The ever-increasing pace of technological change is a double-edged sword for marketing. 

On one side, the volume of marketing technology available makes it easier to deliver on marketing’s original promise — the right message to the right person at the right time.

On the other, we’re lost in an ocean of complexity — bloated tech stacks, siloed data, disconnected experiences — all mixed in with an ever-growing number of channels to contend with, and increasingly demanding customers.

Omnichannel marketing is the answer to this challenge.

By investing in omnichannel marketing, brands can reduce tech stacks, connect their data, and create personalized, relevant experiences for their customers, no matter where they choose to engage. Paired with the power of automation, marketers can deliver these engagements across multiple online and offline channels at scale, giving them back the time they need to focus on strategy. 

But what is omnichannel marketing, and how can you leverage it to deliver the results your business expects — and the experiences your customers demand? 

In this definitive guide, you’ll find all of the information you need to understand the power of omnichannel marketing, avoid common pitfalls, and inspire your own strategy.

What is Omnichannel Marketing?

Omnichannel marketing is a strategic, customer-centric approach to marketing designed to deliver an integrated, consistent experience across multiple marketing channels. 

By integrating various online and offline marketing channels, including social media, paid social, email, mobile app, web, and brick-and-mortar stores, omnichannel marketing delivers a consistent, personalized experience to customers throughout the customer journey. 

The main goal of omnichannel marketing is to ensure that customers receive personalized, relevant engagements in real-time, regardless of the marketing channel they use. This approach not only enhances customer satisfaction and loyalty but also drives higher conversion rates, improves sales, and strengthens brand recognition.

Omichannel vs Multichannel Marketing what’s the difference?

Despite being used interchangeably, there are a number of key differences between multi-channel, cross-channel and omnichannel marketing that businesses need to know.

Uses multiple channelsChannels are connectedData is integrated
Multi-channelYes
Cross-channelYesYes
OmnichannelYesYesYes

[Read Now: Multichannel vs Omnichannel: What Is the Difference?]

Multichannel Marketing

Multichannel marketing involves engaging audiences through the use of multiple marketing channels, including email, web, mobile and social media. Multi-channel marketing is focused around each channel in isolation, without them being connected. Content is shared natively in-channel and often managed by siloed teams.

As a result, customers who interact with a brand across different channels might receive a disjointed, inconsistent experience.

For example, a customer might see an ad for a specific product on social media, buy it online, but then receive an email the next day promoting that same product.

Omnichannel Marketing:

Omnichannel marketing takes a different approach, focusing less on individual channels and more on the overall customer journey. 

By connecting and integrating product, sales and customer data, as well as digital and physical channels, omnichannel offers a holistic approach that delivers a seamless customer experience — regardless of where they engage with a brand. 

This allows marketers to deliver hyper-personalized cross-channel engagements, getting the right message to the right customer at the right time.

01 Integrated Data Layer Data Powers Personalization Converted

Omnichannel vs Cross-Channel Marketing

Cross-channel marketing sits between multichannel and omnichannel marketing. It focuses on creating a coordinated and consistent experience for customers by strategically connecting and integrating some, but not necessarily all, marketing channels.

In cross-channel marketing, marketers leverage data, insights, and technology to synchronize their messaging and campaigns across selected channels. For example, a customer who adds a product to their cart but leaves before making a purchase might receive an email including that product and other relevant recommendations. 

Cross-channel marketing delivers a more connected experience than multichannel marketing. However, it falls short compared to omnichannel marketing, which takes cross-channel a step further by unifying data and enriching it with AI and predictive intelligence to deliver a seamless customer experience across all online and offline touchpoints.

Over the years, omnichannel marketing has grown from a nascent idea into a strategy embraced by some of the world’s most successful brands. 

Technology has fuelled this transformation, with advances in big data, artificial intelligence and machine learning allowing marketers to better understand, anticipate and anticipate, and meet customer needs across various channels.

And now, we’re seeing this trend evolve further. Today’s omnichannel retail marketing is not just about coordination across channels — it’s about creating personalized, contextually relevant experiences that resonate with consumers at every stage of their journey. It’s not just a tool for engagement — it’s a means of nurturing customer relationships and providing superior value. 

1. More Channels, More Data, More Expectations

On average, a customer now engages with a brand through six different channels during their purchase journey — and that number is only expected to grow.

As new channels emerge, they bring along a fresh influx of data for marketers to decipher and utilize. This wealth of information holds immense potential for crafting personalized, relevant experiences that resonate with customers across all touchpoints.

The stakes have never been higher, as consumers now expect each interaction with a brand to be meaningful and tailored to their needs, regardless of the channel they choose. Marketers who can successfully harness this vast pool of data will undoubtedly emerge as the frontrunners in the race for omnichannel success.

2. Automation is helping Retail Marketers Win their Time Back

The ever-evolving world of marketing doesn’t just come with heightened customer expectations — marketers themselves are also grappling with mounting pressure from within their organizations to do more, faster, with fewer resources. 

To thrive under these circumstances, marketers must quickly identify what works and pivot towards strategies that deliver maximum value. 

However, this is easier said than done, especially considering that research reveals marketers spend up to 50% of their time on campaign execution alone. This leaves little room for strategic planning and innovation.

Why Automation Intelligence is Crucial to Sustainable Scaling


Enter the power of automation. 

By leveraging automation at every possible juncture, marketers are making their omnichannel strategies not only more efficient but also scalable.

By embracing automation and streamlining processes, marketers can free up valuable time to focus on building new strategies and driving impactful results. In doing so, they’ll not only meet the growing internal demands but also exceed customer expectations, ultimately securing their position as industry trailblazers.

3. Conversational Channels are Creating New Ways to Deepen Customer Relationships

Conversational channels and AI are revolutionizing the way brands build relationships, creating endless opportunities for brands to engage with their audience on a more personal and context-driven level.

WhatsApp is emerging as a key player in this mix, allowing brands to execute end-to-end customer journeys all within the app. From discovery to acquisition, conversion, sales and support, everything can be done seamlessly within the app, effectively opening up entirely new revenue streams for brands able to integrate WhatsApp into their omnichannel strategies. 

4. Online and Offline are Blurred Lines

The COVID-19 pandemic thrust us all into a new reality, where brick-and-mortar stores took a backseat and online shopping became the norm. 

Suddenly, retailers found themselves sitting on a goldmine of customer data gathered during this digital shift. But this quickly turned into a challenge — seamlessly connecting the online and offline customer experience. 

Imagine walking into a store and having your shopping experience tailored to your personal preferences, based on your online browsing history and past purchases. 

This is the future we’re moving towards, where data breathes life into the in-store experience, creating a personalized journey for each customer. Businesses that can effectively bridge the gap between online and offline and create “phygital” experiences will be the ones who emerge victorious in the ever-evolving retail landscape.

Five Benefits of Omnichannel Marketing

Often seen as the ultimate form of marketing strategy, brands that invest in adopting an omnichannel approach reap the rewards.

1. Create 1:1 Personalized Engagements

The modern shopper doesn’t just enjoy personalized experiences – they expect them.  Omnichannel marketing helps you to deliver on those expectations. 

With omnichannel marketing, personalization goes beyond first names in subject lines. By integrating your marketing channels and activating your product, sales and customer data, omnichannel marketing delivers 1:1 personalized, uniquely relevant shopping experiences across all channels that demonstrate a genuine understanding of your customers. 

When 49% of shoppers state that personalized offers and product recommendations would improve their overall brand experience, adopting omnichannel marketing gives your business an unmissable opportunity to attract, engage, convert and retain customers.

2. Grow Customer Retention and Loyalty

In a post-3rd-party cookie world with wildly soaring advertising costs, focusing purely on customer acquisition is no longer a luxury that many brands can afford. Brands that want to stay ahead of the game need to switch their sights from driving that first sale to extracting value from their current customer base and keeping those first-time customers coming back for more. 

And the incentive is there to do it. Research shows that even small successes in driving repeat purchases can have a dramatic impact on your bottom line. In fact, increasing customer retention rates by as little as 5% can boost profits by 25% to 95%. 

And when 31% of customers cite personalized, omnichannel experiences as the reason they repeat purchase and stay loyal to a brand, the opportunity that omnichannel holds for businesses is hard to ignore. 

By creating seamless, 1:1 personalized experiences across multiple channels, you drive those all-important repeat purchases and grow customer loyalty. 

The result? A more profitable business that’s no longer reliant on acquisition, with happier customers that keep coming back.

3.  Improve Brand Recognition

On average, it takes seven touchpoints with a customer to drive a conversion. If you’re only engaging with your customers across two or three channels, you’re limiting your ability to get those all-important sales. 

By building an omnichannel marketing strategy, you’re equipped to meet your customers with the right message, in the right channel, at the right time.

From in-store to email, by meeting your customers wherever they spend their time, you keep your brand front of mind and increase the chance of securing the sale the next time they’re in the market for your product.

4.  Increase Revenue

Omnichannel marketing’s focus on data, channel integration, personalization and automated workflows can have an impressive impact on revenue. 

Research by Forrester, commissioned by Emarsys, found that customer-obsessed brands with an omnichannel marketing strategy saw 62% increased sales of higher margin items compared to non-customer-obsessed brands. 

In addition, research by McKinsey found that brands using omnichannel personalization saw:

  • 10-15% potential increase in customer retention and revenue
  • 10-30% marketing cost savings 

When executed correctly, omnichannel marketing has the potential to significantly impact your bottom line and drive key business outcomes.

 5.  Accurate Analytics and Reporting

Your job as a marketer is to keep your customers happy — but you also have to keep your business happy, and this comes from proving your revenue contribution. 

However, with siloed data split across a bloated tech stack, this can be a time-consuming task that often yields conflicting results and data sets that don’t match up. 

By using an omnichannel marketing automation platform that handles everything under one roof, you get unified analytics that helps you accurately track and report on the performance of your campaigns. 

This not only helps you see which campaigns are moving the needle (and which need work), it also helps you to attribute sales to specific campaigns and channels, demonstrate the revenue impact of your activities, and make smarter marketing decisions moving forward.

See how Emarsys omnichannel customer engagement platform helps marketers build, launch and scale personalized cross-channel campaigns that drive business outcomes.

Watch Emarsys in Action

Overcoming Challenges in Omnichannel Marketing

Many marketing teams face challenges when it comes to omnichannel marketing — especially as they first evolve from a single- or multi-channel strategy to true 1:1 omnichannel customer engagement. So let’s explore some of those common challenges, as well as tips for overcoming them.

Data Integration and Management

So much of what you want to do as a marketer in today’s world requires data, and lots of it. Data fuels personalization, reveals sales opportunities, shows you who to target, gives you feedback on your marketing efforts, and so much more. 

For many businesses, it’s not so much the gathering of the data that is the problem, it’s being able to consolidate and integrate data in a way where it can be fully leveraged (while, of course, complying with data privacy and security regulations). 

When marketing teams are considering new technology partners, challenges around data integration and management can be a dealbreaker, particularly if: 

  • Connecting data is difficult and overly complex
  • Integrating data is possible but only with an exorbitant amount of support from IT
  • Data sets are difficult to ingest into a unified solution, or cannot be consolidated into a single platform 

If you’re currently experiencing these problems and it interferes with your ability to deliver omnichannel marketing and drive business results, you may need to evaluate your current tech stack and determine which aspects of your technology or data arrangement are limiting your potential. Consider using a single unified customer engagement platform that makes it easy to connect data and channels into one source, and is marketer-friendly so you don’t have to rely on IT support.

Consistency Across Channels

The name of the game with omnichannel marketing isn’t to provide lots of unrelated brand experiences on lots of individual disconnected channels — it’s about providing a cohesive unified experience for each customer across all your channels. But it’s not uncommon for brands who are first dipping their toes into the omnichannel waters to find that the experiences they provide to customers are not seamless nor consistent across channels. 

Challenges with consistency across channels include:

  • Channels and data are siloed making consistency in marketing experiences difficult
  • Inability to personalize consistently due to lack of data or disorganized data
  • Tech stack lacks AI-powered automation that enables scalable, always-on omnichannel engagement 
  • Over-reliance on partner solutions, lack of native channels in your platform

One of the best remedies for these issues is to find an all-in-one customer engagement solution that has the widest offering of channels, easily integrates data and channels into one unified source, and has built-in AI to power automation, segmentation, and proactive personalized marketing across all channels.

Organizational Alignment and Collaboration

Sometimes the obstacle that stands in the way of consistency across channels isn’t the technology or data involved — it’s the people. 

In some instances, teams are simply not aligned on overall priorities or goals, and are guided by different visions of what it takes for the businesses to succeed. Examples include:

  • C-Suite doesn’t see the value in investing to advance omnichannel marketing capabilities
  • Tight budgets and lack of resource for the marketing team
  • Data is scattered throughout the organization, and teams are not enabled to share it
  • Marketing and IT aren’t aligned on technology, or too much IT is required for marketing to use the technology.

One of the best ways to solve these challenges is to first understand the needs of the various teams throughout the organization. For example, your C-suite is focussed on driving revenue and growth. So find an omnichannel customer engagement solution with built-in reporting and analytics so you can show them the revenue impact your marketing impact is making, and prove that their investment was worth it. 

IT will be concerned about data, technology, and security. Find a solution that makes data and channel integration easy, while also ensuring that customer data is well protected and conforms to regional data privacy and security regulations.

How to Build an Omnichannel Marketing Strategy

So far we’ve discussed what omnichannel marketing is, and highlighted the benefits of omnichannel marketing. But the next step is to move from the theoretical to the practical — in other words, it’s time to go beyond the “what” and “why” behind omnichannel marketing, and instead, focus on the “how.”

In this next section, let’s look at how to actually build an omnichannel marketing strategy. We’ll unpack the four essential steps used by today’s most successful omnichannel marketers to ensure their strategy delivers more customer growth and revenue. Those steps include:

 Step 1: Understand the Omnichannel Customer Journey

At its core, the customer journey is the total sum of engagements that customers experience when interacting with your brand. It begins the moment they first become aware of your product or service, continues through the point of purchase and beyond into post-purchase support, and then loops back again for repeat purchases.

No matter whether they discover your brand from Google search, a paid social campaign, or a referral from a friend, almost all of your omnichannel customers will have a journey that follows these five stages: 

  1. Acquisition: Customers browse your store and shop around for options. They do their research, compare your products to others, and begin to build their cart.
  2. Conversion: As they view your products, they begin to build their cart. The customer converts, completing their purchase. 
  3. Growth: This is the stage where you put your first-party data to use. You start nurturing your relationship with the customer, building trust, delivering relevant, timely content and encouraging them to repeat purchase. 
  4. Retention and loyalty: You work to deepen your customer relationship, cultivating brand loyalty that drives CLTV and keeps them returning time and time again. 
  5. Win-back: You take action and re-engage lapsing customers, winning them back before they churn or defect to other brands. 

By understanding the journey your customers take, you’ll gain invaluable insights into how to target them more closely. 

[Read Now: 5 Pillars of the Omnichannel Customer Journey + Real-World Examples]

Step 2: Unify Your Data and Channels

Omnichannel marketing is about providing your customers with consistent, seamless experiences across all channels. That way, as they engage with your brand, they’re having one unified journey, rather than disparate, unconnected engagements over time. 

It starts with data. 

For a customer’s experience to be consistent — meaning, each interaction builds upon the previous interaction to inform the next — you need lots of data. Data tells you what actions your customer has already taken, what they’re preferences are, and what they’re likely to do next. 

Next, your channels.

For a customer’s experience to be seamless — meaning, an experience started on one channel will feel continuous and coherent as they move to the next — your channels need to be connected and talking to one another. That way, actions taken or preferences stated by a customer on a channel will be reflected on other channels. 

Think of it like a puzzle: every data point and channel serves as one unique piece. Putting them all together gives you a complete picture of your customer, which is essential for personalized omnichannel engagement. 

By unifying all your data and channels into one single unified solution, you’re able to see each customer holistically, ensuring that no matter which touchpoints they’re choosing throughout their journey with your brand, you’ll always have an up-to-date understanding of their needs, wants, and desires. 

Watch How Happy Socks Built A Stronger Data Foundation with Emarsys to Power Scalable 1:1 Engagement


Step 3: Personalize Everywhere to Keep Customer Coming Back

Unifying data and channels sets the foundation for your omnichannel marketing strategy, and allows you to deliver customer experiences that are consistent and seamless. But if those experiences aren’t meaningful or relevant to the customer, then your strategy will not yield the engagement you want, nor the growth and revenue your business demands. 

When today’s customers shop with a brand, personalization is a fundamental expectation. Customers understand that the technology exists to craft and deliver highly personalized, relevant experiences, and they know the data they willingly share with a brand informs that personalized engagement. Thus, they have an expectation to be understood and marketed to as a unique individual. 

Every time your customer receives a personalized communication from your brand, you’re demonstrating that you truly understand your customer’s specific needs, rather than treating them as a generic customer in a database of sameness. This level of detail and attention separates you from competitors who either lack the data or marketing technology to do the same. Do this every time your customer interacts with your brand, you’re sure to win their loyalty (and their dollars). 

So, if you want to build an omnichannel marketing strategy that brings customers back to shop with your brand time and time again, make sure you have the ability to provide customers with a personalized experience at each and every touchpoint. 

Watch Booktopia on the Importance of Personalization


Step 4: Use Automation for Scalable Personalization and Customer Loyalty

As you begin incorporating seamless personalization into your omnichannel marketing strategy and delivering the experiences your customers want, you’ll see your relationship with them start to grow. New customers will return to your brand in exchange for the value you give them and the relevant offers you provide, and active customers will transform into bonafide loyalists. 

This is great news, as increased customer growth, retention, and loyalty is one of the benefits of omnichannel marketing. But giving each customer the individual attention and experiences they want can take a lot of time and effort. 

So what happens when your database starts to rapidly expand while your marketing team, your time, and your budget remains the same size? How do you continue to engage with your hard-earned customers with the highly personalized way they’ve grown accustomed to? How do you continue to deliver the right message, to the right customer, at the right place and time… even as your business grows? 

Here’s where automation takes your omnichannel marketing strategy to the next level:

With the power of automation, you let tech do all the work that would otherwise stand in your way of scaling. Automation is essentially that pivotal member of your marketing team who can work non-stop, day and night, to send out the right personalized content at the right time and on the right channel to make the most impact on the customer, wherever they’re at in their journey with your brand. 

This means your core 1:1 omnichannel marketing campaigns will always run in the background, nurturing relationships and building customer loyalty across all your channels, 24/7. 

Step 5: Measure Results to See Your Revenue Impact and Refine Your Omnichannel Marketing Strategy

Once you have your data and channels unified, you can deliver personalized experiences everywhere. Add automation to the mix, you can do it at any scale. With all this in play, you’ll have a stellar omnichannel marketing strategy that is sure to deliver results. 

However, ask the brands who’ve had the most success with omnichannel and they’ll tell you: it’s not a set-it-and-forget-it plan. Think about it: customer preferences are constantly in flux as trends and economic conditions change. Plus, new channels seem to emerge at an exponential rate. Over time, whether your marketing results are good… or less than ideal… you’ll need to know why

Nothing in the world of customer engagement is static, so why should your omnichannel marketing strategy be fixed?

To get the most out of your strategy, you’ll need the ability to measure your results so you know what is (or isn’t) working, and gauge whether or not your omnichannel marketing efforts are actually driving the revenue your business demands — down to the campaign level. That’s why many of today’s best customer engagement solutions include built-in reporting and analytics.

Without the ability to measure results and see your revenue impact, it’s near impossible to know if your efforts are working. This makes it an absolutely fundamental part of a successful omnichannel marketing strategy.

See The Results Adore Beauty Achieved from Their Integrated Marketing and Loyalty Strategies

In an effort to satisfy customers and drive positive bottom-line results, today’s marketers and business leaders alike are seeing the value (if not critical business need) of an omnichannel marketing strategy. But how do you ensure you achieve the best results with omnichannel? 

One of the biggest differentiators between those who succeed with omnichannel and those who don’t is their level of “customer obsession.” Customer-obsessed businesses (or “high omnichannel maturity” firms), as defined by Forrester Consulting, put customers at the center of leadership, strategy, and operations. 

As a result, these businesses are better equipped to respond to the needs of customers, make them feel seen and appreciated, and sustain deep connections with their customers over time. 

To get the most out of your omnichannel marketing strategy, or to optimize your current approach, determine how customer-obsessed your business is. Knowing this can reveal how likely you are to achieve the kind of omnichannel results that make a positive business impact, and research confirms this: A recent study from Forrester Consulting commissioned by Emarsys — The Omnichannel Difference — shows that 54% of customer-obsessed companies see improved customer interactions, 52% of customer-obsessed companies experience better customer loyalty and improved retention from omnichannel efforts across the customer lifecycle, and 62% experience higher margin. ​

Which Channels are in an Omnichannel Marketing Strategy?

Let’s take a look at the essential channels that form the foundations of any robust omnichannel marketing strategy.

Email Marketing

Boasting one of the highest ROI potentials available from digital channels, email has earned its place at the center of many omnichannel strategies. 

By using email as part of an omnichannel marketing strategy you can: 

  • Deliver 1:1 personalization at scale: by using an omnichannel email marketing platform, you can create email automations enriched with personalization tokens that tailor content based on past purchases, product affinity, browsing behavior and more.
  • Accurately segment your subscribers: effortlessly and accurately target customers based on properties like demographics, or how they engage across web, mobile and other key channels. 
  • Drive repeat purchases: by using AI insights to send the right email to the right subscriber at the right time. 

[Learn more about email marketing]

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Mobile Marketing

Mobile usage has surged in the last 2 years, with mobile users accounting for 61% of global web sessions, compared to desktop users. 

By using mobile as a channel, brands unlock the ability to directly engage their customer base in real-time through a variety of methods: 

  • Mobile Push: highly targeted messages that appear on the lock screen or within the notification center of mobile devices, allowing you to engage mobile customers with highly targeted messages. 
  • In-App: backed by an omnichannel automation platform, in-app marketing allows you to capitalize on key customer lifecycle stages and cross-channel behavior to deliver targeted product recommendations and offers. 
  • Mobile Inbox: keep your customers’ eyes on key offers and incentives with a mobile app inbox that keeps your messaging front of mind.
  • Mobile Wallet: reach mobile customers without needing an app by delivering vouchers, coupons, tickets and more directly to Apple and Google Wallet that customers can redeem in-store at point of purchase.

[Learn about mobile marketing]

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SMS Marketing

The average American checks their phone 144 times a day — and that presents an unmissable opportunity to get targeted brand messaging straight into the palms of your customers. 

By using SMS as part of an omnichannel marketing strategy, you can connect with customers on and offline with personalized automations that: 

  • Drive email opt-in to gather valuable first-party data and double down on the channels you can use to target consumers.
  • Remove friction from the buyer journey with SMS automations triggered by key customer actions.
  • Reduce cart abandonment and increase conversions by sending messages to customers that prompt them to complete their purchase.
  • Reach unengaged and churn-risk customers by delivering messages straight to their lock screens.

Equipped with an omnichannel marketing platform, you’ll be able to accurately track the impact of your SMS campaigns and automations, helping you to prove revenue impact. 

[Learn more about SMS marketing]

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Digital Advertising

Digital ads play an essential role not just in acquisition, but also in driving repeat conversions. By unlocking the power of CRM data, you’ll be able to enrich your omnichannel marketing strategy with personalized ad engagements across display, search and social. 

Paired with the right omnichannel automation platform, digital ads will help you to:

  • Drive conversions with personalized engagements that reach the right customer with the right message at the right time.
  • Create smart segments and build lookalike audiences that help you to reach new customers.
  • Refine your media spend and focus your budget on the areas that drive results
  • Take existing campaigns cross-channel by connecting ads to email, web, in-app, SMS and more. 

[Learn more about digital advertising]

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Direct Mail

With open rates significantly higher than email, direct mail is a powerful channel for getting targeted brand messages in front of your customers and prospects. 

By using an omnichannel automation platform to integrate your channels and unify your data, you can use direct mail to:

  • Combine online and offline data to deliver 1:1 personalized experiences in the palm of the reader’s hand. 
  • Connect direct mail to other channels to send relevant messages at every stage of the buyer journey. 
  • Build powerful automations that send based on cross-channel behavior and other pre-defined triggers.

[Learn more about direct mail]

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In-Store

Personalization isn’t restricted purely to digital channels, and integrating your physical retail locations opens a wealth of customer engagement opportunities. 

By bringing in-store into your omnichannel mix, you can:

  • Identify online customers in-store, helping you to attribute digital revenue and target them with cross-channel engagements 
  • Bring online loyalty programs in-store to drive sales and grow program membership.
  • Create 1:1 personalized shopping experiences by activating your 1st-party data.
  • Drive foot traffic with geo targeting and mobile push notifications.

Connect online to in-store with your omnichannel marketing strategy, and deliver a connected, personalized experience that keeps customers shopping. 

[Learn more about in-store]

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Contact Center

By bringing your call and contact centers into your omnichannel marketing strategy, you’ll equip agents with the data they need to deliver personalized customer support experiences. 

Connecting your contact centers to engagement data will help you:

  • Drive sales by helping agents resolve customer queries quickly, breaking down barriers to conversion
  • Feed support data to customer segments, allowing your marketing team to follow up with personalized cross-channel engagements
  • Boost retention with AI-powered automations that turn contact center interactions into meaningful content experiences

[Learn more about contact center]

Nine Omnichannel Marketing Tactics to Build into Your Strategy

We’ve talked theory and strategy, so now let’s look at practical execution. What are the kinds of omnichannel marketing tactics, or omnichannel marketing campaigns, you should be building and creating to incorporate into your strategy? 

Let’s look at some omnichannel marketing tactics that are essential for driving customer growth and accelerating business outcomes. 

1. Welcome (New Contacts)

Focus: Acquisition and conversion

Channels to Consider: Email, Web, CRM Ads, SMS

First impressions matter, and how you welcome new customers to your brand can make the difference between a one-and-done shopper and a life-long loyalist. This makes your Welcome campaign one of the most critical for your mix of omnichannel marketing tactics. 

A welcome campaign consists of content that introduces new leads to your brand, and when done successfully, will convert leads to first-time buyers. You’ll want to use the widest breadth of channels possible so you have the best chance of reaching your new customer. You also want to ensure your creative content is personalized for the customers, but also represents your brand’s unique tone and voice.

2. Abandoned Cart

Focus: Acquisition and conversion

Channels to Consider: Email, Web, CRM Ads

Sometimes customers start a shopping journey but they lose momentum, get distracted, or second-guess their decision before completing a purchase. This is a make-or-break moment in conversion, and one you’ll want to seize upon. 
Abandoned cart campaigns are powerful tactics for your omnichannel marketing strategy because they’re so effective at re-engaging a known customer who is already engaged with your brand. Use your breadth of channels to let customers know that the item or service they’ve added to the cart is waiting for them to complete their purchase

3. Progressive Profiling

Focus: Acquisition and conversion

Channels to Consider: SMS, Email, Web, CRM Ads

You want to get to know your customers, but to do that, you need their information. Yet, asking customers to share all their information all at once can be quite intimidating for them. Progressive profiling helps solve this challenge. 
Progressive profiling tactics enable you to capture data from your customers by keeping them engaged over time and encouraging them to share information gradually, without making them feel pressured. Having a customer engagement platform where data and channels are unified is important here, because after you’ve captured an answer to a question once, you don’t want to have to ask the customer for that data again.

 4. First-Time to Repeat Buyer

Focus: Customer Lifecycle

Channels to Consider: Email, CRM Ads, Web

To move a customer further along their journey with your brand, a little prompting can be helpful. That’s where a tactic focused on moving a first-time buyer to a repeat purchase customer comes in handy. 

When you run a First-Time to Repeat Buyer campaign, you identify your first-time buyers, segment them based on their propensity for frequent purchasing, and target them with personalized, relevant content. Use your wide channel offering to deliver tantalizing vouchers or spot-on product recommendations to inspire their second purchase.

5. “Complete the Look”

Focus: Customer Lifecycle

Channels to Consider: Email, CRM Ads, Web

Once you have an active customer, it’s time to prove to them that you understand who they are and their specific needs and preferences. 

A “Complete the Look” tactic is essentially a complementary products/services campaign — think of it as an upsell. Content is uniquely tailored to each customer, so it’s one of the most powerful ways to go beyond cookie-cutter content and provide your customers with a truly relevant experience. If setting this up as an automation, try testing certain variables to find the best results. For example, try testing timings (i.e. how long after the purchase to wait until sending) or even different segments.

 6. Birthday

Focus: Customer Lifecycle

Channels to Consider: Email, CRM Ads, SMS, Web

Birthday campaigns are one of the most tried-and-true tactics a marketer can include in their omnichannel marketing strategy. It’s a great excuse to engage with and reward a customer, and they’re always happy to be appreciated on their birthday. 

When executing a Birthday campaign, you’ll want to engage your customer with a gift-based incentive in the days leading up to their birthday. Use a range of channels like email, web, SMS, and more to get the message to your customer and let them know you’ve got a personalized gift to help them celebrate their big day.

 7. Price Drop

Focus: Product / Catalog

Channels to Consider: Email, CRM Ads, SMS, Web

Omnichannel marketing is about finding more ways to engage and build relationships with customers. One of the best times to reach out to your customer is when something they’ve been eyeing has dropped in price.

A Price Drop campaign is a very potent tactic because it pairs the feeling of opportunity (getting a better deal) with the constraint of time (for example, if it’s a limited time deal, or while supplies last). Use channels like email, SMS, or web to let your customer know that the product or service they are interested in can now be purchased at a lower price. 

8. Back In Stock

Focus: Product / Catalog

Channels to Consider: Email, SMS, Web

An out of stock product can be frustrating for a customer, and puts them at risk of churning (especially if a competitor can offer a similar or same product). So a Back in Stock campaign should be a staple omnichannel marketing tactic you include in your strategy. 

The beauty of a Back In Stock campaign is that you’re sending customers a personalized message about a product they’ve either already purchased previously, or have expressed interest in purchasing, but couldn’t complete the transaction due to inventory. This is a great tactic to set up as an automation, so you never miss a chance to let customers know when something they love is once again available.

9. Winback Defecting Customers

Focus: Customer Lifecycle

Channels to Consider: Email, Web, CRM Ads, SMS

Customers are human, and humans are complicated. As such, a customer may defect from your brand for seemingly no discernible reason. But if you’re dialed in with your winback tactics, you can re-engage customers before they go completely inactive on you.

With a Winback Defecting Customers campaign, you can identify customers on their way to becoming inactive, and win them back with irresistible incentives or spot-on personalized product recommendations. This is another tactic that lends itself well to automation, because you never want to let a defecting customer be neglected too long.

[Read Next: 10 ready-to-deploy omnichannel marketing tactics your strategy needs]

Successful Omnichannel Marketing Examples

Discover how global brands are using omnichannel marketing to overcome their organizational challenges and drive tangible business outcomes. 

  1. Adore Beauty got one step ahead of the competition with customer journey automation, helping them to increase revenue by 47% in the last 2 years and drive 5.5x customer lifetime value over acquisition costs.
  2. Lorna Jane created powerful value exchanges with downloadable content that drove 33% CVR from their welcome email, a 70.5% open rate and a 25% decrease in their unsubscribe rate. 
  3. Total Tools unified their data sources with Emarsys, enabling them to scale their 1:1 personalization and quickly launch 20 data-driven automations. This broke their dependence on email, making them more channel-agnostic and helping them realize 15x ROI from CRM ads. 
  4. Feel Good Contacts connected their online and offline data, building new automated customer journeys and creating a market-leading app that gave customers better buying opportunities. They drove 26% YoY revenue growth from welcome and abandoned cart, and app sales accounted for 24% of their monthly orders.

Omnichannel Marketing Statistics

From challenges to its impact on loyalty, retention and revenue, these statistics show the importance of adopting an omnichannel marketing strategy, as well as the potential it holds.

General:

63% of respondents in this study from customer-obsessed firms said expanding the marketing/digital channels their company includes in its mix is a must, compared to just 37% of study respondents from firms that are not customer-obsessed. [Emarsys]

Email:

93% of consumers report receiving communications that are not relevant to them. [Insider Intelligence]

54% of marketers who implemented personalization saw increased brand engagement. [Emarsys]

48% of marketers who implemented personalization saw increased conversions. [eMarketer]

Customer Experience:

An increase in one point of CX can increase an enterprise company’s revenue by $1bn. [Forrester]

52% of customer-obsessed companies using an omnichannel strategy see improved customer interactions and engagement. [Emarsys]

The same companies see 62% higher margins and 54% higher loyalty and retention. [Emarsys]

Personalization:

31% of consumers cite personalized experiences as the reason they stay loyal to a brand. [Emarsys]

Data:

27% of marketers blame their personalization challenges on their inability to act on existing data. [Emarsys]

62% of respondents from customer-obsessed companies said their firm is bettering its customer data quality, compared to 35% from non-customer-obsessed firms. [Emarsys]
70% of customer obsessed companies surveyed reported having an established, unified data model, compared to 30% from non-customer-obsessed firms. [Emarsys]

Marketing Automation:

57% of surveyed marketers wished they had more time in the day. [Emarsys]
Surveyed retail marketers reported spending 55% of their time working with execution tools across marketing channels. [Emarsys]

AI:

33% of marketers say the inability to scale content is holding personalization back for their brand. [Emarsys]

30% of marketers cite their inability to segment by behavior and purchases as the biggest hurdle. [Emarsys]

94% of marketers see using AI to segment data as a way to save time. [Emarsys] 

[Read Now: 23+ omnichannel marketing statistics you need to know]

Omnichannel Marketing Summary

Omnichannel marketing is not a one-and-done, set-and-forget approach to customer engagement, acquisition, retention and loyalty. It’s a complex, ever-evolving marketing discipline that has the potential to elevate your brand above the competition and deliver tangible business outcomes.

We hope the content on this page has helped you get a step closer to your omnichannel goals. The path to omnichannel success is not a one-time journey but a continuous process of learning, adjusting, and evolving.

Whether you’re just starting your search for an omnichannel marketing platform or are looking to add more sophistication to your omnichannel marketing, please contact us for expert guidance.