Omnichannel marketing automation lets companies craft a more integrated and personalized shopping experience for their consumer base across multiple sales touchpoints. No matter whether a customer shops online or at a brick-and-mortar store, omnichannel automation allows companies to improve their target audience's experience. Unlike more traditional strategies that take a very generalized approach to marketing, such as multichannel marketing, omnichannel marketing enables companies to focus on individual customers.

Find out more about what omnichannel automation is, how it works and its benefits below. You'll also learn some top tips for implementing it successfully at your company.

What Is Omnichannel?

Omnichannel marketing is a specific category of multichannel marketing, and it aims to give customers a seamless experience, no matter how they're interacting with you. Whether a customer is shopping by phone, in a physical store or online from their mobile device or desktop computer, omnichannel marketing can improve the sale's process. 

Since today's consumers can interact with brands in many different ways, such as over social media, through traditional marketing channels or on mobile apps, the best companies turn to omnichannel marketing. This form of marketing is a system designed to help companies deliver a unified marketing strategy across all of a company's marketing channels, ensuring these channels work seamlessly with one another.

With this form of marketing in their corner, a company can give their customers a personalized brand experience, no matter how consumers interact with the company. As a result, this marketing approach integrates promotion, communication and distribution channels. Additionally, omnichannel marketing automation utilizes the latest tech to help companies automatically communicate with customers. This automated communication applies to digital channels, such as mobile and web communication. 

How Does Omnichannel Differ From Multichannel?

Though it's a type of multichannel marketing, omnichannel marketing is a much more personalized marketing strategy. Multichannel marketing centers a brand in the middle. Like omnichannel marketing, multichannel marketing has companies attempt to reach their customers across multiple channels. However, unlike omnichannel marketing, multichannel marketing only allows companies to send a one-size-fits-all message via all these different channels. As a result, multichannel marketing is often only effective at influencing a small number of consumers.

In contrast to multichannel marketing's ability to only send one-size-fits-all messages, omnichannel marketing allows companies to personalize their messages across multiple channels. Instead of having their marketing channels be an extension of the brand, omnichannel marketing makes it so the channels are the brand. This marketing strategy integrates data points to create a consistent and seamless experience for customers, helping to craft more unique marketing messages to individual consumers.

When a company uses omnichannel marketing, its channels will change as its customers go through their purchase journey. While customers are on their purchase journey, the channels will collect and update their data on the customers. With this data, they'll automatically react to the customers, providing them with more specific messages based on their behavior. By incorporating this data and changing it based on behavior, the message stays relevant, helping improve return on investment (ROI) for all the channels a customer uses. 

Due to the way omnichannel marketing reacts to a customer's engagement, it's a much more customized marketing experience compared to multichannel marketing. Essentially, omnichannel marketing builds on multichannel marketing, borrowing the focus on a brand but using data and tech to set itself apart by giving customers a personalized buying experience.

The Benefits of Omnichannel Automation

Due to the potential for omnichannel marketing to better reach customers, you might be interested in learning more about how it can help your company. If you're thinking about utilizing omnichannel marketing automation, check out some of the top benefits of it below:

• Greater company data centralization: Omnichannel marketing automation constantly gathers data about customers, and a great omnichannel solution will present that data in a single place. By centralizing customer and company data in one location, your team will have more information to rely on when creating new strategies or providing customer support. This data often includes a customer's full history with a company, contact info across all channels and communication preferences. 
• Seamless user experience: With omnichannel marketing automation, you can track customers through their entire purchase journey and send them the right communications at the best time. If a consumer visits your store, looks at a product and then later buys it online via a mobile device, your company can track these interactions and ensure the customer can easily purchase the product they were looking at. When customers have complaints, this kind of marketing ensures the complaint is resolved quickly without any communication gaps.
• More personalized outreach: As you attempt to bring in new customers and convert sales, a more personalized approach can be much more effective than a generalized one. Since omnichannel marketing can target consumers by using their activity level across multiple channels, it's much easier for companies to address a consumer's specific pain points. By tracking user behavior, omnichannel marketing can automatically send consumers personalized content based on their interests. This personalization often increases engagement and helps companies close sales.
• Better persona profiles: Due to omnichannel automation's ability to track customer behavior, companies can use it to build more insightful and in-depth user profiles. With these user profiles, you can create buyer personas and utilize personalized recommendations. By developing more informative buyer profiles, you can segment your audience and develop strategies for specific kinds of users. These more personalized strategies often result in greater conversion rate optimization.
• Improved customer experience: All of the data omnichannel marketing provides to companies allows them to better serve their customers. Instead of bombarding your target audience with marketing efforts that don't appeal to them, you can send them more personalized content to make their customer journey more enjoyable and streamlined. Additionally, you can improve customer experiences when they need support or have a complaint, as your team will have all the relevant information they need to address their needs.
• Increased company collaboration: Many companies enjoy how omnichannel automation allows every staff member on their team to collaborate better. Since every employee from your marketing, sales, tech and customer support teams can see a customer's profile, they can more easily serve the customer and see their previous interactions with other team members. Omnichannel automation systems place all of a customer's resources into one profile, making it much easier for your employees to build off each other's past efforts.

How Does Omnichannel Automation Work?

At ConnectPointz, we're dedicated to helping our clients implement automated omnichannel marketing strategies. As a result, we designed our platform to assist buyers at every step in the omnichannel automation process. Learn more about the five main steps that go into a successful omnichannel automation strategy and how ConnectPointz can help you implement them below:

1. Centralize Customer Data

The first step of implementing omnichannel automation is centralizing customer data and employing customer data platforms. When you centralize your customer information in a data platform, your team can gain key insights about customers and their needs. Since omnichannel uses customer data to automate key processes, it's crucial companies put all of their customer data into one platform.

If you're a small business, you can use our small business integration solutions to better centralize your data. This solution ensures electronic data exchange is seamless and in compliance. It also enables sales channel automation, with the solution changing based on your growth. If you're a larger business, our enterprise integration solutions can also help centralize your data. With this customizable solution, you can unify your applications, databases, systems and services, gaining key insights about your customers.

2. Examine Customer Experience

After centralizing customer data, companies must start examining their customers' experience to implement better solutions. With the data in one place, your company can perform an audit evaluating your customer experience. You'll likely start by looking at how a user interacts with your website, but you'll want to go past just looking at user interactions.

The audit should also take into account the full customer journey. When you audit the entire customer experience, you'll look at everything from the discovery phase and the checkout process to the post-sales experience and overall user experience. Once you've audited the entire customer journey, you'll know how your customers interact with your brand and their mindset when browsing or making a purchase. Since we offer custom software solutions designed to help clients integrate data from multiple channels, you can use our platform to conduct an audit. 

3. Store Customer Feedback

As you attempt to automate every step of your marketing strategy and deliver a more personalized experience, you'll want to gather customer feedback. When you gather customer feedback throughout the customer journey and store it in our centralized data platform, you can learn more about how a particular strategy is performing. 

Often, you can simply implement low-commitment methods of giving feedback, such as one where the customer only has to make a single click to respond. By storing this data, you can make a more informed decision on any changes you make to your marketing strategy.

4. Target Messages

With all of the feedback and data you've gathered about the customer journey, you can segment consumers into smaller groups. When you segment your consumers into specific groups, you can send more targeted messages to them to ensure they're getting more relevant information aimed to address their pain points. To more effectively segment your consumers, you'll often want to do so based on key factors like:

• Customer behavior
• Profile demographics and data
• Campaign engagement

5. Measure Success or Failure

The final step for omnichannel automation is measuring your success or failure. To measure your success, gather data about your customer's interactions with your company and see what strategies work best for you. By finding what your customers most respond to and measuring your success, you can evolve your company's efforts to optimize your marketing strategy. 

Since our platform allows users to integrate data from various sources, such as QuickBooks, SAP, ERP, logistics operations and accounting software, you can measure the successes or failure of a marketing campaign. With our platform, you gain a comprehensive view of your operations and can adjust your strategy as a result. 

How to Be Successful With Omnichannel Marketing Automation

Now that you know the main steps for implementing omnichannel automation, you might also want some tips to get the most out of your omnichannel marketing strategy. Check out some of the top tips for becoming successful with omnichannel marketing automation:

• Identify all consumer communication: When you want to get the most out of omnichannel marketing, ensure you know how all of your different departments communicate with consumers. By knowing how every group is communicating with your target audience, you can create a more cohesive marketing strategy and brand experience.
• Use data for outreach: With all of the data omnichannel automation can deliver, you'll want to use it to personalize your outreach strategies. You can use data on customers' past behaviors to discover how they engage with your company and what they buy, helping you create better follow-up campaigns.
• Ensure internal consensus: Before you start sending out a message about your company via your various marketing channels, ensure everyone's on board with it. A successful marketing strategy and brand proposition are only effective if every department buys into them. By ensuring internal consensus, you raise the chances that every staff member represents your company in a consistent manner.
• Map out a customer's potential journey: Keep track of every step of the customer's journey, from the moment they learn about you all the way to the post-sales stage. By mapping out their journey and understanding what made them buy a product or take it out of their cart, you can better optimize your strategies, finding new ways to inspire future buying and customer retention.
• Analyze data to ensure you're reaching all buyers: Sometimes, companies overlook different buyer segments that could be loyal customers if these organizations just invested some time marketing to them. By analyzing your data, you can better identify potential audiences and buyers, adjusting your strategies to reach them. At ConnectPointz, we unify electronic data communication, making it easier for you to analyze your data. Since you can gather data from various different sources in one place, you'll be more equipped to spot trends and potentially untapped audiences.

Choose ConnectPointz for Omnichannel Automation

When you're looking to implement omnichannel marketing automation at your business, turn to ConnectPointz. With our platform in your corner, you can expect to quickly centralize your data and gain a comprehensive understanding of your customers' needs. Since our platform is customizable and easy to use, your team will be able to seamlessly communicate with each other and personalize their outreach efforts for particular customers.

Take a moment to review the many services we provide to our clients that can help you implement omnichannel marketing automation at your company. You might also be interested in learning more about how our integrated retail solutions can also help you automate every step of your supply chain.

Check out our pricing, and if you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact us.