By now the term omnichannel marketing isn’t breaking news to any marketer. Every publication, blog, industry event, and Twitter influencer has had their say about the rise of omnichannel. (In case you’re still a little fuzzy on what omnichannel really means, you can find out here.)
According to the 2016 State of Marketing report from Salesforce, high-performing marketers are 34.4 times more likely than under performers to create personalized omnichannel customer experiences across all business units.Basically, if you don’t have an omnichannel strategy, you’re going to struggle in 2016.
Omnichannel may be the hottest new marketing buzzword, but it’s definitely not easy, and most marketers are still trying to figure it out. Your martech stack has to be seamlessly integrated so that you know the customer no matter what channel or device they engage on. You’re expected to deliver personalized messages each and every time, and you have to attribute the success of all these complex efforts.
Is your head spinning yet? To help you make sense of it all we simplified omnichannel marketing into four major pillars.
Visibility: A Single View of the Customer
The first key principle of omnichannel marketing is visibility. You know your customers are moving between channels and devices, effortlessly. In fact, Google reports that 90% of consumers move between devices when making a purchase.
The first step towards a singular view of the customer is a fully integrated tech stack. Your marketing automation, retargeting platform, CRM and other solutions should all work together under the guise of a single view of the customer. You need to have insight into every interaction a potential customer has with your business across channels and devices.
But what happens when your customers jump offline to make a phone call? The thread is lost unless you have call intelligence. Without visibility into offline behaviors, you’ll miss out on the complete view of the customer journey.
Key takeaway: Marketers need to focus on the right set of tools that allow them to have complete visibility into the entire customer journey – from first interaction to completed sale, and everything in between.
Measurement: Understand the Impact of Each Marketing Touchpoint
According to a study by The CMO Club, 82% of respondents surveyed felt an inability to measure cross-channel performance is standing in the way of their omnichannel marketing success. Accurate measurement on every possible customer touchpoint is an essential part of omnichannel marketing.
Once you have visibility into all of the interactions a potential customer is having with your business, you can then measure the success of your marketing efforts. What offers, landing pages, retargeting ads, and more are working? What is influencing people to buy? You need to understand the impact of every marketing touch point whether the customer is interacting on a laptop, tablet, or mobile.
Marketers need to be able to accurately measure the impact of their marketing efforts across channels, devices, as well as offline and online. Let’s say you’re A/B testing a landing page. One page may be performing well online, so you optimize towards the high performing version. But if you’re not looking at the offline impact of your landing pages, you may miss that the second landing page was actually driving more phone call conversions than online conversions, and you actually “optimized” against the higher performing version.
Key takeaway: If you can’t give proper credit where credit is due, you won’t be able to optimize your marketing efforts, and fail to provide a one-to-one, personalized customer experience.
Personalization: Deliver One-to-One Customer Experiences in Real Time
Use online and offline data together to deliver a seamless omnichannel customer experience. One-third ofmarketers surveyed by Adobe would prioritize personalization because it is considered the most important to marketing in the future. However, marketers surveyed by Econsultancy and Monetate stated that the biggest challenges with personalization are gaining insight quickly enough (40%), having enough data (39%), and inaccurate data (38%).
Your tools like real-time personalization, social media analytics, predictive analytics, marketing automation, CRM, and more need all of the online and offline data from your potential customers. If a customer visits your website and picks up the phone to call, you can push that offline data to your real-time personalization platform so you can design a returning web visitor experience that makes it easy for that potential customer to call again.
Key takeaway: Integrate online and offline behaviors into your automation tools to create the most successful omnichannel customer experience.
Optimization: Adjust Strategy and Budget Based on Complete Performance
In a study from Multichannel Merchant and Neustar, 78% of respondents currently realize or expect a sales lift with an integrated omnichannel marketing strategy. However once you have the omnichannel customer experience in place, you’re only halfway through the battle. The next step is to have the capability to accurately optimize your marketing strategy and budget based on complete visibility into your marketing performance.
What offers, landing pages, products, or services are driving your visitors to take the next step? What channels are they interacting with your business that leads to a purchase? With complete visibility into the complete performance of your marketing campaigns, you are able to make more powerful optimizations to your marketing strategy and budget.
Key Takeaway: Optimize your marketing with complete insight into the online and offline impact. You’ll make more powerful optimizations and smarter decisions.
Hopefully, these four pillars will help make the concept of omnichannel more accessible.
This article was originally published at Socialmediatoday.com, by author Caitie Gonzalez.
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