Omni-Channel Marketing: Boosting Your Conversions
Monitoring overall marketing efforts is never easy. There are numerous analytics to read into, and it’s difficult to know what data to prioritise. But whatever your priorities are, conversions rates are the most important when you’re looking at the overall performance of a marketing campaign.
This is all well and good, but we’re now in an age where consumers have all the power. They no longer listen to polished marketing messages and, instead, are more in control of their own customer journey than ever before.
Which is why promoting information, campaigns, and products across a number of different channels is so important. Consumers hang out in different places and, if you want to reach a wider audience, you need to reach out to them where they feel most comfortable. This is where multi-channel marketing comes in.
Today, businesses have to make it as easy as possible for customers to buy from them so the customer doesn’t hop over to a competitor. But, in order to do that, they have to make themselves visible on different channels so they have a higher chance of converting.
Consumers are very happy with this. In fact, 72% of them say they would rather connect with brands through multiple channels.
How to Boost Conversions
Multi-channel marketing isn’t just a way to reach a wider audience, it has also been proven to boost conversions.
1. Create Multiple Touchpoints to Guide Consumers to the Sale
Firstly, studies have shown than it takes between six and eight touches with a brand before a customer commits to buying from them.
If you’re covering a number of platforms as opposed to just one or two, you’re more likely to hit each of these touches quicker and in the right way.
When a consumer is exposed to a brand multiple times, they are more likely to purchase from said brand because they feel like they know them.
People who saw messaging across more than one channel were more likely to buy.
How to Create Multiple Touchpoints
Today, 40% of adults online start a customer journey on one connected device and finish it on another.
Purchasing is no longer a linear route, but it means as a business you need to account for the fact that potential buyers might be coming at your brand from all different angles.
Here’s how you can create an effective multichannel marketing campaign with numerous touchpoints.
• Identify customer touchpoints
First of all, map out where your customers usually buy from and how they find you. This could be your website, social media channels like Facebook and Instagram, via billboards, or any other form of marketing you run.
Then consider the five different stages of the customer buying cycle:
– Awareness – Discovery – Purchase – Using the product or service – Customer retention after purchase
Where do each of the channels you’ve identified as the most popular fit into these categories? For example, do customers tend to find out about you via Facebook ads in the awareness stage, but make the decision to buy on your website?
• Choose the most effective channels
Scattering your campaigns across too many channels can be detrimental. Instead, it’s best to choose one or two channels for each stage of the customer journey
• Creative a cohesive campaign
Each channel you choose will require a different sort of activity, but that doesn’t mean you should run different campaigns to each of those platforms. Rather, you want to create an umbrella campaign that encompasses all your chosen touchpoints and creates a cohesive path to the sale.
Take the example from the image above, where there was a series of Facebook ads run to an email list as well as an email marketing portion of the campaign. These two channels working together generated more sales than if they were running separate campaigns.
2. Streamline Your Strategy to Align With Consumer’s Needs
This doesn’t mean you need to be on every channel, though. Instead, you need to have several channels working together, making it easy for customers to move from one to another.
When they’re exposed to your brand on their favourite channel, that’s when they’ll click the “buy” button. This works with other forms of conversions, too.
How to Streamline Your Strategy
Say, for example, that “getting in touch” is a call-to-action you want consumers to take. You want to make sure that there’s always an alternative route in case they don’t like the only option you provide.
In that instance, you want to offer them a live chat route, as well as a phone number and an email address so they can choose the option that best suits them.
Streamlining your strategy also means making it easy for consumers to switch between channels to one that suits them better at that moment in time.
3. Hang Out With Your Potential Customers for a 500% Increase in ROI
Broadcasting your brand across multiple different channels means you’re putting yourself in front of more people – consumers who use Facebook might not use Twitter and vice versa, so you’re essentially exposing yourself to a larger network with multi-channel marketing.
But hanging out with consumers where they like to hang out is only the beginning.
You also want to make sure you’re providing them with content and touchpoints that are in a medium they like to devour.
According to research, brands that use a mixture of display, mobile, social, and video marketing simultaneously achieve up to 500% improvement in ROI from their advertising efforts.
How to Hang Out with Potential Customers
Here, you want to create a conversation with your potential customers and build relationships with them to find out where they like to hang out and what types of medium they prefer to consume.
Talk to previous customers, analyze data from your website about who has been visiting and where they have been directed from, and don’t be afraid to ask for feedback.
When creating a multi-channel marketing campaign, don’t feel obliged to stick to one medium across all channels. Figure out what content performs best on certain platforms and who hangs out where, and incorporate that into your plan. For example:
• 60% of Snapchat’s userbase is under 25 • Twitter is great for providing real-time customer service • Whitepapers and cases studies perform best on LinkedIn
Once you know the top channels your audience are hanging out on and what content they like to consumer on those channels, you can create multi-channel marketing campaigns that revolve around them.
4. Reach the Right People at the Right Time to Boost Sales by 27%
Because consumers are more in control of their spending than ever before, it’s almost impossible for brands to push purchases on them. Instead, the consumer needs to feel like they’re making the decision, which is why it’s important to be there for them at the right time.
Let’s talk for a moment about personalisation.
Getting personal has become a huge marketing tactic in the eCommerce world in recent years. Think about Amazon, who personalizes their suggestions to specific customers based on previous purchases.
Or take a look at retargeting, where brands can re-advertise products a consumer has shown interest in on their social feeds.
Giving people what they want, when they want it is a huge part of why multi-channel marketing is so successful, and marketers who are personalizing the consumer web experience see, on average, a 19% uplift in sales.
The thing is, multichannel marketing focuses on the whole sales funnel.
These days, the customer journey is fragmented, jumping around between devices and channels, so creating a fluid path that deviates between a number of different platforms acts as a thread to keep the journey from breaking up completely.
But there are hard numbers to go with that, too. Marketers that use personalization in their approach see conversions increase by more than 27%.
How to Reach the Right People at the Right Time
We spoke earlier about the customer journey and the different phases of the buying cycle. This forms the basis of your multi-channel marketing campaign, and from there you can:
• Decide how invested the customer is at each stage of the cycle and personalize each step for their level of investment • Create content for different channels that target each stage of the cycle (e.g. social media and blog content for awareness, case study videos for the consideration stage, and an email marketing campaign for customer retention)
5. Implement Mobile Marketing to Reach Engaged, Local Buyers
It’s safe to say the mobile revolution is upon us, with the majority of shoppers choosing to make their purchases via apps on their smartphones rather than in-store and on desktop.
According to research, consumers exposed to multiple channels spend 3-4x more on purchases than single-channel customers and, perhaps even more telling than that, nine out of ten mobile searches lead to an action.
The best part about multichannel marketing on mobile is you can integrate personalization and engagement with potential customers wherever they are, because most people have their smartphones on them when they’re on the go.
Now more than ever, consumers are using mobile to make purchases, with eCommerce revenue accrued via mobile purchases projected to rocket in the next few years.
How to Implement Mobile Marketing
Location is such a huge part of mobile marketing, simply because consumers tend to have their phones on them at all times which act as a less creepy tracking device.
With this knowledge, you can target people who are in the vicinity of your stores, or send out specific campaigns to people who live in certain locations.
With Wi-Fi hotspots and hyperlocal technologies, you can tap into the idea that consumers are always “switched on” and run geo-targeted campaigns that really do let you serve the right content at the right time to the right people.
Geo-targeted campaigns perform better than non-geo-targeted campaigns across the board.
As mobile continues to take precedence as the top device for consumers to buy on, we can expect multichannel marketing to continue to boost conversions.
It’s a brand’s job to go out and reach consumers where they’re hanging out, and multichannel marketing lets you do exactly this. When consumers feel comfortable with the platform they’re on, they’re more likely to feel a connection with the brand and, therefore, buy from them.
Soon, we can expect an increase in personalization for multichannel marketing, where people’s smartphones become the central hub for reaching them, whether it’s via their favorite app or by push notifications when they’re in the right place at the right time. With so much evidence pointing towards multichannel marketing as the way forward, it’s important for brands to start integrating their consumer’s favorite channels to create a fluid experience that funnels them through the different stages of the customer journey.