Omnichannel Customer Journey Explained

What is an Omnichannel Customer Journey?

An omnichannel customer journey visualizes the entire customer journey path spanning all engagement channels, from the moment they discover your brand to their first transaction and beyond. The mapping process offers a clear view of key steps and decision points in the customer journey that allow you to fine-tune interactions, resolve friction and enhance their experience wherever possible.

Customers today interact with brands across an ever-growing number of channels — in-store, email, SMS, app, web and others. With an explosion of digital touchpoints, customers no longer move linearly or predictably from awareness to conversion and beyond. More often than not, they bounce between platforms and devices (and competitors) before making a decision. To keep customers engaged at every stage and on every platform, brands must deliver seamless and unified experiences tailored to the individual at every touchpoint.

Whether you’re mapping high-level customer experience journeys or focusing on specific actions — like joining a loyalty program, ordering a coffee or completing an in-app purchase — an omnichannel customer journey ensures you meet customer needs seamlessly at every touchpoint and in ways they prefer.

Why is an Omnichannel Strategy Essential?

Today, 80% of consumers consider consistent experiences across different online channels “important” or “critical” to meeting their customer experience expectations. An omnichannel strategy empowers brands to meet rising expectations, enabling them to engage customers more effectively with cross-channel customer experiences across conversion destinations. 

Brands that orchestrate unified, omnichannel experiences at scale reap the benefits:

• Repeat Engagement: Marketers see engagement rates up to 250% higher with omnichannel marketing compared to single-channel marketing
• Sustained Loyalty: Companies using omnichannel marketing strategies turn 89% of first-time buyers into loyal customers
• Increased Revenue: Businesses striving to engage audiences across various channels see 14.6% more revenue annually

Mapping the Omnichannel Customer Journey

The backbone of an effective strategy starts first and foremost with mapping out the omnichannel customer journey, capturing a bird’s eye view of the experience across the entire lifecycle. Amid rising acquisition costs and plummeting referral traffic, brands need to not only bring customers to conversion destinations but also turn those initial interactions into repeat engagement.

Acquisition

Acquisition focuses on encouraging new customers to learn about your product or service. Marketing strategies like advertising, content marketing and referral programs are pivotal at this stage to build awareness. App Store Optimization (ASO) is key to garnering new mobile app users. 

Activation

Activation means getting customers to actively use a product or service. This can involve setting up a profile, making a first purchase or crossing an initial engagement threshold. Good onboarding flows are crucial in this stage to provide value quickly.

Engagement

Effective engagement ensures customers remain active over time. Tactics include gamification, personalized messaging and finding ways to make your product or service a part of the customer’s regular habits and routines.

Loyalty

Loyal customers are your biggest brand advocates who show strong brand affinity and sustained engagement over time. Loyalty programs, exclusive access and incentives can incentivize customers to enter and remain in this stage.

Barriers to a Seamless Omnichannel Customer Journey

• Siloed Teams: Marketers, product managers and CRM professionals are often responsible for managing digital customer experiences, yet rely on development teams to make enhancements. As a result, improvements often get placed on the back burner because of competing priorities. To make matters worse, app and web experiences are often created and deployed separately, resulting in a lack of cohesion across conversion destinations.
• Siloed Channels: Customers expect brands to show them they know them everywhere customers choose to engage. However, with channels often managed by different teams, brands struggle to build a single source of truth considering previous interactions. Customers are then frustrated about re-entering personal information when engaging in a new channel.
• Siloed Data: Disconnected organizational structures and segmented technology ownership force marketers and product owners to toggle between different data streams to get the information they need to make customer experience decisions. A lack of unified data means teams must operate without actionable, up-to-date information.

Key Considerations for an Omnichannel Strategy 

1. Audience Segmentation

Not all customers are the same. Effective journey maps reflect this by creating distinct, tailored experiences for different segments. For instance, a first-time customer exploring your brand needs a different experience than a loyal customer downloading your app for the first time. 

2. Personalization

Today’s consumers expect personalized experiences and want to feel like you know and understand them. By leveraging data on customer preferences and progressively gathering zero-party data, you can create relevant, engaging experiences that strengthen customer relationships.

3. Understanding Customer Goals and Mindsets

Consider not only what your customer wants to achieve but also their emotional state. Are they trying to make a quick purchase, solve a problem or find content/entertainment? Your journey should help them meet their goals naturally, while catering to their mindset. Reducing friction, offering guidance and providing support at key moments can build confidence and satisfaction.

4. Comprehensive Touchpoint Mapping

Ensuring a consistent brand experience across all touchpoints is crucial. Journey mapping unifies customer interactions, providing a seamless experience regardless of where and how they engage with your brand. This can include via marketing channels like SMS, email and mobile wallets or across conversion destinations like mobile apps and websites.

5. A/B Testing and Continuous Optimization

Regular A/B testing and experimentation optimize friction points with data-driven solutions. Companies with robust experimentation programs report an average of 41% improvement in engagement through personalized experiments, with multivariate testing showing a 25% higher success rate in optimizing experiences.⁴ Customer journeys evolve with market dynamics, customer behavior and changes within your own product, making continuous experimentation essential.

How AI is Transforming the Omnichannel Customer Journey

Marketing and product teams often share the same goal: drive customers to take high-value actions tied to business objectives. For years,  journey mapping has been a highly visual process, but one that’s also very time-consuming. AI is transforming the journey mapping process by automatically generating content and cross-channel orchestration. 

Airship’s Journeys AI enables you to instantly create a journey map and content for cross-channel messages and app + web experiences based on a simple set of inputs and conditions. Instead of manually mapping the journey, you can focus instead on optimizing the map and content for better conversion, or leverage generative AI to quickly produce alternative copy, images and contact sequences for continuous optimization

Using AI for journey orchestration and content creation is just the beginning. Imagine analyzing enormous data sets — including behaviors, preferences and past interactions — within seconds, automatically delivering tailored, real-time experiences. AI can go far beyond automation triggers to individualize follow-up with customers abandoning shopping carts — emphasizing key product characteristics, next-best offers or even experiences to scale customer insights to feed predictive models and recommendation engines. AI can also analyze performance data to pinpoint improvements and refine the journey, increasing conversions and engagement without continuous manual adjustments.

Get Started: Championing Omnichannel Strategies

While orchestrating omnichannel journeys and creating content for every touchpoint can feel daunting, it doesn’t have to be. Here we break it down into simple steps.

1. Define Customer Personas and Select One: Start by segmenting your audience into personas based on behavior, needs and goals. Focus on a single persona to build out the map.

2. Set Clear Goals and Objectives: What does the customer want from this journey? Define success from both the customer’s and your brand’s perspectives.

3. Identify Key Touchpoints: List every touchpoint — website, app, social media, email — where this persona engages with your brand.

4. Map the Customer Path: Outline each step, noting what the customer thinks, feels and does at each stage.

5. Spot Pain Points and Opportunities: Identify friction areas or drop-off points while highlighting opportunities for personalization or smoother interactions.

6. Test and Optimize: Use A/B testing to refine journey elements and continually optimize them based on data and feedback.

Optimize the Omnichannel Journey with Airship

Airship is the only customer experience platform empowering mobile-first growth teams to create, test and optimize hyper-personalized and unified experiences across conversion destinations and engagement channels. Here we breakdown how we can help you bring omnichannel customer journeys to life to increase loyalty, retention and revenue.

Journey Orchestration & Content Creation

Airship’s Journeys AI uses marketers’ responses to natural language prompts and their stated goals to instantly create a journey map and content for cross-channel messages and on-site and in-app experiences. Now, what used to take several hours, if not days, takes moments, providing a head start on the creative process with complete journeys they can easily edit and perfect. It’s a game-changer, significantly accelerating time to value and scaling customer insights through memorable app, web and cross-channel messaging experiences.

Unified App and Web Experiences

Our one-of-a-kind Experience Editors empowers your entire team to easily create, deploy and optimize high-value experiences to drive opt-ins, user registrations, purchases, feature adoption, reviews, survey responses and more across app and the web — no coding or app updates required.

Brands can reach people wherever they are and convert them using owned channels, reducing paid media spend. Instead of losing new customers due to poor experiences, you can build relationships with connected experiences that customers want. 

Channel Coordination

The Airship Experience Platform offers brands a centralized place to coordinate messages sent across all channels — SMS, email, mobile wallets and others. It’s essential for creating meaningful, coordinated customer experiences and unlocking maximum value from every message. You can create a flexible channel strategy that not only meets your goals and delivers value for your customers, but can be easily adapted for maximum impact.

Data Collection & Enrichment

Seamlessly sync customer data from your martech stack — external feeds, CDPs, data warehouses and data lakes — to create comprehensive user profiles, enable better segmentation and deliver more personalized experiences for customers. Collect valuable zero-party data with experience like Surveys to get deeper insights into your customers’ needs.  

Omnichannel Strategies in Action

You don’t have to take our word for it. The success of our customers’ omnichannel strategies highlights the value of this approach. 

Hawaiian Airlines Transforms Day-Of Travel Experiences

Hawaiian Airlines set out to transform the customer experience with a unified, omnichannel strategy, delivering real-time information  to travelers when and where it matters most. The goal? Improve customer satisfaction, drive greater adoption among new customers and increase retention.

The brand partnered with Airship to:

• Grow App Usage with Wallet: To drive engagement and improve customer satisfaction, Hawaiian Airlines launched Google Wallet boarding passes so they could reach all customers with highly visible, day-of-travel notifications. 
• Deliver Targeted In-App Experiences to Boost Push Opt-Ins and Wallet Adoption: With an in-app automation campaign targeted to customers on Android devices, the airline educated about the feature and promoted its usage. It also launched a Scenes campaign, highlighting the new “Ready to Board” alert to encourage push opt-ins.
• Elevate Day-of-Travel with Live Activities: To convey real-time information to travelers, Hawaiian Airlines implemented Airship’s Live Activities feature during an internal IT hackathon. It was the first airline to launch Live Activities — taking only two weeks from inception to go-live in the app.

Get Started Creating Omnichannel Customer Journeys. Let’s Talk!

The Airship Experience Platform is designed to support your brand and customers throughout the entire mobile lifecycle. As channel fragmentation continues to grow, brands need a trusted partner with deep mobile DNA like Airship to create, test and optimize effective omnichannel customer journeys. Book a meeting today to see how Airship can help you reach new heights.