A Quick Guide to Omnichannel Marketing for Small Businesses by Jeline Hope

Recently, we featured tips on ‘Ways to Grow Your Business in 2022’ and one of the things we discussed was cultivating an online presence. Over the past couple of years, the demand for products and services online has grown exponentially and this trend isn’t about to end any time soon as it offers convenience and variety for customers across the globe.

Of course, it’s one thing to go digital — but technology is rapidly blurring the line between eCommerce and brick-and-mortar businesses. We’re now looking at seamlessly maneuvering between multiple platforms and optimizing business processes by consolidating the physical and the virtual. In today’s article, we’ll take a look at omnichannel marketing, a cutting-edge strategy for the future.

What is Omnichannel Marketing?

Omnichannel marketing is when a business uses multiple marketing channels to create a frictionless shopping experience for its customers. When customers interact with your live chat, email, or social media platforms on any device and visit your physical location, they can easily jump from one channel to another without any issue. Omnichannel marketing presents a unified experience with your brand.

You may think you already have all those things in place, but omnichannel marketing is often confused with multichannel marketing — which keeps channels separate. Omnichannel marketing happens, for example, when you see a post on Instagram about a product you like.

You visit the website and sign-up as a customer, but you run out of time to finish the purchase. The next time you check the shop using your app, the product is still saved on your cart and you receive a follow-up email to remind you about it. Then, when you drop by the physical store, you receive a text message about an in-store promotion that day. In short, omnichannel marketing makes it easier for shoppers to undergo one brand experience.

A Forbes article on omnichannel as customer expectation reveals how integral this strategy has become since the term entered marketplaces in 2010, as the average customer moved from using only two touchpoints to six touchpoints per purchase. 90% of customers now expect their interactions to be consistent across all channels, with omnichannel campaigns seeing an 18.96% engagement rate versus single-channel’s 5.4% engagement rate.

How Small Businesses Can Tap Into Omnichannel Strategies

Omnichannel marketing is no longer just for luxury brands. It’s the smart thing to do for even small businesses, as it offers more organization and a better customer journey as a whole. So how should small businesses go about it?

Keep service consistent

The most straightforward framework to follow is that if you’re selling on a particular platform, you should be serving on that platform as well. It’s also crucial to maintain basic customer service across these platforms; if you’re promoting your business on Twitter, you should also pay attention to messages and comments of customers asking for help. Even self-service options like chatbots and FAQ pages should be consistent across channels.

Use your data

Personalization is another factor to consider, as you better meet customer needs when you’re focused on catering to them — rather than the other way around. Maryville University’s insights on data-driven marketing point out that businesses using data-driven personalization recorded between five and eight times the return on investment for their marketing budgets. Data identifies frequently used channels and measures the impact of your marketing campaigns across channels. How do you collect data? Asking customers to sign-up for a mailing list, encouraging them to leave reviews, or requesting them to answer surveys are simple ways to collect information.

Re-examine what you know

Finally, take time to review and analyze the data you’ve collected. Test out new strategies, evaluate, and repeat Reviewing your information is important to challenge assumptions. Case in point, joint research from Purdue University and the University of California on measuring consumer engagement in omnichannel retailing suggests that consumers want autonomy to independently find, evaluate, and purchase merchandise in physical stores. They don’t want to be told what to buy, and would prefer to co-create an authentic shopping experience.

Written exclusively for thewrightvillage.com

By Jeline Hope