The Right Customer, Time and Place–What Is Omnichannel Marketing

Companies with omnichannel strategies retain on average 89% of their customers.

To be able to communicate effectively in these new circumstances, marketers need to provide customers with consistent messages in all communication channels. This is where theomnichannel strategybecomes essential. The goal is to understand what individual recipients want from a brand at a specific time and place. Let’s take a closer look at these three components: customers, time and place.

Customers

Customers are at the center of omnichannel communication. You want to reach them by creating appropriate messages for each location where they may interact with your brand. It is estimated that a client who encounters a product in several different locations is twice as valuable as the one whose relationship with the brand is based on a single channel. It is important to know and understand their needs and lifestyles to provide them with consistent information.

Time

To create the best customer experience with our brand, you should provide them with relevant information right when they want it. It is good to know at which moment they are interested in a particular product and in what circumstances they engage with your message. In all these situations, you can draw their attention by using the appropriate communication medium.

Place

You need to be where your clients are – and they move in an increasing number of spaces. The omnichannel marketing objective is to make contact with the client at the right place with different forms of contact like e-mail, SMS, push notifications, etc. The context of this contact is very important. Are they at work or at home? Using a laptop or smartphone? Different situations require the use of different media.

How to conduct an effective omnichannel campaign?

1. Create a database of your customers

The first step in implementing the omnichannel strategy is to gather all of your customer data in one place. This includes both information that they leave through web browsing as well as data from real-world activities likes transactional data and store visits. This allows you to better serve your customers with personalized messages. In addition, it allows you to run campaigns in an efficient manner. The best way to use this data is with platforms that are able to analyze huge amounts of unstructured information from various sources, i.e. big data. This is precisely Synerise’s function. 
 

2. Measure the behavior of your clients

To engage your customers you need to know who they are: where they come from, their gender, how old they are, how they shop, etc. Knowing more about them really means having access to data about them. The use of appropriate indicators lead sellers to answer important questions about their potential audience. Did the number of purchases increase after a campaign? What channel will help to encourage the target market to visit the nearest store? Brands works best when they are able to interpret omnichannel data because they make better use of statistics to attract the attention of clients.

3. Discover the important moments in the customer journey

A customer journey is the path that they take from their first contact with your product. It is both about the decisions they make and through which channels they are reached. Regardless of the industry in which you work, tracking the relationship between the client with the product will help you discover important moments in his activity. Such a moment may be a signal that the client is moving away from your business, or, on the contrary, the contact is moving to a higher level. This is an appropriate time to send a message that will engage your audience.

4. Send personalized messages

Knowing more about customer behavior and the stage of their relationships with your brand allows you to better communicate with them. Customers don’t want to receive irrelevant messages, which they treat as spam and only encourage them to disengage with you. Adjusting the content of your message to their needs is essential. If they have recently searched for a specific brand of TV, offer a discount with a personalized email message. If they come into your store, send a push message inviting them to approach the appropriate position or a link to complete a product description. You can be sure that the personalized message will not be treated as spam or intrusion on your part.

5. Use marketing automation

To be able to send such personalized information, you need special tools that support marketing automation. Even a whole team of marketers cannot track the activities of thousands of customers in your database. The amount of data involved would be overwhelming and sending messages based on that data would be even more time consuming. With marketing automation the process of selecting and sending content takes place without your participation

The combination of online and offline

Omnichannel is a big change in the sales process and a great opportunity for your business. To use it, it is important that you have information about the activities of your clients, both from the virtual world and the real one. Collecting information about online consumer interests is not a problem. Thanks to cookies, all  actions are logged when they visit your online store, or are look elsewhere for products.

But in order to uncover all aspects of customer behavior, you need to know how they function offline. You can take huge steps towards this goal through the deployment of BLE technology (Bluetooth Low Energy) and beacons. With these transmitters, you can track when customers walk past your store, when they walk inside and where they stop and linger. Through collecting information from the online and offline you get a better understand of what they want – immediate and relevant information no matter where they are or what device they’re using.