Take a Data-Driven Approach to Ace Omni-Channel Marketing

Omni-channel marketing has gone beyond just being a buzzword. With the shift in the marketing world, marketers are faced with more diverse buying patterns and customers that have higher expectations.

They are realizing that to get ahead on the marketing tracks, they must implement an omni-channel marketing strategy.

At the heart of an omni-channel strategy lies data. Using this treasure trove of data effectively helps to unlock new opportunities.

Let’s understand how you can embed your omni-channel marketing strategy with a data-driven approach to stay ahead of the curve.

What is Omni-Channel Marketing?

Omni-channel marketing is an approach to personalize customer experience on every channel, be it mobile, retail, social media, desktop browser, and any other platform that your customers might be using. It places your customers at the center of every touchpoint, thus, your messages must adapt to what your customer needs as well as the channel they choose to communicate on.

Why Must You Implement Omni-Channel Marketing?

The number of channels and touch-points customers are using to make buying decisions is multiplying.

So, what does it mean for your business? You need to be everywhere. And omni-channel marketing helps you with that.

Some other benefits of this strategy include:

• Improved brand visibility
• Boost in customer engagement
• Better customer service
• Seamless user experience
• Improved customer retention

Let’s take a look at an example.

Imagine, after a long day at work, you need to recharge yourself with a good ol’ cup of joe but you know your favorite coffee shop will be crowded and who has the energy to stand in a long waiting line after a long day? Wouldn’t it be delightful if the coffee shop had an app that lets you pre-order coffee so that you could enter the shop, collect your order, and leave?

That’s exactly what Starbucks did. They made placing orders and payments easier for their customers, and almost 20% of their revenue^[i] comes through the app. This omni-channel approach helped to enhance customer experience and boost revenue.

Why is Data the Backbone of Omni-Channel Strategy?

If you want to succeed as a marketer, your data is your most valuable resource to propel your brand forward.

Data fuels your omni-channel strategy by throwing light on:

• Who your audience is
• What they are most likely to respond to
• What channels they prefer

It backs you up with solid evidence to help you offer a seamless experience to all your users.

How Can You Deliver an Omni-Channel Experience with a Data-Driven Approach?

To understand how you can adopt a data-driven approach for omni-channel marketing, here are a few things to consider.

1. Segment Your Audience

Use your data to identify what makes up your wider audience, what their needs and wants are, and then hone in on specific small segments. This helps you deliver campaigns designed specifically for each segment and make the customers in that segment feel special. Create your target personas and analyze your existing customer data or collect new data from surveys/feedback. To effectively target and personalize your marketing campaigns, you can segment an audience based on criteria like:

• Demographics – age, location, gender, language
• Behaviors – job, purchase behavior, search behavior

2. Ramp Up Your Technology Stack

Having a solid tech stack helps you get more data and do more with that data. Marketing Automation Platforms (MAPs), CRM, Customer Data Platform (CDP), Content Management System (CMS), predictive analytics, and other platforms help marketers identify trends and track performance. You can automate several tasks through MAPs and use CDPs to create more personalized marketing campaigns. With a CRM at the heart of your tech stack, you can record each buyer’s journey from prospect to customer. An analytics tool can be your brainpower to understand behavior and even predict future purchase behavior to reach out to customers at just the right time and right channel.

3. Improve Data Quality

Improving your data quality is critical to getting actionable insights. Improve your data entry process and periodically review its validity, completeness, accuracy, and consistency. Normalize your data because it is collected from various sources and remove any duplicates in your database. For instance, a tool like M-Clean can help you dedupe records in Marketo.

4. Choose the Right Channels

Data-driven marketing is fueled by your ability to collect and utilize customer data. Marketers need to be savvy about the best ways to leverage it without being invasive. This is where analytics can help. It can show you the marketing channels that drive the most traffic to your site, which channels are generating the most leads, and where your audience spends the most time. This will show you where your efforts and time can be best spent.

5. Personalize Your Content

The core of a successful omni-channel strategy is personalization and when you know who your customer is and how best to communicate with them, you can improve customer engagement and ROI. As you get data about your target customers, you can use this information to personalize your content to make it more relevant to customer needs.

When you know what kind of content your customers are consuming and at what point in the buyer’s journey they find it most valuable, you can send the right message, at the right time. Just ensure that your content is optimized as per the channel you’re communicating on.

Putting your customer at the center of your marketing strategy means also putting their data at the center of your marketing operations. It is only through a data-driven omni-channel marketing approach that you can offer your customers a consistent experience across all touchpoints that not just boosts customer engagement but also drives brand affinity.

Want to have a solid data-driven omni-channel marketing strategy? Talk to us!

References

^[i] Starbucks – Mobile Ordering Payments