How Brands Can Create an Effective Omni Channel Marketing Strategy A great marketing automation platform not only helps you deliver great customer experience but also enables simplification of technology for marketers

A recent and renowned study stated that customers who frequent a business both in-store and online have a 30% higher lifetime value than those who only shop through one channel. With conversion rates in the low single digits, every channel helps drive up sales.

All marketers agree that omni channel campaigns and communication ensures higher revenues and decrease the likelihood of losing out on customers who are present on the channels that you are not available on. In other words, it allows customers the flexibility to check product availability on any device, through any channel of their choice like SMS, voice, email, social, web/app or walk in.

A well-established fact is that Omni channel marketing is predicated on knowing the individual customers well enough from past purchases or data of their browsing history to fully customize all interactions, no matter the device or channel to give them the enhanced experience they are looking for. Hence, all digital interactions influence every rupee spent by the customer. People also veer towards brands that not only offer an Omni channel experience but a personalized one as well and this has remained one of the most elusive or poorly implemented strategies in modern day martech.

Importance of the unified customer profile:

The omnichannel roadmap – the most sought-after goal in marketing – can be achieved by building a unified customer profile that helps in nano-segmenting the offers and content that is generated and put out by brands. It is interesting how unified customer profiles come from a strong omnichannel marketing approach, and then feed right back into supporting the overall omnichannel framework and growth.

Yet not all the companies who are pursuing omnichannel right now have accomplished the unified profile roadmap milestones. Their challenge continues to remain the integration of data that's impacted by internal silos and platforms that don't allow integration. Another remarkable observation has been that each channel that is set up in isolation – separate vendors for email, SMS, push notifications, social etc, means that these channels don't even exchange customer click data in real time with the marketing or campaign automation platform. The result is that customers may not recognize disparate channels as part of the same marketing effort, and this can be very confusing or at times even frustrating to them.

A rich & deep personalization can be achieved only if the data from all individual interactions is unified to analyze the channels and devices that the user prefers for browsing and purchase. All this data can then be used to deliver:

• The messaging content that is most likely to resonate with each customer

• The frequency of messaging that each customer responds to best

• The types of products customers like to buy

• The types of incentive recommendations each customer responds to most often

A responsive marketing automation platform is ideally like a giant suction machine that captures customer data (email addresses, online cookies, smartphone numbers, offline behavior, response to a promotion, response rates, calls to the call center, products viewed and bought and so on) from all possible touch points. Then to use the data in an innovative way to build customer journeys effectively giving you a real time and a transparent way of measuring customer engagement without becoming invasive is a huge achievement. If this unified profile database is updated, campaigns can be automated to trigger marketing activities from all channels and point to the same information repository.

Binding Unified Profile to Campaigns

This is another very important consideration for a successful omnichannel experience - the ease of monitoring those channels and moving between them while avoiding friction.

A great marketing automation platform not only helps you deliver great customer experience but also enables simplification of technology for marketers with least dependency on IT/Tech. It should enable not only an intuitive interface to construct the complexities involved but also provide insights to campaign and channel metrics. It should provide not only a tactical edge with ease of all channel management but also a strategic edge by bringing you closer to a true 1:1 personalized customer relationship.