Omni-channel marketing is viewing the experience through the eyes of your customer. It is understanding how the customer experiences your business across all channels. It needs to be seamless, integrated, and consistent. 

Omni-channel anticipates that customers may start in one channel and move to another as they progress to a resolution.  Making these complex ‘hand-offs’ between channels must be easy for the customer.

Omni-channel is multi-channel and is about giving the customer an easy experience across all channels that the customer uses.

As a business owner, it is important to respond to the changing needs and requirements of your customers by implementing omnichannel marketing into your business.

Here are 7 ways you can implement omnichannel marketing today to boost the performance of your business

1. Be A Customer

Act as a customer of your own business. 

Research your products, subscribe to lead magnets, place orders, abandon orders, like comments and posts and see how your business responds.

Test how easy it is to deal with your business. Use this as a learning experience. Experiment with how customers interact with your business.

Are there barriers? Are expectations met or exceeded? How well do you follow-up? How responsive is your business? 

Become your own customer so you can identify any weakness or shortcomings your business may have so that you can improve them. 

2. Measure 

Data is readily available and can be easily collected.

Make sure your business is collecting data and analysing the data. 

Use the data to gain an understanding of how customers interact with your business and how you can improve your business.

You no longer have to wait for days to access your data. Establish a regular system for analysing your data.

Use it to help improve your decision making.

Testing is very important. Sometimes we learn what doesn’t work not necessarily what works. This will all lead to the continuous improvement of your business.

3. Segment Your Audience

Understand your data and determine what is useful to you and your ideal client profile.

Then you can segment your audience accordingly. Which data points actually help you better understand your audience? 

Using marketing automation, you can capture this information to build rich profiles about your customers and the customer journey.

The data can be translated into customer case studies and used to build buyer personas. 

Use the data to gain a deeper understanding of your ideal clients and then use this to improve your landing pages, email marketing and content marketing activities.

4. Develop Content/Messaging that Addresses Use Cases and Behaviours

Content and messaging are key. 

If a customer has previously engaged or purchased your product, you probably want to consider that in your marketing. 

If a customer has put something into a cart but hasn’t yet purchased, use your content to reference that intent.

You can send emails referencing previous purchases and recommending complementary products.  This type of content and messaging makes consumers feel personally spoken to and helps drive much higher engagement, loyalty, and purchases.

5. Use Case Studies For All Your Business

Listening and responding to your customers will help you improve your support team, product team, merchandising teams, and customer service efforts. 

What you learn, test and review will all combine to the improvement of your whole business. 

Having all areas benefiting from your marketing activities will build a much better business.

6. Social Listening and Engagement

Increasingly, people use multiple devices during a single transactional process. 

Make sure that you are able to listen and respond to these interactions. 

For example, an e-commerce retailer should strive to preserve items in a cart across devices – if you add an item to your mobile shopping cart, it should still be in your shopping cart when you log in on your desktop computer.

Neil Mohan, Google’s VP of Display Advertising, said, “If you’re just focusing on mobile, you’re solving yesterday’s problems. Consumers are flitting back and forth among many devices, from smartphones to desktops, and from laptops to tablets to TVs. 90% of consumers start a task on one device and finish it on another. Consumers are way ahead of where advertisers and publishers are.”

Here’s a chart from Telco 2.0 Research, illustrating the frequency of multi-device paths to purchase:

7. Start Now

You need to start today. Small steps are better than no steps.

There’s too much at stake in your business to delay taking that first step any longer. 

Consumers may be ahead of many marketers now, but this soon won’t be the case. 

Those Business owners who thrive will be the ones who can deliver on the promise of personal, omnichannel experience.