Omni-channel customer experience: retaining and engaging your audience

Emails, push notifications, mobile apps… Marketing professionals have many channels at the tip of their fingers to reach customers. But that doesn’t mean you should view the user experience in isolation. Instead, choose an omni-channel customer experience to retain and engage your audience, that way, users won’t feel frustrated, and your sales will increase.

How do multi-channel and omni-channel strategies differ?

Multi-channel marketing: a silo strategy

While brands have deployed the multi-channel strategy (also known as silo marketing) for a long time, and the practice is still widespread, it is not particularly effective nowadays. A multi-channel approach entails using different channels separately, not in a coordinated manner. It means you can’t maximise the quality of customer engagement, which can leave users feeling frustrated and result in a potential loss of revenue

Cross-channel marketing: the successor to multi-channel marketing

A cross-channel strategy builds on multi-channel marketing. It’s about having a distribution channel where all channels are used in a complementary manner throughout the customer journey.

Omni-channel marketing: for greater consistency and flexibility

An omni-channel strategy goes further than multi-channel and cross-channel marketing as it is omnipresent and simultaneous. For example, a customer can use their phone while being physically in a store.

It is a marketing approach that uses several physical or digital channels in a complementary manner to create a coherent, unified experience for your customers.

Marketing professionals can therefore take advantage of all their physical or digital distribution channels:

• Online marketing,
• Mobile advertising,
• Social media,
• Email,
• Telephone,
• Physical points of sale, and so on.

The aim is to streamline the customer experience and create strong ties between brands and customers for guaranteed retention and visibility.

Your customers will thank you With this strategy, customers will benefit from a true omni-channel journey. For example, they can:

• Request extra information via social media,
• Purchase items on the website,
• Monitor the progress of their orders directly via their phones,
• Collect the product from a store.

What are the advantages of an omni-channel strategy?

An omni-channel strategy is probably the best suited to boost the return on investment (ROI) for your marketing. In practice, there are several advantages. You can:

• Offer the consistent, personalised customer experience that customers very much expect.
• Centralise all your data and further your customer knowledge: this is interesting as you can refine and improve your marketing strategy as you interact.
• Reach more potential customers by using different channels.
• Improve the customer experience and satisfaction, and reinforce customer loyalty: an enjoyable customer experience equals greater customer retention.
  

An omni-channel strategy can create a strong synergy between the channels used, ideal for boosting customer engagement. Now it’s over to you!

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