How to create an omnichannel customer engagement strategy in 3 steps

Research shows that omnichannel customer engagement increases purchase frequency by 250% and average order value by 13%.

This makes implementing an effective omnichannel customer engagement strategy a must because customers are expecting you to provide a seamless experience. Any inconsistencies and they’ll be running to the competition. In this mini guide, we’ll walk you through everything you need to know about creating an omnichannel customer experience. We’ll also look at some examples that you can use for inspiration.

What is an omnichannel strategy?

An omnichannel customer engagement strategy involves giving customers the opportunity to interact with your brand across multiple channels as part of one seamless experience. 

For example, if someone likes your social media ad about a coffee machine, you’ll recommend the same coffee machine when they visit your online store. After purchasing this machine, they’ll receive a thank you email and won’t see the ad on social media again. In this example, the customer has three touchpoints with your brand: social media, your physical store, and email. What makes this experience omnichannel is that each touchpoint is connected to the next with zero inconsistencies, giving the customer a seamless experience.

Why is omnichannel customer engagement important?

There are four channels of customer engagement: contextual engagement, engagement of convenience, emotional engagement, and social engagement. They can offer the following benefits:

A more personalized customer experience

Running effective modern ad campaigns is all about personalization. Engaging customers with relevant products shows that you understand their needs. Using the espresso machine example above, if you see a customer shopping for a new machine, you could link to your blog posts covering how to choose the right machine for their needs.

This stands out because you aren’t presenting irrelevant marketing messages. You’re tailoring campaigns to past behaviors.

Increased brand loyalty

A ClickZ study found that 90% of customers are more likely to stick with your brand if they’re connected through three or more marketing platforms. In today’s age of fierce online competition, this can help you retain customers and stand out.

Three ways to create and grow your omnichannel strategy

Creating an omnichannel customer engagement strategy relies on using the correct software and having the infrastructure to analyze customer behaviors. So here are three ways you can create an omnichannel customer engagement strategy:

1. Centralize your data

Before you even start running personalized marketing campaigns and connecting experiences across platforms, you must first centralize your data. This makes it easy to spot patterns and customer preferences that you can use to personalize experiences.

This centralization also gives you a complete view of customer profiles. 

An easy way to centralize data is to use a customer data platform like Lytics. These platforms enable you to collect data from analytics, surveys, and transactional data and put them under one digital roof.

2. Measure customer behavior

Once you’ve structured all your data, it’s time to understand customer behaviors.

Implementing an omnichannel customer engagement strategy doesn’t mean you must be active on all social platforms. This is impractical even for larger organizations. Instead, use qualitative and quantitative analysis to understand what platforms specific customers use most.

3. Use personalized marketing

Now comes the fun part: building marketing campaigns that appeal to a customer’s preferences and behaviors. Most are intimidated by this step, but if you centralized customer data and analyzed behaviors and preferences, all you need to do is use your copywriting skills to tailor your copy to these preferences.

Also, understand what are the two types of customer engagement. In a nutshell, they are contextual and convenient engagement. So if you can present your product as something your customer is already looking for, you’ll increase the chances of a sale.

Omnichannel marketing is simple with Lytics

Creating an omnichannel customer engagement strategy doesn’t have to be tedious. With the correct customer data platform, you’ll be able to store all customer data under one digital roof. From here, you can spot customer preferences and touchpoints. If you’re looking to upgrade your single-channel marketing strategy to an ​​omnichannel customer engagement platform, consider Lytics. The customer data platform gives you a 360-degree view of customer profiles so you can use it to make marketing decisions.

You already have a data warehouse. Why not leverage and build around it? With Lytics, you don’t have to maintain two databases. You can ensure security and privacy through a modular approach, a reverse ETL capacity, and delivery of business-specific personalization.

The Lytics next generation of CDP consists of the following composable tools:

• Lytics Conductor builds omnichannel customer profiles (C360) that unify and aggregate all customer touchpoints from everywhere—and in a private and security data warehouse.
• Leveraging composability into CDP accelerates speed through discovery. With Lytics Cloud Connect you can find those customers in a segmented process with direct queries.
• The Lytics Decision Engine provides real-time customer tracking intelligence for actionable insights, including providing product recommendations—with real-time personalization and customer scoring.