Omnichannel vs. Multichannel Marketing: Here’s Everything You Need to Know

When it comes to creating an online marketing strategy, marketers often grapple with which approach is the best.

Approach A: Should they use a personalized customer-centric approach? As the statistics reveal, companies with omnichannel customer engagement strategies retain almost 89% of their customers, which could help in the long run.

Approach B: Since multichannel customers spend 3-4 times more than single channels do, should companies experiment with multiple channels? This way they can focus on reaching as many customers as possible and diversify their risks.

While the difference between both the approaches seem subtle, it can significantly impact how your business engages with its customers. As the popularity of your product/service soars, the need for a more personalized and seamless experience becomes vital.

This article will dive into the nuances of omnichannel vs. multichannel marketing, helping you understand each approach and craft an engaging customer journey. Let’s explore these strategies and their impact on customer engagement.

What is omnichannel marketing?

Omnichannel marketing is a customer-centric approach to creating a smooth, connected experience for customers regardless of where they interact with your brand.

It is focused on providing a seamless experience, regardless of the path customers choose to take. They enjoy autonomy in deciding how they interact with the brand. For the brand, it’s about delivering a consistent marketing message irrespective of the channel.

Whether on social media or in the brick-and-mortar store, the brand tone and messaging remain consistent, alongside a memorable personalized touch. The personalization can include product app nudges, emails, SMS and Whatsapp reminders, etc., based on behavioral insights. This personalized touch is not just a marketing strategy but a way to make customers feel appreciated and important.

The strategy is designed based on the customer behavioral data collected from the different touchpoints, enabling contextual and relevant re-targeting. When every interaction with your brand is positive and consistent, customers feel valued and are likelier to stick around.

Example:

A customer looking to buy a laptop interacts with the brand’s website but abandons his choice in the cart. Soon, he receives a reminder message from the brand of his purchase plan through an email, or an SMS on his registered mobile number. This message is meant to encourage him to visit the physical store for an exclusive discount and get a feel of the laptop.

While visiting the store, he uses the app to locate the item. The in-store staff, aware of the customer’s online activity, offers tailored recommendations, creating a seamless shopping experience.

Benefits of Omnichannel Marketing: Why Should You Use It?

Winning in an omnichannel world demands excelling in all channels, from in-person to hybrid, inside sales, digital self-serve, and marketplaces—especially during uncertain economic times in which a poor customer experience may lead to a lost sale. – “ The multiplier effect: How B2B winners grow , Mckinsey.

Omnichannel marketing is designed to draw customers into completing a specific task. It is like a relay race, where each touchpoint passes the torch to the next, with an aim to deliver an exceptional customer experience at every stage. You put the customer in the driving seat, and their experience in the buying journey will not be the same as another customer. It purely depends on their choices and platforms they choose. As a result, customers derive a better experience that results in:

1. Improved Engagement and Retention

According to research by Aberdeen, organizations using omnichannel strategies achieve a 91% higher year-over-year increase in customer retention rate on average. They also see a 3.4% increase in customer lifetime value.

People stick with brands that make them feel heard and understood. Omnichannel marketing leverages data from various channels to understand customers’ behavior and personalize interactions. As a result, people will come back for more because they feel valued, transforming one-time buyers into loyal advocates.

2. Driving Increased Sales

Apart from making customers happy, an omnichannel strategy is a great sales driver. Relevant product recommendations and targeted promotions increase the likelihood of purchase, leading to a 9.5% year-over-year revenue increase and up to a 7.5% year-over-year decrease in cost per contact.

Bajaj Allianz General Insurance experienced a 60% revenue boost from their renewal business via incorporating an omnichannel automation strategy.

3. A Competitive Edge

Did you know 83% of customers are willing to share their data to enable a personalized experience?

The competition for customer attention is quite fierce, and the one who comes on the top understands customers better and ensures that the marketing efforts aim to provide a more personalized experience.

4. Smarter Spending

Efficient marketing isn’t about creating more content, or identifying new platforms to promote your product; it’s about leveraging your existing resources to create a bigger impact with minimal effort.

Omnichannel marketing helps you make the most out of your marketing budget. It ensures that your tone and messaging are consistent across all platforms and every marketing activity is purposeful and contributes to your overall strategy.

5. Improved Brand Loyalty

Consistency fosters trust. Customers who experience a uniform message and tone across all channels reinforce their trust in your brand. Omnichannel marketing helps maintain this consistency, creating a reliable brand image.

6. Long-Term Growth

Data is indispensable in omnichannel marketing. It helps you develop a long-term strategy, wherein the data you collate across different channels becomes valuable insights for the future. It also gives you a better understanding of your customers, telling you how, when, and where they would like to engage and what messaging resonates the most with them.

For instance, by analyzing data from customer interactions on social media, websites, product apps, in-store purchases, and email campaign performance, you can draw insights from patterns and preferences that can help you plan your marketing campaigns better. It enables you to develop more personalized and relevant experiences so that each touchpoint is engaging and interacts seamlessly with the subsequent touchpoint. This approach will help you refine your strategies continuously, fostering stronger customer relationships and driving long-term success.

Who is Omnichannel Marketing for: Factors to Consider (with examples)

Personalized experience is becoming the new norm in marketing. Given the customer-centricity, it sounds like any business’s need of the hour. That said, omnichannel marketing requires significant investment in integrating the channels regarding money, human resources, and time.

Therefore, it is essential to take a step back and evaluate if you need it, and if you do, what are the prerequisites you should consider, such as:

1. What is the goal of your omnichannel marketing strategy?

2. Do you have all the product data that evaluates the product-market fit?

3. Do you have all the customer data to create an effective omnichannel strategy?

4. Do you have the human resources and tools to help you succeed?

5. Does it align with the goals and priorities of your business at the moment?

6. More importantly, do you have the money to invest in an omnichannel marketing strategy?

There’s no better way to provide the personalization that customers seek except via omnichannel marketing. Depending on the stage of your business and priorities, you can implement omnichannel marketing when you see fit.

Usually, businesses employ omnichannel when they need to:

1. Re-Engage Customers

Many e-commerce providers, such as Nykaa, AJIO, and Myntra, use re-engagement tactics to drive sales during cart abandonment. They send email reminders of abandoned carts, discounts, and promotions on the selected products. They go beyond emails and display relevant ads on social media platforms for their chosen products, reminding customers of the discounted price and encouraging them to complete the shopping.

2. Address New Customer Challenges

Starbucks ‘Phygital’ experience is an excellent example of using an omnichannel strategy to solve customer challenges. Standing in long queues is a deterrent when it comes to brick-and-mortar stores.

Starbucks addresses this by encouraging customers to sign up for the Starbucks reward program, use the app to order their drinks, and know when their order is ready to collect, avoiding the queues altogether. Starbucks further seals this relationship with the app by rewarding them for using it and offering limited-time incentives, encouraging them to return for more.

3. Transition from B2B to B2C Sales

Estée Lauder, a well-known high-end beauty brand, expanded its reach directly to customers through a well-planned omnichannel strategy. The strategy involved developing a unified customer experience, providing personalized recommendations and targeted campaigns, virtual try-on, and loyalty programs that encourage repeat purchases and long-term loyalty.

“If we focus on the client, on the final customer, we always get the right decision made and there are normally win-win for the brands, for our retail partners and for the consumers. That’s what we are looking for. That’s our principle.” – Fabrizio Freda, CEO of global cosmetics retailer  Estée Lauder. (Source)

4. Drive Online Traffic to the Brick-and-Mortar Stores

Through its store events and physical consultations, Sephora effectively drives online traffic to physical stores through its omnichannel strategy. They do this by promoting product launches in-store, prompting users to book physical consultations through the app, buy online pick-up in-store (BOPIS) services, and in-store events and classes. They encourage customers to visit their physical stores, boosting sales both online and offline.

Now that we know what omnichannel marketing entails, let’s understand multichannel marketing.

What is Multichannel Marketing?

Source

As the name suggests, multichannel marketing is a product-centric strategy that uses multiple channels to broadcast brand messaging. These channels work in isolation, intending to meet customers where they are and increase the brand’s reach.

Multichannel marketing can mix traditional media such as TV, radio, print advertisements, and billboards with digital marketing such as online advertisements, social media, pay-per-click, search engine optimization, and so on. In this case, the messaging depends on the employed channels, and they don’t connect with one another.

Example:

A customer views the catalog of the new products in a magazine. They also view ads for the same products in newspapers, social media, and television. They further notice a promotional banner for these products on their website and soon after receive an email with a discount for these products. In this case, each channel operates independently, without integrating customer experience across these channels.

Benefits of Multichannel Marketing: Why Should You Use It?

Multichannel marketing aims to increase the number of touchpoints between the brand and the customer. As a result, you must be at all places where your target audience is present.

Unlike omnichannel marketing, the customer experience and buyer journey in multichannel marketing are the same for all shoppers. Some of the benefits of using multichannel marketing include:

1. Casting a Wider Net

It is beneficial when you have a broader spectrum of target audiences. Different customer segments prefer different platforms. By utilizing multiple channels, you can effectively reach a wider audience, improving your chances of engaging them.

2. Improving Brand Recall

According to the rule of 7 in marketing, it takes an average of seven messages to a customer before they make a purchase. When customers see your brand advertisement in multiple places regularly, they are more likely to recall your brand. So, the more channels, the better.

3. Diversifying Risks

You are no longer putting all the eggs in one basket. As a result, even if one channel falters, the others would continue to perform, ensuring that the business continues to reach customers.

4. Enhanced Customer Experience and Engagement

By being available on multiple channels, customers have the flexibility to interact with the brand on a channel of their choice, improving the brand’s engagement and overall customer experience.

5. Insight into Customer Preference and Behaviour

Multichannel marketing enables you to experiment with different channels and see which works best. In other words, it delves into customer preferences and helps you refine your subsequent marketing strategies.

6. Improves the Success Rate of Your Campaign

The idea behind multichannel marketing is to experiment with different channels to see which one works best. So, even if one channel fails to meet expectations, the other one can bring in the results you expected, improving the campaign’s overall success.

Things to Keep in Mind Before Implementing Multichannel Marketing (with example)

When marketing a new product, improving product awareness by reaching as many customers as possible is necessary. Multichannel marketing offers a broad reach and the flexibility to target diverse audiences. However, it’s essential to evaluate whether your business is ready for this approach and consider the following:

1. What is the goal of your marketing strategy?
2. Do you have a diverse customer base?
3. Can your team manage multiple platforms effectively?
4. Do you have the budget to invest in varied marketing channels?
5. Does your product/service benefit from exposure across different channels?

For instance, Apple has excelled in promoting its hardware through various channels. While most products use retail stores primarily for sales, Apple uses them as another platform for people to learn about their products without any pressure to purchase, complementing their online stores.

Additionally, Apple created exclusive channels for Apple ID users, such as Apple TV+, Apple Music, and Apple News, promoting their products and generating additional income. Award-winning shows like Ted Lasso and Black Bird attract significant attention, sparking customer interest and encouraging them to experience the Apple ecosystem.

Omnichannel vs Multichannel Marketing: What Sets Them Apart from each other?

While omnichannel views all channels as an integrated entity, multichannel views the channels independently, working towards a common goal. While both focus on driving sales, they differ in terms of customer experience.

Omnichannel vs. Multichannel Marketing: The Power of the Right Technology

Technological advancements such as integrating Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems and Customer Engagement Platforms (CDP) have made cohesiveness possible, which is the foundation of omnichannel marketing. In fact, there are more benefits to it than meets the eye, such as:

1. It provides a comprehensive view of customer interactions, enabling you to personalize customer experiences while maintaining consistency.

2. It helps you understand customer behavior and preferences and refine your marketing strategies, thanks to the advanced data analytics tools that collect and analyze customer data.

3. It enriches your omnichannel efforts by predicting customer needs and automating marketing campaigns with AI and machine learning advancements.

4. It integrates online and offline touchpoints with tools like virtual try-ons, mobile apps, and in-store digital tools, helping you provide a tailor-made experience for your customers.

Similarly, a customer engagement platform significantly enhances the efficiency of the multichannel approach:

1. It enables you to engage with customers across various platforms simultaneously.

2. It streamlines campaigns across multiple channels using marketing automation tools, ensuring consistent and timely messaging while tracking performance and optimizing your campaign for better results.

3. It enhances your content for different channels with AI tools, improving engagement and conversion rates.

4. It optimizes content and automates repetitive tasks, providing insights into customer behavior across different channels, making your marketing efforts more productive and effective.

Omnichannel and Multichannel Marketing: Which one should you choose?

Multichannel marketing might be a good option if you lack the resources for a full-fledged omnichannel marketing approach. Each channel can operate independently, which makes it easy to manage operations without much coordination. The main advantage of multichannel marketing is that it enables a company to expand its reach without integrating the channels. You can effectively use various customer segments and compare performance across channels to identify the best fit. Scaling such an operation still requires a robust tech infrastructure and tools.

However, suppose you are looking for an engaging, large-scale strategy, like holiday sales. In such a case, you must send a unified message across different platforms, making omnichannel an effective and promising alternative.

Omnichannel works best to provide a more cohesive and personalized experience. It combines all the touchpoints, providing a consistent experience to the customer from the moment they interact with the brand until purchase and even after. It is resource-heavy, but the benefits are worth every penny – smoother customer experience, higher customer retention rates, better sales, and increased brand loyalty.

Even small enterprises and e-commerce brands can implement omnichannel successfully with careful planning and appropriate tools. Before you get started with omnichannel marketing, ensure you have a solid strategy and the right marketing tools that support integration across channels. This investment in creating a connected experience can turn one-time buyers into loyal, returning customers.