Building an effective omnichannel strategy

Providing a seamless omnichannel experience for customers requires intention, but with the right tools and approach, it is possible. Below are 4 important steps you can take to help develop an effective omnichannel strategy.

The main reason to pursue an omnichannel marketing strategy is to improve the customer experience. You want to design your approach around what customers want and how they typically behave, which requires learning more about them. There are a few ways to do that:

• Review your data. The analytics your tech products provide can be invaluable for learning more about your customers. Website and app analytics can reveal common customer behaviors and help you better understand the customer journey. Marketing analytics from your email, social, text, and paid search products can help you understand which channels your customers respond to the most and what kind of messaging works best on each one.
  
  
• Learn from customer-facing employees. The employees who work most closely with prospects and customers will know a lot about who they are and what they care about. Talk to your sales reps, cashiers, and customer service representatives to learn more about your customers.
  
  
• Perform regular UX testing. Don’t assume that your current digital systems all work correctly—try them out. Make test purchases on your website, app, and any third-party apps you use, on a range of device types and browsers. Sign up for your email list and marketing texts so you can confirm that they’re working correctly. Experiencing interactions with your business from the customer perspective can help you spot issues you might miss otherwise.
  
  
• Send customer surveys. The best way to figure out how your customers feel about your brand is to ask them directly. Send surveys to take the pulse of how well you’re doing now and where customers want to see improvement.
  
  
• Set up customer interviews or focus groups. Surveys can provide a good snapshot of how customers are feeling, but conversations are better for getting more detail about their habits and preferences. Arrange interviews or focus groups to better learn how customers prefer to interact with your business, why people choose the channels they choose, and what they think would create a better customer experience.

Implementing an omnichannel strategy depends on having the right technology tools and making sure they work seamlessly together. If you want customers to have a unified experience across multiple channels—such as website, app, and email—you need to be able to connect all those platforms on the back end.

Plus, integrated technology is key to enabling personalization. If you know that the customer who just signed up for your email list has ordered pumpkin spice flavoring in the past, you can send an email featuring your blog post on delicious pumpkin spice recipes to try. If they choose the post about pumpkin spice lattes, you can then run ads promoting your coffee products, paired with the image of a delicious latte. But to do that, the tech you use for your website, email, and ads must all be connected.

Analyze your current tech stack to determine whether your products can be easily integrated. You want your CRM (customer relationship management) system, e-commerce software, marketing automation platforms, data analytics tools, and any third-party apps you use to all connect to one another. If you find that any of them doesn’t work well with the others, consider looking into an alternative product that does. And when choosing technology products moving forward, always consider how well they integrate with the tech tools you already use.

Creating a unified brand experience across channels does not mean putting the exact same content on every one. You want your presence on each channel to be aligned with your brand positioning and guidelines, while still being tailored to the way customers use that particular channel.

Consider, for instance, each social media site’s strengths, weaknesses, and norms; Instagram is a great place for images, while TikTok is all about video. And text marketing should be short and to the point, while email gives you more space to share longer content and include a mix of media types. You can keep your main brand messaging consistent while varying the content format and communication style you use on each channel.

Any good marketing strategy is a work in progress, and that goes for omnichannel strategies as well. You want to continually track results and look for ways to improve. Determine the most important KPIs (key performance indicators) to monitor for each channel and campaign, and continue to solicit customer feedback to help provide extra context for the metrics you track.

Every campaign you launch is an opportunity to learn. Test out new ideas to see how they land. Be prepared to change your marketing strategy as you go based on what you learn. Even if a particular tactic doesn’t net the results you’d hoped for, that’s still valuable information you can apply to the next campaign.