In today’s ever-evolving, competitive landscape, staying relevant and growing customer engagement means marketers must continue to adapt and elevate their customer experiences. That requires an omnichannel approach. In this Smart Guide, we’ll dive into how to create the right moments of engagement for your customers throughout the entire customer lifecycle.
18 Min Read
It’s no secret that customer behaviors and expectations of brands are constantly evolving. What worked five years ago — or even last year — no longer works today. Customers are more informed than ever with access to social media, comparison shopping, and reviews — all at their fingertips. They’re also saturated with marketing messages, discounts, and offers at every turn.
Customers want brands to be mind-readers that anticipate their needs and provide the information, products, or offers they need in that moment. They want interactions with brands to be intuitive, timely, and valuable. Marketers must take a smart, intentional, customer-first approach to how they engage customers throughout their journey with the brand.
1PwC (2018) Experience is everything: Here’s how to get it right
In our increasingly digital world, customers are engaging with brands across a growing number of channels. They’ve become channel agnostic and don’t view their brand interactions across channel lines. 73% of shoppers use multiple channels, and the more channels they use when engaging with a brand, the more they spend.2 They’ll average half a dozen different channel interactions before they make a purchase, and they expect experiences across those channels to be seamless.
Creating seamless, connected customer experiences across channels requires a new approach ー omnichannel ー which builds customer journeys around a comprehensive view of your customers and is responsive to how customers are engaging with your brand across channels. That way, an interaction on one channel immediately impacts what that customer experiences on another.
2Harvard Business Review (2017) A Study of 46,000 Shoppers Shows That Omnichannel Retailing Works; 3Knexus (2016) Omnichannel Stats You Don’t Want to Miss; 4WorldPay (2015) The Store of the Future and the Role of Omni-Channel Payments in Driving Business Growth
Marketing campaigns have traditionally been planned at the channel level on a campaign-by-campaign basis. Each channel leveraged its own data to optimize performance for that specific channel without taking into consideration how those channel messages impacted the greater customer experience. Marketers were only responsible for a specific channel and lacked the tools to integrate data and experiences across channels.
As marketers started engaging customers across the growing number of channels, their approaches remained channel-centric. Interactions on one channel were disconnected from messages on others. Each channel was unaware of events or interactions taking place on other channels, resulting in conflicting messages to customers.
5Digital Commerce 360 (2013) Why an omnichannel strategy matters; 6Google (2015) Omnichannel shoppers: An emerging retail reality
“Every company has data, but if you can’t action off that data instantly, then it doesn’t do you any good. And when dealing in financial products…you better get it right. The magic with Blueshift is its agility and ability to handle data for segmentation, journeys, and personalization across all channels, no matter the speed or attributes that we put in. We have the flexibility to use our data to improve results across many different use cases.”
“Every company has data, but if you can’t action off that data instantly, then it doesn’t do you any good. And when dealing in financial products…you better get it right. The magic with Blueshift is its agility and ability to handle data for segmentation, journeys, and personalization across all channels, no matter the speed or attributes that we put in. We have the flexibility to use our data to improve results across many different use cases.”
Joyce Poole
Sr. Director, Marketing CRM,
LendingTree
Omnichannel marketing takes a fundamentally different approach by creating dynamic customer experiences built around a unified view of the customer. It puts the customer at the center of every interaction. Just like personalization is core to effective marketing strategies, taking an omnichannel approach is becoming another essential in the marketer’s toolkit. Only with an omnichannel approach can marketers achieve true customer-centricity, which translates to increased engagement and conversions, greater mindshare, reduced churn, and ultimately greater lifetime value.
Download our Smart Guide to Omnichannel Campaigns learn how.
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