Omnichannel marketing campaigns provide brands with seemingly limitless possibilities for how they can reach customers. While uniqueness is often is a sign of a good campaign, it is but one of many tenets that all omnichannel campaigns should follow. We’ve listed five of these major tenets here.
Integrated Technologies and Data
The prime directive of omnichannel marketing is a single, unified view of the customer. This is impossible to achieve without proper integration of your customers’ data. More than likely, this data will be collected and stored across different technologies, so marketers must ensure that these disparate systems seamlessly communicate with each other.
Mobile Always
Not mobile first, which implies it is the first consideration of equally important platforms. Mobile must drive strategy today, even though the purchase journey may originate on desktop. People are not carrying their desktops around in the store, and they’re not snapping pictures with their laptops. Everything must be designed and considered for the phone.
A Clear User Flow
The more opportunities you provide customers to customize their experiences, the more complexity you inherit. What happens when a customer wants to order through your website while in store? How does a tourist return an item that they bought at home? Global problems requires smart, holistic thinking.
Security and Worst-Case Scenario Planning
Gone are the days where retailers had to worry just about bad weather and electrical outages. Our interconnected world provides ample opportunities for disruption through bad actors or calamities. It’s important for marketers to plan for these scenarios so that they can communicate with their customers quickly and offer solutions in their time of need. They need to make sure that everyone across of the organization knows the plan and has a clear understanding of his or her role. If marketers don’t plan for these scenarios in advance, then they’ll be left scrambling to come up with answers once a crisis actually occurs, which can result in mixed messaging, increased customer dissatisfaction, and a slower progression to a solution.
Well-Established Pre-and Post-Campaign Analytics
Just because marketers can do something that doesn’t mean that they should. Before launching a campaign or implementing a new solution, marketers need to outline their goals and understand why they want to pursue a project in the first place. They also need to define what success looks like and set clear KPIs to help them identify whether they’re meeting their objectives. Once these prerequisites are completed, marketers need to analyze their work. Doing so will help them pinpoint what they’re doing right versus what they’re doing wrong and adjust accordingly. Using the analysis to take away actionable insights is key. Of course, marketers need to ensure that they’re seeing the data for what it is and not just shaping it into what they want it to be.
