Customer loyalty rides in on the back of an excellent customer experience. Therefore, your marketing efforts can only meet your expected outcomes when your customer experience merges brilliantly with the online and offline worlds. Why online? Because your customers are spending hours sifting through multiple channels. Therefore, if you haven’t already considered a multichannel marketing strategy, you might be leaving out tons of leads entering your sales pipeline.
Multichannel users spend three to four times more than single-channel customers (source). So, This makes it easier for marketers to magnify their lens on the customer’s activity. In addition, customers today are more specific in their needs, which keeps them moving through several platforms. Hence, you need to immediately seize this opportunity and follow them across their networks to provide them with what they’re looking for. You can do all of this with the help of a multichannel marketing strategy.
Multichannel marketing is the process of blending all your marketing efforts to initiate interactions with customers who are present across various online channels. This process may not seem as simple as it sounds because there are multiple factors and considerations. Hence, in this article, we will walk you through the three key essential points that can help you set a successful multichannel marketing strategy:
1. Consider all channels as the same entity
Since handling multi-channels is a different game, your marketers might have vast chances of botching up your plans at any time. And that’s why some businesses can still not attain a success rate through this marketing technique.
Your brand should have a unified tone for multi-channel marketing to sound familiar on every platform. For instance, Posting exciting content on one platform and promoting it with irrelevant content on another will surely puzzle your customer’s mind. Hence, decide the tone of the final message first and then keep it the same across all platforms. Then, when you begin considering each channel as the same entity, you may not risk turning off your customers.
2. Play by the rules set forth by each channel
When using a multichannel marketing strategy, you have many channels at your disposal, and each has its own rules and advice for elevating your marketing efforts. For example, your enrollments and subscriptions may perform better on email channels, while your articles may do well on LinkedIn. Some beautiful results on one platform may not produce the same outcomes on other channels.
Hence, although your message is unified, you should still consider what will work best for each channel. Therefore, before employing any channel, conduct extensive research and list every crucial component that can make your channel more successful in engaging with your customers.
3. Design a single view of the customer
Customers today scan many options and make snap decisions in a few seconds. Furthermore, these customers are so invested in the brands and products that they create several scattered and fragmented accounts across various channels, giving marketers little to no idea about ongoing customer actions. And this makes marketers more clueless about hitting the right message at the right time. This is where a single customer view comes in handy.
A single customer view refers to compiling information about customers’ behaviors and activities across various channels. Here, all the customer’s signals are added into one single record so that marketers can trace the customer’s purchasing journey.
You, too, can develop a holistic view of your customers by following the key points outlined below:
- To start, gather your customer’s personal and professional information.
- Find out which channels they use and what they browse
- Identify the devices they use.
- Analyze the amount of time spent on each channel or device.
- Track every single move your customer makes
By combining this data for a particular customer, you can better segment your audience and gain a 360-degree view of their buying process.
We understand that merging and converging all your customer data from various channels can be challenging, given that 89% of marketers have trouble linking customer data (source). However, this task can be simplified if you try employing an automation tool.
Click here to find out how marketing automation boosts inside sales productivity!
Multichannel marketing can be a powerful tool to chase the ever-changing interests of your customers. To top it all off, it also aids in enhancing your customer engagement rates, which is much needed for every company. And there is a huge probability that your competitors may already be savvy about it, as statistics show that 51% of companies use at least eight channels to interact with their customers (source). Hence, you also need to jump on the bandwagon and start capitalizing on multi-channel marketing to bring your plans to fruition.
Shifting to new routes or networks can seem daunting, but once you begin placing your brand on each channel, you will gradually enter the world of multi-channel marketing. Hence, optimize this technique; in return, it will act as a guiding light on your journey to reach your most intended and targeted customers.
