology to stimulate the right communication for the appropriate consumer across email, web, mobile and other digital channels. Here are some ways by which you can easily leverage the power of marketing automation.
- Understand your audiences and address their issues more effectively by getting warnings and alerts of critical issues before they occur, and pay immediate attention on inbound communications with automatic processes.
- Split your customers by creating a different customer groups so as to target them in various ways.
- Build insightful and rich user profiles by capturing the behavior of your consumers. These profiles will help you in implementing personalized recommendations and assist your sales and support team in identifying potential prospects.
5. Train Your Team and Customers
Acquire the right tools and make sure that your team uses them to their full potential. The main objective is to stay flexible and craft a resilient customer support model.
- Train your support staff by eliminating barriers between the customers and the customer service teams.
- Empower your customers to get the most out of the channels they are on.
- Pick service tools to create interactive, self-service FAQs and knowledge bases.
- Introduce your customers to resources, templates, features, and tutorials to enable them to utilize your services efficiently.
In this way you can save your customers effort and time by directing them to the channel most suited to their problem.
6. Continuously Optimize Your Channels
Online and offline channel arrangement must be monitored and reorganized when needed. You should constantly leverage the enterprise considerations and insights to understand buyer priorities to personalize cross-channel experiences and add features to capitalize on unique channel characteristics (mobile vs. website). Here are some tips to optimize your channel mix.
- Follow your data, not industry benchmarks. A particular channel working for other companies won't necessarily work the same for you. Use your data to determine whether a channel is successful.
- Modify or drop the channel that is not generating revenue or ROI to meet your standards. Invest in a channel that offers you the best advantage, and give an opportunity to the channels that are performing well.
- Constantly monitor top channels. In case if your ROI is decreasing or if your revenue is not increasing swiftly as it was previously, then modify your strategy.
7. Use Discounts Effectively
Coupons convinces the customer to purchase instantly. According to Bulldog Reporter, almost 80 percent of consumers said digital coupons "close the deal" for them when undecided on a purchase. For example, Starbucks uses its reward app to make a purchase. You can possibly reload and check your card via website, phone, on the app or in store.
Here are some discount ideas that will surely help you to enhance your products sale.
- Multi-buy offers: Multi-buy offers give consumers multiple products for a price that together is less than purchased individually. This is a great way to sell less popular, high priced products at full price by putting them altogether with a discounted popular item.
- Volume-based discounts: With volume discounts, buyers receive supplementary percentages or amounts off when buying a certain threshold of product. For example, if you spend $100, you get 10 percent off your purchase, but if you spend $150, you get 15 percent off. This “buy more, save more” model causes more movement of the product at a lower cost per piece.
- Gift with a purchase: Offer a free gift to make your customer purchase your product, like a t-shirt with the company logo on it. This will also help in promoting the brand.
- BOGO: Offer a "buy one, get one" deal where the second item is free or discounted. When a shopper can pay almost the same price for two items as they would have for just one, it’s hard for them to say no.
8. Be Global, But Act Local with a Localized Content Strategy
Have global customers? Your website should be more than a simple translated version of your English-version site hosted in a separate country-specific directory. While interacting with a global company, your visitors should feel local.
Let’s have a look at some ways to localize your content marketing:
- Associate or merge with local companies.
- Create local advertising (i.e. print ads, display ads, video ads, etc.) that appeals to locals.
- Seize local vogue and news.
- Select local buyers preferred payment procedures.
Implementing an effective, automated omnichannel strategy doesn’t mean that you should be active on all the successful channels. Just choose the right strategy and follow some essential tips for your customer as well as for your business. With cross-channel integrations, it’s easy for you to engage with your audience selectively. This will create truly aligned marketing initiatives resulting in brand loyalty, customer retention and revenues generated from higher customer lifetime values.