Customers today want it all. They don't want half personalization or customer support. They want brands to impress them wholeheartedly; only then will they trust them.
In short, omnichannel experience is what customers want now to become loyal. They want personalized website content, relatable social media posts, and multiple touchpoints with their brands.
According to a recent Nelson report, 74.7 million US households will function as omnichannel shoppers by 2025.
A Forbes article states that customers no longer use one or two touchpoints. They now use at least 5-6 touchpoints to communicate with brands.
So, OCX is essential to build customer loyalty and boost your sales. But how to enhance customer experience using omnichannel marketing?
Let's walk through this post to know all about omnichannel customer experience.
Why Is Omnichannel Customer Experience Important?
Customers today want fast and easy solutions. According to a report, 78% of customers hate to explain their problems to different customer support departments. They enjoy frequent answers in one place.
OCX helps to bring personalization to SaaS, retail, and other business sectors. In addition, omnichannel customer experience is helpful in:
Enhance customer experience
Centralized and integrated customer relationship management platforms allow businesses to build personal relationships with their customers. They can provide solutions based on individual customers' needs. Besides this, CRM can also help to improve employee experience, leading to a better customer support system.
No waiting for customers
Omnichannel experience helps to reduce waiting time for customers. With multiple touchpoints, customers can use various sources to reach out to brands without waiting in the queue. For example, customers can use in-app chat, email support, phone call, or chatbot to interact with customer support teams in real-time.
Customer retention
Streamlining your omnichannel resources with marketing strategies can lead to better customer engagement. It helps you find gaps in customer journeys and nurture them with custom marketing solutions. Eventually, it will support better customer retention and attract new customers.
Diverse audience base
Omnichannel communication helps to interact with a diverse audience base. You can directly communicate with potential customers using social media channels. Emails can land you in busy professionals' inboxes. With omnichannel, you can connect with diverse audiences using their preferred way.
Foundation of a Good Omnichannel Customer Experience
Omnichannel customer experience is not the same as it was before the pandemic. The customer needs and purchase habits have also changed the omnichannel experience.
The McKinsey team has recently organized a B2B Sales Pulse survey among hundreds of B2B decision-makers in the US. The survey has thrown new light on omnichannel marketing, such as:
- 94% of respondents consider omnichannel experience as the reality of B2B marketplaces.
- B2B customers now use ten or more ways to interact with brands.
- 35% of B2B buyers are willing to spend $500,000 or more in a single transaction.
- Suppliers must work hard to retain loyalty if customer needs are unmet.
Today, customers are using a blend of traditional (face-to-face meetings) and modern (video conferences) channels to make decisions.
Thus, your OCX strategy to retain loyalty today lays on the three Cs:
Consistency
Maintaining consistency in your omnichannel marketing strategy is extremely important. Users might start their journey from your website but order products from your mobile app. Therefore, you should create a consistent brand image and experience across all your omnichannel resources to create a better user experience.
For example, I added sneakers to my Amazon cart from the website on my desktop.
But I completed the purchase on the Amazon app. Consistency lets me shop across multiple devices and portals without any hassle.
Convenience
After consistency, convenience is the second most crucial foundation of the omnichannel experience. Customers want comfort and ease while purchasing.
Therefore, you should mix traditional and modern approaches to build customer loyalty. For instance, you can offer your customers online and physical shopping experiences.
Tiffany is a famous jewelry brand that sells thousands of dollars worth of designer jewels. The brand has stores across the globe. But, for their buyers' convenience, they have created a website where customers can order classic Tiffany jewelry.
Communication
The third and most important foundation for building customer loyalty is personalized communication. Customers want to receive customized messages and offer from brands to build a strong relationship with them. Personalization helps to increase ROI, earn customers' trust and establish your unique brand identity.
With multichannel marketing, you get several venues to interact with your customers and impress them through emails, social media, etc.
In a case study, Solitairebliss has stated that personalized emails have helped them make customer journeys smoother. They used their players' history to customize emails. For example, they suggest playing FreeCell Solitaire if they like Klondike Solitaire.
7 Tips to Build Customer Loyalty Using Omnichannel Experience
Omnichannel experience is essential to meet customers' demands today. You can quickly meet your customer's expectations with segmentation, personalization, and proper content delivery.
Here are 7 easy tips for building customer loyalty using an omnichannel experience:
1. Focus on market segmentation
Market segmentation allows you to run highly relevant and comprehensive marketing campaigns to build customer loyalty. In addition, you can bifurcate the targeted audience based on their problems, gender, age and other demographic factors.
This will help you create personalized marketing campaigns to boost your sales.
According to a report, 49% of people make impulsive purchases when they get a personalized experience.
However, you must carefully segment your prospects and customers to drive maximum results. You can here use the lead scoring method to categorize your potential customers.
Lead scoring means you can score every action a lead takes on your omnichannel resources and segment them into groups like Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) or Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs).
For example, when a prospect calls your sales department to request a product demo, this shows that the person is interested in purchasing your products so that you can put them in the SQL category.
On the contrary, if a prospect downloads an ebook from your website, it shows that they are aware of your products but not ready to purchase. In that case, you can categorize a lead as an MQL group.
2. Start a meaningful conversation
After segmenting your audience, you must start a meaningful conversation through different channels.
You must send a valuable, exciting, relevant message to target each customer segment. For example, retail brands can send personalized messages based on customers' previous purchases. Big eCommerce brands like Amazon, eBay and Walmart send their customers emails based on their previous purchases.
On the other hand, you can use social media to offer discounts on special dates, seasonal sales or other personalized messages.
In short, you can use every omnichannel resource to send a personalized message to a targeted audience. This way, you can establish relationships with your customers through various touchpoints and increase your conversion rate.
3. Leverage marketing automation
It is impossible to build a successful omnichannel customer experience without tools. You need the best marketing tools to deploy omnichannel marketing strategies.
The best and worst thing about the omnichannel approach is it scatters data across multiple platforms. You might have a prospect who interacts with you via email, chatbot or social media.
It is complex to stream and use data from various platforms and using it to create personalized marketing strategies. In addition, monitoring every marketing effort on several platforms is humanly possible.
Thus, to build loyalty using omnichannel marketing, you have to get various marketing tools to help you, like:
- Email marketing tools to create, customize and monitor email marketing campaigns.
- Social media management tools to schedule posting, measure engagement and socialize with prospects.
- Data analytical tools to monitor, manage and analyze customer data in one place.
- Content management tools to manage various content elements like blogs, ebooks, etc.
4. Get feedback
The best way to build a loyalty program is to understand your shortcomings and work on them. You can put your omnichannel resources on a task to gather feedback from your customers.
With feedback, you get a chance to evaluate your customer support system and employees' performance. However, don’t just gather feedback from your customers. Also, take action based on the feedback your customers have given.
For example, Axis bank sends SMS messages to their customers to retrieve feedback on their services. This allows them to review their services and staff’s performance and improve their customer support system.
5. Focus on customer experience
According to research, 80% of customers said they had switched brands due to poor customer experience and support.
So, instead of attracting new customers, you should focus omnichannel components on retaining your existing customers.
Improving the customer support system is both external and internal affairs. Apart from gathering feedback from customers, you must work on strengthening your internal customer support system.
For instance, use CRM software to solve your customers’ queries faster. The software enables you to assign tickets to the concerned employees. In addition, you can monitor individual employees’ performance and ensure that customer queries are resolved in the shortest possible time.
Also, build an internal custom support policy and environment. When you constantly train your employees to serve customers in the best way, it will harness a customer-centric culture in your workplace.
Besides this, provide multiple channels to your customers to connect with the support team. I suggest here to use chatbots to resolve small queries so your customer support team can focus on essential issues.
All in all, strengthen your support infrastructure as much as possible to build a better loyalty program.
6. Retarget your inactive customers
Your old customers are your golden sale tickets. They are already familiar with your brand, products and customer support system. So, there is no need to put much effort into re-engaging old or inactive customers.
All you need to do is check your inactive customers' history to understand their habits, preferred communication channels and purchase needs. And using omnichannel resources, you can reactivate them in your sales funnel.
There are several ways to engage with old or inactive customers, such as:
- Push notifications are the best way to engage with your inactive customers. You can send them exciting notifications if customers are not using your mobile application or purchasing anything from it. For example, you can say “we miss you” or offer them a 10% discount on the first purchase.
- SMS is another excellent method to interact with your customers. You can send product offers based on your customers' previous purchases via SMS message. Also, if a prospect has visited your website, but hasn’t taken any further action, send them a message like a download an exclusive ebook or join a special newsletter.
- Geotargeting is the perfect re-engagement solution for brands with a physical presence. If you are opening a new store in the area or launching a special seasonal sale, you can send messages to people near your store. This practice is good for local and retail businesses.
7. Bridge the knowledge gap
Salsify's survey states that 46% of consumers will buy from the brands they trust.
And they can only trust your brand when they are aware of it. Use your omnichannel strategy to bridge the information gap and make people understand your business. You have to show customers your products and how they can help them.
There are several channels to earn your customers' trust, such as:
- Use Reels to show behind the scene moments to your customers.
- Share case studies to promote your business solutions and aware your audience.
- Publish original reports or surveys targeting your industry.
Let’s Build a Loyalty Program Using Omnichannel Experience!
Achieving customer loyalty is not an overnight process. You have to work to improve your customer satisfaction throughout their journey actively. You must touch multiple points and offer them several channels to communicate with your brand.
Importantly, you must provide personalized solutions and messages to your customers. Be it pre-sale or post-sale engagement, use omnichannel strategies to communicate with your customers at every point.
I have attempted to show CX from an omnichannel viewpoint to build a loyalty program in the post. I hope you find it helpful and will use my suggestions to retain loyalty.
