The boom in online shopping in recent years has nudged businesses to strengthen their online presence and build a stronger, deeper, and more personal relationship with their customers. Businesses have developed websites, social media profiles, and even apps as part of their omnichannel marketing strategy in addition to conventional brick-and-mortar retail stores to provide customers with a seamless shopping experience. But how does it help improve the customer experience? Let’s find out.

What is omnichannel marketing?
The exponential acceleration of technology has become a double-edged sword for marketers. While it has become easier to get the right message to the target audience at the right time, marketers are also mired in a sea of complexity, with an expanding number of channels and competition to deal with. At a time when losing a customer’s attention is as easy as ever, companies have come up with omnichannel marketing to create a consistent brand image and improve customers’ shopping experience. It involves integrating and working with the numerous channels that businesses use to communicate with customers, including offline stores and events and digital media like websites, newsletters, emails, apps, push notifications, and much more.

How does omnichannel marketing improve customer experience?
Omnichannel marketing is different from multi-channel marketing. For example, multi-channel marketing is when a landing page of a company’s website is linked to an email promotion campaign using two channels to convince customers to buy one’s products.

On the other hand, omnichannel employs a data-led, AI-driven approach to comprehend complex data points like customer behavior, preferred channels, age, and other factors to determine which messages to send to which customers through which channels and at what time. This ultimately results in a seamless and highly customized experience that impacts sales significantly more than usual multi-channel marketing. When omnichannel marketing is truly effective, it can boost customer loyalty, improve brand recall, and increase sales. But it can also be a tricky affair. Let’s look at five tips to help build a robust omnichannel strategy and improve the overall customer experience.

Research and collect insights
It is essential to understand customer demands and put them first in order to create an impactful omnichannel strategy. This can be done by browsing one’s company website, making a purchase, using the chat-bot, and walking a mile in the customer’s shoes. This will help determine the most problematic areas that hamper a seamless shopping experience. Moreover, one can reach out to client servicing teams like email marketing associates or even a cashier at a physical store to get the customer’s viewpoint from their level of expertise. Once this internal company research is done, one can reach out to consumers via surveys, reviews, or focus groups to learn more about their shopping experience and improve on what’s not working for them.

Segment customers and plan their experience
Following the data analysis, it is simpler to divide users into different groups according to their common behavioral patterns and create a personalized plan for how one wants their experience to flow across all touchpoints. For instance, a theme park can make it easier for tourists in different groups (like couples, families, and school kids) to plan their accommodation, check ride schedules, and book tickets online without having to wait in queues with its website, app, wrist bands, cards.

Choose appropriate marketing automation tools
The tools that help the company engage with their customers must be carefully determined. Using the appropriate martech or software that leverages technology to target and optimize marketing can make or break the strategy. Some useful martech includes good Customer Relationship Management (CRM) or email marketing software, an integrated customer engagement platform, automation tools, social media management solutions, and digital analytics tools.

Maintain consistency
It’s important to have a variety of digital platforms for one’s business and maintain consistent messaging and communication across them all, which is easily achievable after developing an effective omnichannel marketing strategy. The consistency in brand message raises brand awareness and improves customers’ journey, whether they are in the physical store or shopping on the company’s website.

Test, measure, and improve
The last lap is to keep learning, analyzing, updating data points, and optimizing one’s content to develop lasting consumer relationships. One’s omnichannel strategy should be dynamic, just like any other aspect of marketing.