3 Tips for Building Better Omni-Channel Marketing Campaigns

Whether you are engaged in cross-channel, multi-channel or omni-channel marketing, there are a myriad of reasons to enhance your customer’s experience across all of the channels you use to reach them. Not only does using a variety of channels enable you to revive dormant accounts and reach new audiences, it also has a major impact on customer retention, profits and Customer Lifetime Values (CLVs). Companies with strong omni-channel customer experiences consistently produce these measurable benefits:

• 91% — Customer retention rate, compared to the average customer retention rate of 33%
• 5% — Year-over-year increase in annual revenue
• 30% — Increase in CLV, compared to those using one channel

What’s the Difference?

In case you are wondering, there is no real difference between cross-channel and multi-channel marketing as both involve a strategy wherein you are interacting with customers using a variety of channels. The major difference between cross- and multi-channel and their accomplished cousin omni-channel is cohesiveness. According to Branwell Moffat, the Director of CX Consulting at KPS Digital, “Forcing a customer to stick to a single channel or making them start at the beginning when switching channels creates friction and impacts the customer’s experience. The key difference between multi-channel and omni-channel is that omni-channel joins these touchpoints together so that, whatever journey the customer chooses to take, the experience is consistent and unified.”

Tip # 1: Connect Your Tech

According to ZoomInfo, the B2B data dynamos, “Only 14% of organizations say they are currently running coordinated marketing campaigns across all channels.” Naturally, this begs the question why are 86 percent of marketers unable to coordinate their campaigns across channels? The answer lies not in the complexity of the endeavor, but in how well their marketing technology stack is integrated. If you have a stack that is well-connected and able to share clean data across channels, you significantly reduce the time needed and steps required to pull off a well-coordinated campaign.

Why Bug IT When You Can DIY?

Before you dismiss tip #1 thinking you’ll need to book time six months in advance with your IT team to integrate all of your databases and martech, think again. There are a number of user-friendly integration tools on the market today that enable you to connect your tech without help from IT. More importantly, the best integration tools  drastically simplify the complexities of creating seamless customer journeys. How? They equip you with pre-built and customizable connectors that enable you to integrate multiple systems via a plug-n-play workflow engine. Moreover, you can use your workflow engine to trigger the launch of synchronized marketing campaigns — automatically. This brings us to our next tip.

Tip # 2: Automate Personalized Omni-Channel Campaigns

Creating personalized content for multiple channels does not have to be a budget-buster. E-Commerce News reports that a “lack of time and resources makes it difficult for 23% of marketers to run multi-channel marketing campaigns.” The good news is it is now infinitely easier to create personalized, multi-channel campaigns even if you are short on time and resources. In fact, once all of your databases and martech are well-connected (Tip 1) you can then connect a Content Automation Tool (CAT) to your marketing automation platform (MAP) or your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, and it will do all the heavy lifting for you.

Smart Marketers Heart CATs

When you add a CAT to your stack, it continuously mines all other connected sources for meaningful content that can be repurposed across a variety of channels, i.e. SMS, messaging apps, etc. This benefit alone will save you a ton of money on content development. However, the real beauty of the CAT is that it automates the process of personalizing omni-channel campaigns. You can set it up to automatically send the right content to the right person via the right channel based on specific data attributes. Or you can take a semi-automated approach by reviewing things before you allow it to send things on your behalf.

Tip #3: Get Your Data In Fighting Shape

According to CMO, “The biggest challenges with personalizing campaigns are gaining insights quickly enough (40%), having enough data (39%), and inaccurate data (38%).” In other words, you need to be able to:

• See and gauge your data quality in real-time — right down to the segment level
• Enrich your data on demand via integrated third party sources
• Ensure your data is clean, complete and ready to personalize your campaigns at all times

Fortunately, the answer to all of the challenges is as simple as integrating a Customer Data Platform (CDP) into your stack. A good CDP will have a data dashboard that continually monitors your data quality and ensures all data coming in and being shared within your stack is standardized, complete and clean. In addition to centralizing your view of data so you can see the big picture with ease and make decisions on the fly, your CDP should also enable you to know whether or not your lists contain every person and company in your total addressable market (TAM). When you consider that 62% of companies use marketing data that’s up to 40% inaccurate, it’s easy to see how a CDP is indispensable to your mission of building better omni-channel marketing campaigns.