Omnichannel Marketing Explained

What is Omnichannel Marketing?

Today, consumers expect brands to meet them with seamless, unified experiences wherever they choose to interact. Omnichannel marketing empowers brands to satisfy this demand, enabling them to engage customers more effectively with consistent, cross-channel customer experiences across conversion destinations. 

Omnichannel marketing helps brands maintain a unified presence with synchronized messaging and experiences across online and offline channels — grounded in a holistic understanding of the customer and their engagement preferences. As consumers interact with brands across an ever-growing number of digital touchpoints, brands must embrace an omnichannel approach to drive sustained loyalty and customer satisfaction. 

Critical elements of a successful omnichannel marketing strategy include:

• Seamless journey orchestration across every customer touchpoint 
• Contextually-connected messaging across all channels and platforms
• Personalized experiences fueled by zero- and first-party data
• Seamless connection of digital and in-store experiences when relevant

Omnichannel marketers are unlocking more value for their customers and business:

• According to McKinsey & Company, over a third of consumers have developed omnichannel shopping habits since COVID-19, and up to 70% do their shopping and research both in-store and online
• Gitnux’s 2024 MarketData Report found that:
  • 86% of senior marketers agree that a cohesive omnichannel strategy is critical to the customer journey
  • 70% of businesses say omnichannel strategies are important 
  • 90% of customers expect consistency across a business’s channels
• Marketers see engagement rates up to 250% higher with omnichannel marketing compared to single-channel marketing

What’s the Difference Between Multichannel vs. Omnichannel Marketing?

Omnichannel marketing and multichannel marketing are often used interchangeably, but they represent two different customer engagement strategies. Understanding the nuances between them will help you identify which is most suitable for your business objectives.

• Multichannel marketing refers to the process of engaging customers across multiple channels — email, SMS, social media, web, apps and others — to maximize reach. However, each channel is treated in isolation. Many brands take this approach to simplify their martech stack, but it can create siloed, fragmented and disconnected experiences.
• Omnichannel marketing refers to the process of engaging customers across all channels. Rather than treating them in isolation, marketers lean into cross-channel synergies to reinforce their brand message and boost results. This also allows them to optimize their tech stacks to integrate customer data from all touchpoints for more robust profiles. 

Unifying channel coordination and data streams empowers marketers to scale personalization and deliver more consistent experiences everywhere customers choose to engage.

When to Use Multichannel Marketing

You may be wondering when to use multichannel marketing vs. omnichannel marketing. The short answer is that it depends on your business goals. If you have set objectives for specific channels, multichannel marketing can be suitable. You can get your message out to as many customers as possible with more limited resources.

However, customers are increasingly frustrated by disconnected experiences across channels. What they see from a brand in one channel should be contextually-consistent with what they see in another channel. That’s why omnichannel marketing is becoming increasingly important for marketers to thrive in the mobile-first economy. 

By coordinating channel efforts and integrating data streams through omnichannel marketing, brands can deliver more seamless and unified customer experiences. Marketers that show their customers they truly know them — no matter where they choose to engage — reap the benefits in the form of repeat engagements, brand loyalty and higher customer lifetime value.

Benefits of Omnichannel Marketing 

Omnichannel marketing can be transformative for businesses wanting to improve customer interactions across platforms. Let’s explore some of the specific benefits of an omnichannel strategy, like how it can meet consumers’ expectations and drive business growth.

Higher Customer Engagement

Omnichannel marketing drives deeper customer engagement by empowering them to interact with a brand where and when they choose. Whether shopping online, browsing on a mobile app or visiting a physical store, omnichannel marketing ensures the messaging and overall experience feel connected. This consistency creates a smoother, more personalized customer experience, resulting in higher satisfaction and repeat business. 

Deeper Loyalty and Retention

Companies using omnichannel marketing strategies turn 89% of first-time buyers into loyal customers, while companies with weak or no omnichannel marketing only retain 33%. Omnichannel strategies are essential for building consumer loyalty, as they help businesses deliver the seamless, unified experiences that consumers demand through deeper personalization, value and convenience.

Increased Sales and Revenue

Omnichannel marketing throughout the buyer’s journey can also boost revenue. Businesses striving to engage audiences across various channels see 14.6% more revenue annually, while also generating 80% more in-store visits than those not utilizing omnichannel strategies. Research also shows that omnichannel customers spend 4X as much as in-store customers and 10X more than digital-only customers. 

Greater Customer Reach

Brand presence across multiple channels increases visibility and amplifies brand messaging, increasing the likelihood of consumers remembering your brand and choosing to engage with it in the future. Unifying experiences across channels like email, SMS and mobile wallets, as well as across conversion destinations like apps, websites and physical stores, empowers marketers to reach different audience segments on the channel where they prefer to spend their time.

10 Steps to Implement an Effective Omnichannel Strategy

Now is the time to start planning your omnichannel marketing strategy. Here are some steps to take as you make your plan:

1. Pinpoint Your Target Audience

Your omnichannel strategy should center around your ideal customer — a persona you must understand in depth. What do they care about, and where do they look for information? What are the pain points of their demographic? Where do they shop? Market research, segmentation and customer data collection will help you find answers to these questions.

2. Set Clear and Measurable Goals

A successful omnichannel marketing strategy begins with objectives and key performance indicators (KPIs). Define whether you want to boost sales, increase customer engagement or improve retention. Then, identify the North Star metrics for each channel that will help you achieve those goals, from opt-ins to conversion rates to customer lifetime value.

3. Invest in the Right Tools

Your goals will help you determine which technologies you need to support your omnichannel efforts. Determine if there are gaps in your capabilities that a new technology could supplement, such as a customer experience platform, marketing automation tools, data analytics platforms or content management systems. No-code capabilities are changing the way that marketers execute omnichannel marketing, empowering everyone on your team to deploy experiences across channels without any technical support.

4. Identify Your Customers’ Preferred Channels

You need to know where your audience spends time across digital and physical locations. Retailers, for example, should find out when and where their customers shop most and how much they typically spend. This data can be obtained through surveys, social listening, website analytics and more.

5. Prioritize Channels That Make Sense For Your Brand

Once you have sufficient customer information, you can select the channels you want to use and allocate marketing dollars accordingly. Any omnichannel marketing strategy should typically include a mix of traditional and digital channels, such as push notifications, in-app messages, email, print materials, in-store ads and a brand’s website. 

6. Optimize Your Presence Across Channels

Create engaging, consistent experiences across your app and website, social platforms and other marketing channels, while navigating the specific nuances of each channel. Connect each channel seamlessly to achieve your goals more quickly. For example, a customer who has your app installed should be sent to your app when they click on an email on their phone, not your website. A customer with your loyalty card in their mobile wallet should be able to easily scan this in-store. Small changes can result in big gains.

7. Ensure Compliance With Regulations

Your omnichannel practices must comply with all laws and regulations that apply to your area and industry, potentially including HIPAA, GDPR and CCPA. Make sure you have strong data security measures to protect your consumers across every channel you use.

8. Train Your Teams

Team members across all departments should be trained on the tools and strategy of your company’s omnichannel approach. Cross-functional training and ongoing learning will help support your strategy and ensure its effectiveness. Focus on empowering everyone with the capabilities to work with speed and agility.

9. Improve Customer Support

Customer service can make or break a consumer relationship. Make sure you have a solid team of friendly and supportive customer service representatives who can turn one-time buyers into loyal, lifelong customers and support them on their journey long after purchasing. Consider whether your customers prefer talking to your support team by email, on the phone or via live chat, and which is more cost effective for you.

10. Make Data-Driven Decisions

Your omnichannel strategy is bound to need adjustments along the way. Instead of making those changes based on guesswork, use data to monitor and optimize campaigns in real-time and refine experiences as you go. Optimize channel investments based on their preferences and the effectiveness of each channel in driving actions. A/B testing one channel against another or using control groups when adding in a new channel can help you understand and improve effectiveness.

Hawaiian Airlines: An Omnichannel Marketing Success Story

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

Consider Hawaiian Airlines, Hawaii’s largest and longest-serving airline. The brand 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.

How to Execute an Omnichannel Marketing Strategy

To successfully launch an omnichannel strategy, brands need a variety of tools and technologies to facilitate smooth integration and communication across multiple channels. Airship’s Experience Editor is purpose-built to support and enhance omnichannel marketing efforts through a comprehensive suite of features that streamline and optimize customer interactions across various channels. 

Here’s how some of our capabilities support marketers’ omnichannel efforts:

Journeys AI

Empowers you to bring cross-channel customer journeys to life faster than ever before, including creating and optimizing rich content for messages and no-code app and web experiences. What used to take hours, if not days, now takes moments, giving marketers a head start on the creative process with journeys.

Unified Channel Coordination

Centralizes the coordination of messages across multiple channels. Marketers can easily manage multi-channel campaigns and customize strategies to optimize reach and engagement based on customer data. For example, you can choose to target a customer based on their last active channel, or based on their preferred communication channel. 

Segmentation

Enables precise, personalized audience targeting across channels. With the Segment Builder, you can create detailed segments based on consumer behaviors, events and attributes captured through interactions across touchpoints. Deep segmentation ensures messages are highly relevant to your customers’ preferences and enhances cross-channel experiences.

Contact Management

Maintains and updates customer details in a centralized location for various marketing channels. It allows marketers to search for and find customer information and update crucial details like opt-in statuses and channel associations. These capabilities ensure customer data is current and accurate, enabling personalized, compliant communication across touchpoints.

Personalization

Helps marketers use first- and zero-party data, custom event properties and external data feeds to deliver highly personalized and relevant messages across various channels. This capability supports the creation of rich, interactive experiences unique to individual customer behaviors, preferences and real-time contexts.

A/B Testing

Eliminates the guesswork about which campaign variation will perform best on a specific channel. You can test up to 27 message variations to see which messages get the most engagement. Airship makes it simple to complete rigorous testing, so every message and campaign is effective and fueled by data.

Performance Analytics

Provide deep, data-driven insights into how, when, where and why customers interact with a brand across channels. Airship’s analytics insights help marketers fine-tune their omnichannel strategies to better meet organizational goals. Having a central place to view all campaign and customer data simplifies performance tracking and optimization across multiple channels, so every aspect of an omnichannel strategy is aligned and effective.

Airship Partner Network

Includes top customer data, experience and engagement platforms. This allows you to seamlessly connect data between systems and make decisions in one channel based on insights from another.

Omnichannel Marketing Best Practices

Now that you have the tools and steps to kick off your omnichannel marketing practice, here are just a few more tips and best practices to keep in mind as you execute and refine your plan:

1. Go Mobile-First: Data from Statista shows that two-thirds of online shopping was done on smartphones in Q1 of 2024, with phones accounting for 75% of retail site visits. Given the high engagement level on smartphones, businesses need to ensure a pristine mobile experience with a mobile-friendly website, responsive design, social media integration and a streamlined app. Ensure you’re able to reach your web and app users with tailored messaging and experiences, and continue to test them to understand what’s working.
2. Solicit and act on customer feedback: Omnichannel marketing makes it easy for customers to share feedback through their preferred channels. Don’t be afraid to ask for feedback during moments of attention — such as when they visit your app or website — rather than solely relying on email. Then, use this feedback to optimize your strategy and improve the customer experience, demonstrating a commitment to satisfying customers.
3. Ensure full integration of all systems: Build a martech stack that prioritizes flexibility and scalability to keep pace with customers’ evolving expectations. Ensure every solution you use for channel management can integrate with others, so that you aren’t left stitching together different data streams. Scaling customer insights across channels enables you to build more robust profiles so that you can deepen personalization.

Optimize Your Omnichannel Marketing Strategy with Airship

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 execute an effective omnichannel marketing strategy. 

Book a meeting today to see how Airship could benefit your brand and propel your omnichannel strategies to new heights!