5 minute read
Are you Really Delivering an Omnichannel Experience?
A recent PwC report found that the number of businesses investing in omnichannel has risen from 20% to more than 80% in 2 years. This intention to be omnichannel aligns with consumer requirements, with 90% expecting a consistent Customer Experience (CX) across all channels.
Depending on the maturity of their strategy, most marketers are executing a multichannel or cross-channel, rather than omni-channel, approach to customer engagement.
Given businesses with the highest omnichannel customer engagement are seeing, on average, 89% customer retention, compared to 33% for companies whose engagement game is weak, it’s worth us examining the differences between the three.
Only 13% feel businesses are actually delivering effective omnichannel engagement.
Multichannel
If you’re executing your marketing strategy across many channels, but the customer experiences them in silos, with disparate messaging and no centralised data analytics capabilities, then you are taking a multi-channel approach. This is company-centric and provides a fragmented CX, which today’s consumers find outdated and frustrating.
Omnichannel
Omnichannel takes a customer-centric approach. It harnesses the power of connecting the channels your target markets prefer to use. Consumers love the speed and flexibility of a transparent and uninterrupted journey, even if they switch device mid-transaction.
The personalisation, empathy and intimacy of true omnichannel marketing promotes loyalty and increases customer lifetime value (CLV).
Cross-channel
If you’re using multiple channels but only connecting and delivering an integrated and unbroken customer experience with consistent messaging across some of them, some of the time, then yours is a crosschannel strategy. This provides consistent engagement but doesn’t enable personalisation and the CX is disconnected.
Top Tips for Omnichannel Success
Deploy a solution that centralises and integrates the collection, aggregation, and analysis of real time consumer demographic, psychographic, behaviour and preference data, like a Customer Data Platform.
Properly map the customer journeys of all your Ideal Customer Profiles (ICP) across every channel and touchpoint.
Segment your list and communicate with customers in real time on the channels they prefer according to your data.
Split test and experiment with your channels, campaigns and messaging regularly for continuous improvement
Simplify, integrate and centralise your technology stack to optimise efficiency.
Optimise automation for speed and scalability eliminating reliance on slow, error prone manual processes.
Invest in AI and ML to go beyond segmentation, predict customer needs, adapt fast at scale, and deliver hyperpersonalisation.
Choosing Your Marketing
If you are one of the 73% of businesses that’s not yet fully datadriven, or you’re a start-up with no historical engagement, conversion, and revenue data then you’re probably wondering how to choose the right marketing channels.
SMS
Whilst SMS has a cost for consumers and engagement and is restricted by a 160 character limit, it has great reach and 91% of consumers say they would opt into brand communication via this channel. It is a great automatic fallback if your WhatsApp or Viber message hasn’t been seen by a customer.
80% of all active mobile users in the UK use WhatsApp, it has 2 billion active users worldwide and it’s used to send 100 billion global messages per day. Consumers love that it’s free and secure, and they can receive and send texts, emojis, audio and video. Brands as diverse as Agent Provocateur (for personal shopping) and KLM (for flight updates) engage with customers via WhatsApp. It’s also fast becoming a preferred platform for more intimate influencer marketing.
Mobile
In the second quarter of 2022, mobile devices (excluding tablets) generated 58.99% of global website traffic and this figure is set to rise by 25% by 2025. Gartner predicts that by then, 80% of customer service organizations will have abandoned native mobile apps in favour of mobile messaging by IM and SMS. So, we advise a mobile first approach.
Viber
Viber Business Messages are a great addition to your omnichannel strategy. It has 1.169 billion users in 193 countries, a 97% delivery rate and more than 8,500 brands rely on Viber Business Messaging Solutions worldwide. It’s a great choice to reach consumers in Ukraine, Vietnam, The Philippines, Myanmar, Iraq, Belarus, Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, Montenegro and Africa. It’s also free for consumers to use and has end-to end encryption and account verification like WhatsApp. In addition to multi-media transactional, promotional and conversational messaging, you can create Viber chatbots and promote your Viber Community with desktop and post-call ads, ad banners and Viber stickers.
It’s true that people’s inboxes are saturated but the vast majority of people have personal and business email addresses and a properly segmented list with highly personalised email content can lead to a 760% increase in email revenue, so it should certainly be part of your omnichannel approach.
It’s true that people’s inboxes are saturated but the vast majority of people have personal and business email addresses and a properly segmented list with highly personalised email content can lead to a 760% increase in email revenue, so it should certainly be part of your omnichannel approach.
Conversational AI Chatbots
Chatbots provide instant responses and solutions for a great CX. They are extremely versatile, way beyond the obvious customer service use case. You can use them to share optins for email and mobile marketing. They can be programmed to promote, upsell and cross-sell products and services. Chatbot features like surveys and polls enable vital consumer data collection. They can help save 30% in operational costs, freeing employees for more innovative work and improving customer engagement with customised and humanised conversations.
CPaaS
Management and integration of these channels can be centralised with a Communication Platform as a Service (CPaaS), enabling seamless contextualisation across the customer journey. So, a customer may use a chatbot to schedule a call with a human customer success agent, then receive an automatic reminder by both email and their preferred messaging service like WhatsApp, where the call can also take place. Gartner predicts that 95% of businesses will be using API-enabled CPaaS by 2025 and Juniper Research estimates CPaaS will generate more than $34 billion in sales by 2026, so it’s worth exploring for omnichannel execution.
If you’re looking to effectively engage your customers across channels, GMS solutions can help. Feel free to contact us at info@gms-worldwide.com.
