Multichannel vs. Omnichannel Marketing and Keeping up with a Customer Journey |

What is multichannel marketing? Broadly defined as interacting with customers via multiple direct and indirect channels in order to sell them goods and services, multichannel marketing is about engaging with customers in their channel of choice.

Global multi-channel marketing solutions make all channels available to the consumer (in-store, web, mobile, social, phone) for the purposes of engaging with a brand. Marketers have traditionally pursued a multichannel marketing approach for several reasons:

It’s cost-effective: If an organization knows that a customer prefers to engage on the mobile app, it makes sense to devote resources to market to that customer on that channel and, conversely, to avoid spending marketing dollars on a channel the customer avoids.
It’s personalized (to an extent….): A multichannel marketing approach that engages with a customer on their channel of choice checks off the box for high-level personalization because it’s not technically a “one size fits all” approach. The brand is making a concerted effort to take the customer’s personal preferences into account. We’ll contrast this with more advanced personalization techniques later in the blog.
It expands brand awareness: A CPG company that relies solely on its retail partners or in-store promotions to expose customers and prospects to the product closes off a slew of opportunities to engage with customers via digital channels.
It humanizes a brand: A multichannel marketing approach provides opportunity for a brand to solidify its message and craft a narrative about its corporate values. With a presence on social channels, for example, a brand can more easily tout its sustainability programs or eco-friendly initiatives.

Global Multi-Channel Marketing Solutions Requirements

To achieve the above outcomes, the most important shared requirement is that a marketer know something about the customer. More specifically, it requires knowing a customer’s channel preferences and frequency, purchases and behaviors – at a starting point. If, for example, a customer visits the (fictional!) Wellesley Outfitters website and browses the landing page for mountain bikes, it behooves Wellesley Outfitters to know not only that the customer prefers to shop online to be ready with content when the customer appears, but also to know the customer’s transaction history and preferences. Presenting the right content (color, size, brand, etc.) or offer (free tune-up, accessory discount, local trail maps) depends on having a single customer view, which is the key to providing each interaction with relevance and context.

A customer data platform (CDP) facilitates a multichannel marketing strategy by ingesting data from all sources, retaining full detail of all ingested data, storing ingested data indefinitely, converting the data into unified customer profiles and making those profiles available to all external systems. Multichannel marketers cite a single customer view, improved predictive modeling and recommendations, and improved message selection and personalization as among the core CDP benefits.

Multichannel Marketing Limitations

The need for a single customer view to engage with today’s always-on, connected consumer across an omnichannel journey highlights one limitation of multichannel marketing; the purpose of developing a single customer view is to understand how a customer interacts with a brand across all channels, not on a channel-by-channel basis. Customer journeys are dynamic and becoming more digitally focused with customers engaging in multiple channels, on multiple devices. The key limitation to multichannel marketing is that it cannot match the dynamic nature of today’s customer journeys; it kneecaps itself, in other words, by focusing on a one channel/one customer approach.

Consider the customer browsing mountain bikes at Wellesley Outfitters. The customer’s experience is enhanced when the company presents content or offers that are relevant to the customer’s journey, which will often extend beyond that one channel. But in a multichannel marketing approach, despite all the channels being available to the customer, the channels themselves are not integrated. If the mountain biker leaves the website but then goes to the mobile app, with a multichannel marketing approach Wellesley Outfitters may consider the app experience as a separate interaction. The reality, of course, is that as far as the customer is concerned it is all part of one holistic engagement with a brand.

A lack of channel integration hampers personalization efforts for the same reason. Without real-time insight into how a customer is moving through various channels, brands lose the relevance and context required to delight customers with a personalized CX optimized for each interaction. If personalization stops at engaging with a customer in the channel of their choosing, minimal benefits are easily outweighed by introducing friction into the customer experience by providing a customer with an irrelevant experience that ignores the entire, holistic customer journey.

Mutlichannel vs. Omnichannel Marketing

While a CDP can certainly support a multichannel marketing strategy, the technology is more suited to support omnichannel marketing, which integrates channels and eliminates data siloes and data latency to enable an organization to move at the pace of the customer throughout a dynamic, non-linear customer journey.

An omnichannel approach connects a customer’s digital and traditional experiences, which increases customer satisfaction and lifetime value. Research from IDC shows that omnichannel shoppers have a 30 percent higher lifetime value than customers who use a single channel. And an Aberdeen Group survey shows that companies with an extremely strong omnichannel customer engagement have an 83 percent customer retention rating compared to 53 percent for companies with weak omnichannel customer engagement.

Omnichannel marketing more accurately reflects the way today’s consumers engage with brands across both physical and digital channels and online and offline touchpoints. The strategy enables a personalized, relevant experience that is always in the cadence of the customer journey wherever a customer chooses to engage.

For more on the Redpoint omnichannel approach that puts customers in charge, and puts you in control, click here.

Editor’s Note: A follow-up blog post will examine omnichannel personalization in more detail, including exploring how real-time customer engagement that is consistent across all enterprise touchpoints leads to outsized revenue gains.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do Digital Advertising & Acquisition solutions improve the customer journey?

Redpoint’s Digital Advertising & Acquisition solutions enable companies to optimize their ad campaign targeting and media spend and improve overall workflow efficiencies. This enables companies to manage all their customer and prospect data – as well as information purchased from data providers – in a single environment which, in turn, can be used to orchestrate advanced customer journeys that include digital advertising campaigns.

Why are Data Quality and Integration critical for having a single view of the customer?

At its core, this is a ‘garbage in, garbage out’ question. By automatically – and accurately – bringing all of your customer data together into a data platform you will realize several benefits:

Easily Access All Data Sources and Types: Redpoint easily unifies customer data from all sources, in any format, without coding. Integrate it all: first-, second-, and third-party sources; structured and unstructured; active; and dark data to get a complete and precise view of every customer.
Integrate Complete and Accurate Data at Unbeatable Speed: you can leverage Redpoint to automate data quality with zero latency, so you make the best decisions that enable you to deliver a more relevant customer experience.
Integrated Analytics: feed your analytics systems with data from all environments across the organization using data-preparation technology that economically scales with your business to deliver accurate insights at the speed of business.
Data Stewardship: create highly accurate, comprehensive data profiles, including streaming digital behavior and IoT (Internet of Things) data, to drive the highest quality interactions with customers.
Accurate master customer data: using advanced matching algorithms to resolve identities, our industry-leading data quality delivers precise, automated master customer data.

What are the benefits of a Single Customer View?

Know all That’s Knowable About the Customer: personalize engagement with meaningful, reliable data from multiple systems into a single view of the customer – a Golden Record – that’s more accurate, more complete and more contextual than the data from any single source.
Customer Profile View: a web user interface that displays key data such as personally identifiable information, demographic and behavioral information, and metrics like web visits, transaction history, customer lifetime value and more.
Clienteling: the Single View of the Customer is a dynamic view—as customer preferences and transaction history change, the record changes as well. View previous campaigns and drill into content to view offers and treatments and gain insights into how to take the next best action with product recommendations.
Improve Customer Lifetime Value and Revenue: know what the customer wants through an always on and always updating Golden Record that gives product recommendations that align with customer expectations.
Increased Personalization: gather a precise customer view that gives you the information to have meaningful conversations with your customers, reducing frustration and friction, and providing a clienteling experience that complements omnichannel customer journeys.
Reduced cost and improved profitability: maximize ROI for your best customers by understanding and optimizing their journey with up-to-date and accurate information.”

What is Omnichannel Personalization?

Omnichannel personalization is the customization of customer experiences, informed with real-time data, no matter what channel or touchpoint customers interact. The customer wants to be recognized by a brand or organization as the same customer across all channels and devices. This is only achievable in an omnichannel setting that builds consistent and persistent relationships with customers everywhere they interact with the brand.

What is a Customer Data Platform (CDP)?

A customer data platform is a marketing system that provides a single point of real-time control over customer data (batch and streaming), by unifying all types and sources, including first-, second-, and third-party data. The CDP serves up a unified customer view accessible across the enterprise to drive more contextually relevant interactions in cadence with the customer.

A purpose-built customer data platform is specifically designed for handling all customer data to provide the scalability, cadence, and flexibility needed to engage with connected customers. CDPs can quickly unify data and eliminate gaps and redundancies to help you overcome the growing complexity of engaging with customers in real time across multiple touchpoints in a fast-changing marketing environment.