What is omnichannel marketing? Definition, examples, and tips

Whether you’re walking into a store or swiping on a mobile app, shopping is a unique experience for everyone. Think about the last time you made a purchase—what sparked it? Did you see a commercial? Receive an email? Walk past a display in the mall? Whether you notice or not, marketing is part of everything you do. Every brand interaction along your path to purchase plays a role in your decision to ultimately buy an item. So how can brands ensure they reach shoppers at each stage?

The answer is an omnichannel strategy. An omnichannel marketing strategy can help you seamlessly integrate all your channels and make your numerous marketing tactics work together effectively and efficiently. By understanding how your customers shop, you can take a customer-centric approach to connecting with audiences on different channels as they’re moving towards a purchase. With even more technology-enabled touchpoints and unique shopping experience opportunities, consumers expect more from brands. That’s why it’s critical to integrate every single one of your brands’ channels into your omnichannel strategy.

Before we go any further, let’s break down what that really means.

In marketing, omnichannel refers to a customer-centric approach that integrates all channels, delivering a unified and consistent brand experience across physical stores, apps, and websites. It ensures customers can seamlessly interact with the brand across different platforms, enhancing their overall brand experience.

“Omnichannel strategy” refers to a brand’s holistic approach to every customer touchpoint across channels. With omnichannel strategies, brands strive to give customers a consistent, cohesive experience across both digital and brick-and-mortar touchpoints. By approaching every channel as part of a single brand experience, all the pieces work together to reach audiences across the customer journey.

In addition, an omnichannel strategy encompasses the entire customer journey, from brand discovery at the beginning of the marketing funnel, all the way through to purchase, customer loyalty, and beyond. A good omnichannel strategy makes the buying journey smooth and frictionless because audiences are having the same experience with your brand, across channels.

While omnichannel and multichannel sound similar, it’s important to understand the key differences to ensure you’re implementing the right strategies for your brand. Multichannel is more of an umbrella term to include any strategy that involves more than one channel. Omnichannel, on the other hand, goes a step further to include or account for every single channel—it’s all-encompassing. Let’s dive into a few key differences that this distinction creates.

First, omnichannel experiences are a bit more complex and nonlinear. They match the nonlinear nature of most modern customer journeys. Multichannel strategies are more straightforward—they create an unswerving line between channels.

Next, while an omnichannel approach can act as an entire business model, multichannel is more operational. Consequently, a multichannel approach may lack back-end system integration - one channel can’t transfer information about audience engagement to another channel. For example, channels in omnichannel strategies can make live updates, such as sending an email reminder of items a customer showed interest in on their website, to enable more useful and relevant customer experience across these channels. A multichannel approach doesn’t allow for this type of seamless experience.

As customers engage with a brand on different channels, an omnichannel strategy gets smarter. Multichannel is static, but omnichannel is fluid. Similarly, omnichannel strategies tend to focus more on customers, while multichannel often puts the brand at the center.

Learn more about the differences between omnichannel and multichannel.

Advertising technology is advancing and consumer behaviors are shifting, so your marketing needs to adjust accordingly. Creating an integrated omnichannel strategy can help you tailor unique messages for your audiences, no matter where they encounter your brand. An omnichannel strategy can also help ensure that your brand presence and messaging is consistent across all your marketing channels.

In addition, omnichannel is important because consistent interactions can lead to better customer experiences. And better customer experiences—combined with more engagement opportunities across channels—can result in more conversions.

Third, omnichannel gives your brand the opportunity to reach the right customers at the right time. This enhanced outreach can lead to more optimized media spending and, as a result, increased return on investment (ROI).

Understanding the importance of this approach, let’s explore how you can create your strategy.

Creating an omnichannel customer experience requires a solid foundation and integrated approach. Your channels must work together collaboratively to drive the best experience for your customers. There are five key steps to building your approach: insights collection, analysis, segmentation, logistical consideration development, and optimization.

Remember, omnichannel takes every single channel into consideration—that includes both in-store and online touchpoints. Let’s take a look at some examples of omnichannel marketing to make sure you don’t miss one while building out your strategy.

Now that you’re more familiar with omnichannel overall, it’s important to consider a few key trends:

Customers engage with your brand across channels every day— your brand can enhance those connections through an omnichannel strategy. Omnichannel marketing strategies are critical parts of your business plan, and they’re essential to the long-term growth of your business. Now that you understand the definition, the importance, and the key differences between omnichannel versus multichannel strategies, it’s time to make that knowledge actionable. Get started with your strategy with help from Amazon Ads.