Omnichannel Marketing

Omnichannel marketing is the practice of delivering the most relevant marketing campaigns and messages to your audience across all the channels through which they interact with your brand. These channels include websites, emails, webinars, social media, apps, and even offline channels like business events, in-person interactions, and more.

What is omnichannel marketing?

Omnichannel marketing is the customer-centric approach of creating and delivering the most contextual and consistent messaging to customers across all the touchpoints through which they interact with your brand by collecting and processing useful information from customers' prior interactions. This information is usually collected, stored, and processed via a marketing platform.

Touchpoints for omnichannel marketing range from digital to offline media like websites, emails, social media, webinars, customer calls, events, in-person meetings, brochures, newspaper ads, and more.

The goal of omnichannel marketing is to provide the relevant and consistent information to buyers through their most convenient channels so that they can evaluate your solutions more effectively and make informed buying decisions.

Here's an example of what an omnichannel marketing experience might look like for a buyer and a brand.

You run an ecommerce company that sells sports bikes. A customer named Liz wants to buy a mountain bike. She searches for one on a search engine and lands on your website.
Since you've integrated all your marketing channels to facilitate an omnichannel experience, here's what her buying journey looks like:

Touch Point

Buyers Interactions

Search engine

Liz types "best mountain bikes to buy" in the search engine.

Landing page

Liz lands on your page and reads relevant content, like blog posts on "tips before purchasing a mountain bike," "top 10 mountain bikes to buy," etc.

Paid ads

Liz consents to receive marketing promotions from your brand by accepting the cookies on your website. She sees your brand's ads on other websites and social media. The ad focuses only on mountain bikes based on her prior interactions. Since the ads are relevant to Liz, she clicks on the ad and signs up for an email newsletter about mountain bikes.

Email newsletters

Your newsletters feature educational content about mountain bikes. Liz has opened and interacted with most of these newsletters. This demonstrates that Liz is really passionate about mountain bikes, so a salesperson invites her to visit a nearby showroom for a free demos on some mountain bikes.

In-person meeting

Liz tries a few mountain bikes and shows interest in two particular models. The salesperson records this information in the marketing solution.

Sales calls/emails

Your sales team keeps updating Liz about her favorite mountain bikes when there's a special offer going on or when new models are released into the market. The experience delivered to Liz is consistent and relevant, making her more likely to purchase a mountain bike from your brand.

Why is omnichannel marketing important for your business?

Better customer experiences
Customers always get the most relevant information by interacting with your brand's touchpoints and not mass targeted product promotions. This positions your brand as less sales-focused and more customer-centric—thereby increasing your credibility and making your brand your customers' top choice when they want to make a purchase. It increases customer loyalty and creates repeat customers.
Simpler brand identity
In omnichannel marketing, all your messages across various channels reflect uniformity and consistency. This means your audience can easily identify your brands and remember the message for a longer period.
Improved marketing returns
Omnichannel marketing means fewer product promotions and more relevant messages that educate your audience. When you successfully scale up the personalization of your content, you convert more shoppers into customers, which generates greater marketing returns.

Challenges of omnichannel marketing

Scattered data
Siloed teams
Lack of unified visibility
Content variety
Personalized automation

Scattered data
Successful omnichannel marketing campaigns require a lot of basic customer information, like first name, email address, and phone number, prior website interactions, like time spent on the page, email bounce rate, and conversion rate, and prior campaign interactions, like impressions, engagements, and conversions. These datasets are usually stored on different platforms, developed by different vendors, and don't get sync well.
An omnichannel experience can be achieved only when all the relevant datasets are combined into a single system and the data is aligned with the analytics software so that you can draw clear insights about customers and their activities.
Organizing all of that scattered data is just half a battle. Gathering data from multiple sources and combining it into a single system, and then deriving insights from the analytics software, creating campaigns based on those insights, and automating them at scale can be a tedious and time-consuming process.
Siloed teams
Because they often operate in different offices and time zones, customer-facing teams like sales, marketing, and support often work in information silos. This results in a communication gap, which reduces their ability to collaborate. Additionally, most marketing platforms either don't have a built-in channel to exchange insights and communications among the team members, or it requires a complex setup.
Lack of unified visibility
Since marketing teams typically use different platforms for different functions—like managing contacts, running campaigns, and sending messages—gaining insights on end-to-end campaigns is challenging. Teams need to have a clear and direct visibility into all campaigns, customers' interactions with those campaigns, and related performance metrics to create more data-driven content and deliver better experiences.
Content variety
Creating multiple content variations for different buyer personas, interactions, and behaviors, as well as templating them and feeding them into a marketing solution, can take a lot of time and effort.
Personalized automation
Delivering a unique message for each visitor according to their interactions with your content requires sophistication and extreme precision while setting up the campaign. For example, let's take two visitors, Sam and Katty, who land on your website to buy sports products. Both have shared their contact details and consented to receive promotions.
Sam lands on your product page and views content about basketball.
Katty lands on the same product page and views content about tennis.
To deliver a personalized experience, the marketing solution should identify Sam as a basketball shopper and send automated emails with basketball content, whereas Katty should receive automated emails more related to tennis.
A typical marketing automation solution would likely categorize both shoppers as sports enthusiasts and send a generic email about sports products, which isn't as relevant to either shopper.

How a unified marketing platform can solve the above problems

Unified marketing platforms are a solution for managing marketing activities end-to-end on a single platform.
A unified marketing platform should enable marketers to create and execute omnichannel campaigns, manage customer data, and measure marketing metrics and ROI in one place and without the need for any external solutions.
Zoho Marketing Plus is one example of a unified marketing platform that enables marketing teams to create, collaborate, and measure success for marketing campaigns—all on a single platform.

Zoho Marketing Plus addresses the challenges of omnichannel marketing

Manage data in one place

Marketing Plus enables your teams to manage customers' contact details, study campaign insights, and measure performance data across dashboards in one place. Your team can organize data and draw insights without any complex calculations.

Collaboration and communication

Marketing Plus comes with built-in tools that enable team members to discuss ideas, collaborate on campaigns, review results, and manage all campaign-related communications in one place. Thanks to the free flow of information and communication, every member of your customer-facing teams can track customer choices and craft unique experiences for them.

Personalized automation

With Marketing Plus's marketing automation feature, you can deliver personalized and unique experiences to every audience member by enabling your teams to create multiple journey paths for each interaction. This means your audience members receive promotions based exclusively on their previous interactions with your content.

All your marketing activities on one screen

Marketing Plus's Brand Studio provides complete visibility into all your past and current marketing activities, along with the details of which team members who are working on which campaigns. This unified visibility enables the marketing team to plan campaigns and content effectively.

Contextual templates

With hundreds of ready-made and pre-built templates, your team can choose one that closely matches the desired output for a campaign without having to build designs from scratch. This reduces ideation time and enables rapid deployment and dissemination of content.

Here what our customers say

Saru Saadeh, CEO, IronRoots

Everything at Iron Roots starts with the data. But there's a huge hole in the market, where channel solutions are siloed. Zoho Marketing Plus gives us a comprehensive view of our omnichannel marketing campaigns, allowing touchpoint cadence and the ability to visualize our entire strategy in one place. From this unified platform, we can install heat maps, see the traffic on our landing and product pages, and use PageSense to identify the average fold, measure engagement, and then extract incredibly valuable data from on-page experiences—which then fuels our subsequent marketing activities. In a nutshell, Zoho's new marketing platform solves so many problems that are neglected by most marketing operations and tools.

An omnichannel marketing strategy for your business

Utilize data
Map successful journeys
Implement a unified marketing solution
Train your Team
Study the feedback

Utilize data
Bringing customers and marketing data to one place, streamlining data for uniformity, and connecting datasets to make data-driven decisions is the most crucial step. If you already have customer and campaign data, find the best ways to connect them and derive meaningful insights.
For example, if you have customer details in one system and a list of offline event attendees in another system, merge both datasets; find the customers who have attended your offline event and incorporate them into your larger dataset.
For your next event, you can focus your campaigns on prior event attendees, who are more likely to purchase tickets.
Apply this concept to other marketing related activities and deliver a targeted and personalized message.
Map successful journeys
Study how buyers encounter your brand, engage with your touchpoints, and make shopping decisions. Study your most engaged and sales-converting campaigns in each channel. Identify the factors that contributed to the campaign's success, like content, promotional offers, and more, and implement similar ideas for other campaigns you create. Follow this method for all your omnichannel marketing campaigns.
Implement a unified marketing solution
Managing innumerable volumes of data and multiple marketing campaigns in a siloed or standalone marketing solution makes it challenging for marketing teams to create and deliver connected customer experiences.
Implement a unified marketing solution capable of running omnichannel campaigns and providing unified insights to equip your marketers with the information and tools necessary to create and deliver personalized experiences.
Train your Team
Building a customer-centric organization by striving to deliver a consistent and relevant experience to customers is the collective responsibility of every team member. Seed this philosophy into your company's vision.
Standardize every customer communication that goes out from your organization. This entails including your brand's logo and color motifs in emails and other content, consistent messaging, language, and empathy, and anything else that reflects your brand's dedication to the customer.
Make it a mandatory practice for sales, support, and every other customer-facing team member to study customers' prior interactions before initiating any form of communication with them.
Study the feedback
Omnichannel marketing should be two-way communication. You only know whether your omnichannel strategies are really working if you get feedback from customers and don't solely rely on performance metrics.
Get feedback from customers via online forms and surveys, or by interacting with them over the phone or in-person.
Create customer-focused rather than metric-focused campaigns, because if the customer is happy, the metrics will reflect it.
Take ideas from your customers and create better omnichannel campaigns that delight them at every buying stage.

Frequently asked questions

How effective is omnichannel marketing?
According to research conducted by several sources, effective omnichannel marketing can deliver:
- 250% higher engagement rate
- 90% customer retention rate
- 30% increase in customer lifetime value
How can omnichannel marketing improve sales?
Omnichannel marketing attracts more high quality prospects and delivers a personalized experience that makes it easy for customers to make purchase decisions. This converts more prospects into customers than conventional marketing.
Does my business really need omnichannel marketing?
Yes! every business today needs omnichannel marketing. Your potential customers are everywhere and want to interact with you via different channels.
Is omnichannel marketing expensive?
It depends on the marketing platform you use. A unified marketing platform like Zoho Marketing Plus is priced competitively to meet all your omnichannel marketing needs. We also offer a 15-day trial period so you can evaluate Marketing Plus for your business. Start your free trial here.

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