What is omnichannel marketing?

Accompany your customers on the entire customer journey!

“Omni” comes from Latin and means “each” or “all.” In addition to channels, in marketing it refers to the inclusion of all touchpoints in the customer approach. Touchpoints to the customer can be found on- and offline, digital and analog, they include both sales and information channels. It’s a new marketing discipline that gives equal consideration to the customer on truly all channels, whether for sales purposes or purely informational. And this is the big difference to multichannel or cross-channel marketing. In multichannel marketing, the advertising company offers the customer several different channels, but not all of them. In addition, the channels are used independently of each other and are therefore not in a relationship with each other, as is the case with omnichannel marketing. Cross channel marketing, on the other hand, describes all the activities of a company in relation to the purchase, i.e. the customer receives his complementary information on the different channels, which should trigger a purchase. But given today’s information age, we know that it’s not always about sales right away. The focus is on unlimited, seamless customer experience, and only omnichannel marketing can achieve that.

WHAT IS THE BENEFIT OF
OMNICHANNEL-MARKETING?

Omnichannel marketing makes it possible to respond to customers at all touchpoints. It’s not for nothing that omnichannel marketing is also often called ” all-channel marketing”. Only omnichannel marketing ensures that there are no cannibalization effects among the various channels. Because the focus is on the customer experience as a whole. This is why omnichannel marketing also involves a shift in objectives towards a single overall objective. The focus is on the smooth flow of information across all touchpoints, rather than individual channel-based customer experiences.

WHY SHOULD COMPANIES CONSIDER ALL TOUCHPOINTS?

Nothing is more important for a company than recognizing how the prospect becomes a customer. Touchpoints are an important tool here, because customers use them to leave traces on their individual customer journey. So it can be hugely beneficial for companies to see which touchpoints contribute what. Means, which channel arouses interest, which leads to the purchase decision and over which inquiries come in. Of particular interest are the touchpoints that you cannot control yourself, such as editorial coverage or personal opinions on social networks. Once the touchpoints have been identified and analyzed, the primary goal is to draw optimization potential from this information. Each channel gets its role and will be further developed. For example, if a company realizes that the print catalog is losing importance, but the web store is attracting more visitors, they can consider offering their catalog digitally as well, thus closing the loop of a holistic customer approach.

WHAT TECHNOLOGICAL AND SYSTEMIC PRECONDITIONS MUST BE CREATED TO MAKE OMNICHANNEL MARKETING POSSIBLE?

This depends primarily on the goods of a company. If there are products instead of services, PIM systems are needed to run an effective Product Information Management. Supplemented by a DAM system, the foundation stones for a complete, visual product experience have been laid. But to ensure that all touchpoints can be played at the right time with the right product and, above all, in the channel-appropriate presentation, a higher-level system is needed – the brain of omnichannel marketing. It bundles all the systems, information and output channels and orchestrate the effective customer experience. This is because manual delivery can never enable the integration and interplay between channels that a system can achieve automatically. Omnichannel marketing therefore also always requires the right technological prerequisites or systems in order to be lived by the customer.

WHAT ARE THE BIGGEST OBSTACLES FOR COMPANIES THAT WANT TO DO OMNICHANNEL MARKETING?

The biggest obstacle is believing that you can do omnichannel marketing without the right system support, or with makeshift solutions that don’t have omnichannel marketing at their core. Once this understanding has been established, some preliminary work must first be done before an omnichannel marketing system can be put into operation: analyzing customer behavior. As mentioned earlier, a company needs to understand what the customer journey is like before it can support a system.

At the beginning of a project, all touchpoints should therefore be identified. Afterwards, the customer journey is modeled. Because only when we understand how the potential customer thinks and acts is it possible to address them in a personalized and individual way with the help of an omnichannel marketing system. Once this work is complete, the next step is to set up the system with all upstream and downstream interfaces.

WHO EXACTLY IN THE COMPANY IS INVOLVED IN THE CONCEPTION, PLANNING AND MANAGEMENT OF
OMNICHANNEL MARKETING INVOLVED?

Since omnichannel includes all channels with a customer, planning and conception should also not be considered in isolation. Of course, marketing is still the central interface when it comes to the initial approach to customers. But there should always be an “omni view” of all points of contact. Therefore, it is advisable to take on board all those responsible who also communicate with customers. This can be the e-commerce manager with his web store or the service employee who answers queries in chat or on the phone. But the social media manager and sales should also be involved in the design. As with other projects, it is important to appoint a central project manager, and this is usually someone from marketing.

HOW DOES AN OMNICHANNEL MARKETING SYSTEM WORK?

Since all channels and devices must be played on effectively, an omnichannel marketing system also centralizes all information in one place. It is the leading system for all contacts, upstream systems and output channels. In this way, the system pulls the master data it needs and provides users with an interface tailored to their needs to refine this information. Rights and role management with release levels ensures that only properly defined content can be played out. Once the content has been prepared and approved for advertising, the logic stored in the system triggers the automated filling of the channels. This requires that the system has seamless interfaces to the output channels. With an omnichannel marketing system, users focus only on creating the effective content. The correct delivery is done by the system completely automatically, because this is exactly the main feature of these systems, which have been developed specifically for this purpose.