Craig Dennis
July 7, 2023
8 minutes
Today’s customers expect a seamless experience, whether they’re browsing on a phone, shopping in-store, or engaging with a brand through email. According to recent industry data, the average consumer now interacts with more than 50 touchpoints before making a purchase, a dramatic increase from just two touchpoints 15 years ago. This shift has made omnichannel marketing not just a competitive advantage, but a necessity for brands aiming to build loyalty and drive growth.
Omnichannel marketing is a strategy that delivers a unified and consistent customer experience across all channels and devices.
Whether a customer is on a mobile app, website, or in a physical store, the goal is to provide the same level of personalization and service at every touchpoint. This approach relies on integrating customer data from multiple sources to create a single, comprehensive view of each individual.
A unified customer profile enables brands to tailor messaging and offers based on real-time behaviors and preferences. This not only increases engagement but also builds trust and satisfaction, as customers feel recognized and valued at every stage of their journey.
Example: A customer browses a product on their laptop, receives a personalized follow-up email, and then completes the purchase in-store, all while their preferences and history are recognized and applied throughout the process.
Multichannel Marketing | Omnichannel Marketing | |
---|---|---|
Channel Focus | Utilizes multiple channels to reach and engage customers | Utilizes multiple channels to reach and engage customers |
Channel Silo | Channels operate independently with minimal coordination | Channels are integrated and interconnected, facilitating data sharing and consistent messaging |
Customer Experience | Customer experience may be fragmented with inconsistencies across channels | Customer experience is seamless and cohesive across channels |
Channel Optimization | Focuses on optimizing individual channels independently | Focuses on optimizing the entire customer journey across channels |
Personalization and Context | May have limited personalization across channels | Leverages customer data to deliver personalized experiences tailored to individual preferences and behaviors |
Approach | May have a channel-centric approach with less emphasis on the customer experience | Puts the customer at the center, prioritizing a seamless and personalized experience across all channels |
Multichannel marketing uses several channels to reach customers, but each channel often works in isolation. This can lead to inconsistent messaging and a disjointed experience. Omnichannel marketing, on the other hand, connects all channels and data sources, ensuring that every interaction is informed by a complete understanding of the customer.
An omnichannel marketing approach isn’t simple to implement. It involves having a centralized data source and a method of syncing data to various marketing channels. If you can do omnichannel marketing correctly, though, it can provide you with the following benefits:
Apple’s ecosystem allows users to move seamlessly between devices. Features like Continuity let customers start a task on one device and finish it on another, while maintaining a consistent brand experience across retail, digital, and support channels.
Amazon’s Whispersync feature lets users pick up where they left off in a book or audiobook, regardless of device. The shopping experience is unified across the website, app, and physical Amazon Go stores, with consistent account information and order history.
Customers can order, pay, and earn rewards through the Starbucks app, website, or in-store. Loyalty points and personalized offers are synchronized across all channels, making the experience smooth and rewarding.
Sephora integrates online and in-store experiences. Customers can access their profiles, purchase history, and personalized recommendations whether shopping online or visiting a physical location.
Disney’s MyMagic+ system connects theme park tickets, hotel reservations, and ride bookings through a single platform, accessible via app or wearable device. This creates a frictionless experience from planning to park entry.
Begin by consolidating all customer data sources into a centralized platform, often your cloud data warehouse or customer data platform (CDP). This includes transactional data, behavioral data, CRM records, support interactions, email engagement, website activity, and offline purchases. The result is a unified customer profile, sometimes referred to as Customer 360, that gives marketing, sales, and service teams a consistent and comprehensive view of each customer.
Raw data often contains fragmented identifiers, think email addresses, device IDs, phone numbers, loyalty IDs, and cookie IDs. Identity resolution links these disparate data points to a single customer profile by stitching together identifiers across systems. This process allows you to track an individual’s behaviors and preferences across devices, sessions, and channels, enabling true cross-channel personalization. Without identity resolution, customer interactions remain siloed, limiting personalization and causing disjointed experiences.
With centralized and resolved profiles, the next step is activating the data. Use a data activation platform or reverse ETL tool to sync enriched customer profiles from your data warehouse into your marketing, advertising, and customer engagement tools. This eliminates the need for redundant data storage and allows teams to deliver real-time personalization, dynamically adjusting offers, content, and messaging based on the most recent customer interactions. Seamless data activation ensures that every tool is operating on the same up-to-date customer view.
Once data is activated, you can design customer journeys that adapt based on behavior, preferences, and lifecycle stage. This orchestration enables consistent and relevant experiences across email, SMS, push notifications, paid media, and even in-person interactions, ensuring that customers receive the right message at the right time, no matter where they engage.
Continuously track engagement, conversion, and retention metrics across all channels to understand what’s working and where gaps exist. Use attribution models, cohort analyses, and A/B testing to evaluate performance and uncover opportunities for improvement. Feeding these insights back into your data pipeline allows you to refine messaging, offers, segmentation logic, and journey design, creating a self-improving omnichannel system that gets smarter over time.
*Step-by-step process:
AI Decisioning is revolutionizing omnichannel marketing by enabling you to deliver personalized customer experiences at scale.
Key Applications:
Smarter Segmentation: AI agents dynamically segment audiences based on real-time behaviors and preferences, ensuring that each customer receives content tailored to their unique journey.
Predictive Analytics: Machine learning models forecast customer actions, allowing for proactive engagement strategies that anticipate customer needs and enhance satisfaction.
Autonomous AI Agents: Self-directed AI agents autonomously trigger personalized messages or offers without manual intervention, improving response times and ensuring timely, relevant interactions.
By integrating AI Decisioning into your marketing strategy, you can achieve a higher impact program that contributes more revenue and delivers a better customer experience.
Omnichannel marketing is no longer optional for brands that want to deliver consistent, personalized experiences across every device and channel. By centralizing data, resolving identities, and activating insights, companies can meet rising customer expectations and drive measurable business results. Platforms like Hightouch make it possible to orchestrate complex journeys, deploy AI-powered decisioning, and grow beyond a human scale, all without the headaches of traditional data silos.
To see how Hightouch can help you build a seamless omnichannel strategy, book a demo.