In the eCommerce industry, omnichannel marketing has been a prevalent theme across articles, social media, conferences, and general thought leadership over the past few years.

Everyone is talking about it, but how many retailers are actually using it? How much of this is just theory, and how can we put omnichannel marketing into practice?

What is omnichannel marketing?

Omnichannel marketing is when you create a completely unified and seamless brand experience, no matter what channel your customer uses to connect with you.

Today, to feel comfortable enough to make a purchase, a customer needs 7 touchpoints with a brand on average. This means that each and every time your customer connects with your brand, they move a little further towards purchasing.

Omnichannel marketing ensures that each of those touchpoints provides the same experience with the brand.

So for example, an omnichannel brand would provide the same look and feel, and experience for a customer that started a support ticket on their site, and then contacted via Twitter.

How to use omnichannel marketing for eCommerce

When implementing an omnichannel marketing strategy for eCommerce, there are four main things you’ll need to do depending on how big your store is.

Unify the whole company under the omnichannel strategy

When adopting an omnichannel marketing strategy, you’re ultimately changing the focus of your company to the customer.

If you’re changing the central focusing of your company, it’s not just marketing that needs to be in on that change. This means that customer success, merchandising, and sales need to be a part of these plans.

As channels and apps share customer data, so should you between the different departments of your business. A marketer creating automated campaigns should know what the number one question that’s asked of sales managers is, and customer success should know exactly what promotions are currently running.

This means that customer data needs to be centralized so that each person, much like your channels, needs to be up to date on exactly who the customer is and what they’re looking for.

Collect data on your processes and your customer

One of the first things you need to do when you create an omnichannel marketing strategy is to audit your entire customer experience from each and every channel that a customer might use to connect with you.

This means researching your products on a variety of channels to see what your customers experience, ordering from your store, and going through your own returns and refunds system (including a ticket with customer service). You should be testing engagement with each channel.

Sometimes, we’re too close to our own processes to see potential friction. Bring in friends or family members to help you do these audits.

Another great thing to do is to ask customers for feedback. There is an opportunity for feedback at each step of the customer journey, though most retailers ask for feedback after a purchase has been made.

However, many retailers and brands forget to ask for feedback after a customer service interaction. A great personalized omnichannel marketing experience can include customer service too- think about it, wouldn’t it be nice to not have to re-explain your situation each time you reached out to customer service?

After each customer service interaction, ask customers how they feel with a short NPS (net promoter score) survey. It’s low engagement, and it gives you an idea about how they’re feeling about your service.

Use customer data to segment audiences and set up automation

The idea behind omnichannel marketing is personalization. You want your customers to feel like that email or message was written just for them (even if it wasn’t).

When you use your customer data to personalize your omnichannel marketing campaigns, you will be able to send the right message, to the right person, on the right channel, at the right time.