Omnichannel marketing. There’s a reason why you’re hearing more and more about it: It’s a smart strategy that can lead to big payoffs. The goal of omnichannel marketing is to provide customers with a consistent and seamless experience with your brand, no matter where they’re interacting with it.

A successful omnichannel strategy focuses on ensuring the customer experience journey is the same across platforms — and ideally frictionless. Usually, this leads to a better user experience. Only a few years ago, it was considered novel when large brands began using Facebook and Instagram as a primary place to conduct customer support. If a customer was unhappy with their products, they could send the brand a Facebook message and quickly get a service representative to help them. For many of today’s young consumers, this is a much preferable experience to calling a customer service helpline because it’s more in-line with their everyday interactions.

In addition to providing a cohesive customer experience, an omnichannel strategy also means having better attribution data from your campaigns — both organic and paid. Data is gathered every time a customer engages. With a true omnichannel strategy, you can follow one customer across devices to get a better understanding of the customer journey, when and where your consumers prefer to engage, and which campaigns create the most value. This data is critical to helping you target campaigns more effectively by optimizing your media spend.

All of these benefits work together to increase revenue. After multichannel shopping grew significantly in 2020, Target dove into their sales data to uncover valuable insights. They discovered that customers who visited Target on multiple channels spend four times as much money as in-store only customers and 10-times more than digital-only customers.¹ Similarly, an organization that analyzed more than 135,000 marketing campaigns run in 2021 found that campaigns that ran on three or more channels were 494% more likely to convert a sale than single-channel campaigns.² Whoa! These kinds of multiples just can’t be ignored!

More than 80% of Americans are online on a daily basis; about 30% say if they are awake, they are online.³ With an average of 22 internet connected devices in each U.S. household, these numbers are large but not shocking.⁴ (Okay, 22 does sound shocking, but when I started counting the connected devices in our empty nest household, I quickly got to 13 ... so now 22 doesn’t sound that unreasonable. How many do you have?)

The above merely supports the fact that there is a significant chunk of our online time that’s ripe for brands to showcase their products. Whether it’s an influencer on social media, an email about an upcoming promotion, a banner ad on a news website or an advertisement in the middle of a streaming TV show, when consumers are online, they’re open to advertising. And when brands can provide consistent, cohesive messaging to consumers alongside multiple shopping platforms, the return can be game changing.

I find it all fascinating! If you do too and would like to hear more, join me on Sept. 13 for a NAMI webinar on mapping the meat consumer journey for successful omnichannel campaigns.

¹ IMD, Why omnichannel will define retail in 2021: the surprising comeback of the physical store, January 2021.

² Omnisend, What we can learn from omnichannel statistics for 2022, April 2022.

³ Pew Research, About three-in-ten U.S. adults say they are ‘almost constantly’ online, March 2021

⁴ Deloitte, Consumers Benefit From Virtual Experiences, but Need Help Managing Screen Time, Security and Tech Overload, August 2022

Omnichannel Marketing: Crafting Consistent Experiences for Maximum Impact

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