Omnichannel Engagement

What is omnichannel engagement?

Omnichannel engagement is the practice of interacting with customers across multiple channels, such as in-store, online, email and mobile. This multifaceted approach to customer engagement allows for more personalized experiences that are tailored to each individual’s wants and needs.

Omnichannel engagement helps companies better understand customers by collecting data from multiple platforms and channels, allowing them to gain insight into their behaviors and preferences. By tracking customer activity across these platforms, businesses can deliver the most relevant content to their customers and provide a higher level of customer satisfaction.

Four benefits of omnichannel engagement

Omnichannel customer engagement can take time and resource to set up, but once it’s done, omnichannel engagements deliver:

Improved customer experience:
By engaging customers with relevant content no matter which channel they choose to interact through, omnichannel engagement helps businesses provide a more personalized channel experience that leads to greater customer satisfaction.
Increased customer loyalty:
By providing a seamless and engaging experience across multiple channels, customers are more likely to feel connected to your brand, helping to foster loyalty and drive retention.
Smarter marketing decisions:
Omnichannel engagement allows businesses to better understand their customers’ behavior and preferences across multiple channels, allowing businesses to make better-informed decisions about their marketing and sales strategies.
Improved customer service:
by connecting your customer service to your core marketing channels, you help agents get to the bottom of customer queries and quickly provide resolutions.

Key omnichannel engagement challenges

Integrating an omnichannel engagement strategy with your business doesn’t come without its challenges:

Creating a consistent experience:
The idea of omnichannel is to create a consistent, connected and seamless customer experience, regardless of which channel your audience is using. However, putting this into practice across every major touchpoint is a challenge for brands.
Collecting and unifying your data:
To deliver engaging, relevant content to your audience, you first need to know who they are. That starts with unifying your data. However, with multiple data types (from behavior to product and sales), breaking down silos and consolidating it can be a difficult, time-consuming process.
Building a communication strategy:
One of the key principles behind driving omnichannel engagements is keeping the conversation going when a prospective customer leaves a channel – for example, walking out of a store or bouncing from a website. Finding creative ways to engage your audience across multiple touchpoints requires careful thought and execution.
Delivering meaningful, personalized engagements:
1:1 personalization across multiple channels is the end goal for many brands building an omnichannel customer engagement strategy. However, data privacy, data security and tech limitations can stand in the way of achieving true 1:1 personalization.

How to build an omnichannel engagement strategy

Follow these steps to get started with your omnichannel strategy:

Know who your customers are – and where they are:
You don’t need to invest in a marketing channel if your customers aren’t present there. Start your strategy by working out where your customers spend their time, so you can focus your efforts and meet them there with meaningful, relevant content.
Spend time mapping your customer journey:
Plug any potential gaps in your strategy by building a customer journey map that covers all key touchpoints customers hit during their experience with your brand.
Create content for each channel:
If you want to achieve the full potential of omnichannel engagement, batch and blast content will not cut it. You need to create engagements that are tailored not just to your customers, but the channels they’re engaging on.
Deliver customer support on every channel:
If your customers are spending time with your brand there, you need to back up that experience with support if and when they need it. Connect your support teams with social media, app and messaging channels so customers don’t have to go looking in order to get help.
Optimize your marketing stack:
To run a truly powerful omnichannel engagement strategy, you need the right marketing stack. With tools like Emarsys’ customer engagement platform, you can cut out bloated, unnecessary tools and access everything you need to run your omnichannel strategy in one place.