The customer journey is increasingly complex, encompassing multiple marketing channels like paid ads, organic search, social media, referrals, and traditional print marketing. This rapid proliferation of digital channels is significantly altering customer expectations, necessitating brands to embrace an omnichannel approach to customer engagement as springboard to drive sales and revenue.

What Is Omnichannel Customer Engagement?

Employing an omnichannel marketing strategy requires you to interact with customers across various channels, such as email, SMS, WhatsApp, QR codes, social media, and paid channels, every step of the way. This approach is crucial for growing a business, whether you run an e-commerce site or a brick-and-mortar store. It allows customers to choose when, where, and how they make a purchase.

It typically takes six to eight interactions with a customer to generate a reliable sale. The more channels you use to reach them, the faster you can convert a lead into a paying customer. Here are a couple of statistics to highlight the effectiveness of Omnichannel Marketing:

• B2B campaigns that use omnichannel marketing see an average ROI increase of 24%.

• Businesses that implement marketing campaigns on at least four different channels can see ROI increases of up to 300%.

Your customers are active on numerous channels, and new ones are emerging constantly. Here's why you can't afford to overlook omnichannel customer engagement:

1. Increase Brand Awareness

Brand-awareness marketing is when you are actively reaching out to customers who may or may not be aware of your product. The omnichannel approach allows you to reach new audiences wherever they are, adapting to their preferred channels.

Using a customer data platform (CDP) can help you to know your customers better, predict their preferences better, and engage them effectively on the channels they engage most with your brand.

2. Generate Leads

During lead generation, you should ask this question: Once you have established an awareness of your brand, how do you get the audience to move from considering to actually buying it?  

Implementing a multichannel approach empowers your marketing team to connect with audiences across a wider range of channels, facilitating the engagement with valuable content assets that guide them down the marketing funnel.

3. Create Frictionless Audience Journeys

The time between a customer viewing a marketing message and making a purchase is crucial. The longer you drag out this period, the more likely they are to reconsider. Through an omnichannel approach, you can engage customers on their preferred shopping channel through relevant, direct links, reducing the time it takes to move them along the marketing to sales funnel.

4. Leverage the Benefits of Multiple Channels

An omnichannel marketing approach allows you to capitalize on the positive features of each channel. If you want to reach a larger audience base with lengthier content, the classic email marketing will not fail. If your priority, however, is to offer more concise and direct follow-up notification reminders, SMS marketing and WhatsApp marketing might be more useful alternatives.

5. Increase Customer Win-Backs

When customers abandon their carts, it's crucial to reach them while their purchase intent is still high. Providing audiences with timely next-best offers on multiple channels can be the springboard to bring them on their omnichannel conversion journeys.

6. Improve Customer Trust

By implementing an omnichannel marketing model, your customers will consistently see your brand messages across all their favorite platforms, fostering a trusting and loyal relationship. Omnichannel Marketing allows you to reach customers across various touchpoints and engage them with your best content more effectively.

7. Increase Targeting

Utilizing different channels simplifies targeting specific customers from various demographics and behaviors. Each lead will be more receptive to your brand through their preferred channels—some may favor social media, while others prefer email or text messages. Omnichannel Marketing allows you to reach your target customers on their preferred platforms without missing those on different ones.

8. Collect Better Customer Data

As a marketer, you know that data is crucial. Collecting customer data can be challenging, but omnichannel marketing simplifies and enhances this process. The more channels you operate on, the more opportunities you must gather diverse data on leads and customers.

9. Achieve Faster ROI

With a variety of channels, omnichannel marketing can reduce overall costs and deliver a faster return on investment. Email alone can offer a high ROI, but adding more channels is relatively inexpensive and can significantly benefit your campaigns.

10. Expand Your Loyalty Base

Omnichannel Marketing is an effective and cost-efficient way to expand your base of loyal customers. By continuing to engage them after conversion across multiple channels, you can lower overall acquisition costs and increase their lifetime value.

No strategy is perfect, and omnichannel marketing, despite its numerous benefits, has its share of challenges:

1. Tedious Change Management

Implementing an omnichannel marketing strategy demands substantial technical capabilities, which can be especially challenging for small businesses. Managing content across multiple channels often requires collaboration with the IT department, a luxury not all organizations can afford. The multitude of available channels can be overwhelming, making it difficult to leverage them all efficiently.

Solution: Start small. Focus on two or three channels where your target audience is most active. Gradually expand as you become more comfortable and capable.

RESUL’s multilevel hierarchy abilities provides a systematic approach to manage and control access to information based on different levels of organizational hierarchy. Its intuitive solution interface also empowers non-technical teams to streamline workflows, while fostering collaborations between cross-functional teams.

2. Manual Persona Segmentation

Identifying buyer persona segments and targeting them contextually on the right channel to achieve sales attribution, is key for the brand which should be constantly validated and updated by using machine learning.

Younger demographics are more likely to be active on social media platforms, while older demographics may prefer traditional channels like phone or in-person interactions. If your buyer personas aren't accurately defined, you may attract attention but fail to convert leads into sales.

Solution: Instead of going purely by the marketer's gut instinct, RESUL’s new-age machine learning algorithms can help you create buyer persona segments effectively and quickly.

Its high-level clustering of audiences is not only based on their demographics and purchase pattern but also on their behaviour (using propensity scores based on time, content, offer, channel and location) and influence (both social and real world) characteristics, helps you to expedite effectiveness and precision in audience targeting.

3. Low ROI Returns

Using a marketing technology to drive omnichannel audience engagement approach might increase overall costs, straining your marketing budget.

You may end up spending large amounts of money trying to engage and convert thousands of people who may not be ready to commit to your product or service. Not knowing how much credit to give each channel for a conversion makes it difficult to focus future efforts and choose strategies that get the best results. That’s why tracking conversion across multiple channels is key to know whether your omnichannel customer engagement efforts really pay off.

Solution: RESUL helps you tackle this problem by tracking conversion attribution at a segment-of-one level across all your marketing channels. This gives you actionable insights on how you can further nudge your audiences along their journeys to conversion.

Omnichannel Customer Engagement: Take the First Step with RESUL

An Omnichannel marketing strategy begins with defining buyer personas and building and segmenting better audiences.

The time to start your Omnichannel Marketing journey is now—don’t miss out on that much-needed ROI boost any longer. Try RESUL Startup and let us help you craft an Omnichannel Marketing strategy that’s sure to convert.