As consumers continue to engage with brands via more channels than ever, savvy marketers must shift their attention from website optimisation to holistic omnichannel optimisation to drive conversions.
Traditional marketing is guided by the 'Rule of seven', which states that it takes an average of seven interactions with your brand before a customer makes a purchase. This rule still holds true, but those interactions are now spread far and wide.
In today's world, consumers can interact with brands via innumerable touchpoints along their journey, from physical stores and pop-up retail experiences to websites, apps, chatbots, and social media. Simply optimising your website to attract and manage these interactions means that you're missing the big picture.
Without an omnichannel view, you're flying blind. It's also impossible to improve upon the user experience if you don't fully understand all the moments that customers go through as part of their brand experience.
These various touchpoints mark the critical moments when potential customers are making up their minds as to whether they want to purchase from your brand. To successfully influence these visitors and convert them into paying customers, brands need to be present to deliver a superior experience in ways that meet the customer's individual needs.
Adopting a customer-centric, omnichannel marketing strategy ensures consumers have a positive, interconnected, and frictionless experience at every touchpoint. Resolution Digital’s Evolution framework is an umbrella for various customer experience (CX) and transformation methodologies. The framework encompasses 3 different stages: Evaluate, Discovery, Strategy, and Delivery to guide the process of enhancing customer experiences and achieving strategic business goals.
A well-considered omnichannel strategy lays the groundwork for success; more revenue for sales teams and a better customer experience all round. The consistency of interactions builds a more recognisable and identifiable brand image and tone, which enhances brand visibility and reputation.
At Resolution Digital, our Evolution framework brings together all services within the Resolution environment to assess, align and provide tailored, personalised, omnichannel solutions to drive meaningful business growth.
These insights were then applied locally when we teamed up with Target Australia. We rolled out omnichannel optimisation tests across various channels and audiences, which we aligned with audience needs and values. This approach translated into increased awareness and brand loyalty, plus an uplift of 60% in users to seasonal content and 950k newsletter submissions on the website during the campaign period.
Successfully aligned with audience needs and values, this approach translates into increased awareness and brand loyalty.
Omnichannel optimisation also unlocks deeper audience understanding through more in depth user insights and data analytics.
Tracking engagements across all channels delivers a holistic view of how customers are digesting your brand. From here it's much easier to see what they like and don't like about the brand, which can underpin your personalisation efforts and allow wider improvements to be made to the offering – as well as where, when, and how it is offered.
Resolution Digital's State of Martech Report
This is where the role of first-party data becomes critical, as we say farewell to third-party cookies.
First-party data provides credible, first-hand insights into which customers are most likely to convert, along with their needs and wants. Resolution Digital’s State of MarTech report highlighted that 35% of Australian marketers had not yet implemented a first-party data strategy. This is interesting as not only is this information crucial in optimising your omnichannel strategy, but it also allows a brand to tailor the user journey and deliver content that is relevant.
This deeper understanding of the touchpoints that drive the most engagement enables marketing campaigns to be more targeted and messaging to become more refined, to deliver a higher quality of outcomes. The result is increased conversion rates and return on investment to ensure you get more bang for your marketing buck.
As with Target’s experience, research has shown that customers who engage with multiple touchpoints have a higher rate of conversion, brand loyalty and repeat purchase, ultimately delivering increased revenue for the business.
Brands which fail to embrace omnichannel optimisation will pay a high price; consumers now have more options and expect more from brands than ever before. 59% of customers would buy from a competitor which offers a better user experience, according to Digizuite.
If you are not making the most of omnichannel optimisation to reach your audience at the time and place that suits them, you are leaving money on the table by missing a valuable opportunity to engage them and make a sale. Worse yet, you're leaving the door open for your omnichannel-savvy competitors to swoop in, hijack the conversation and steal away that business.
Achieving an Omnichannel strategy and implementation is no easy feat.
The CRO experimentation matrix is a good starting point to have a clear view of the different vendors across the complex landscape to choose from.
Originally featured in Mediaweek
