4 Omnichannel Marketing Strategies for SMEs

Omnichannel marketing campaigns focus on delivering a personalised and seamless experience to customers across different channels and devices. Such campaigns are therefore specifically built around each unique customer - personalising messages to the customer as they move through their purchase journeys. In this article, we’ll cover four of the most effective strategies for SMEs when developing omnichannel marketing campaigns.

1. Craft buyer personas

The first step towards implementing omnichannel tactics is getting a better idea of who your customers are. This is where buyer personas come in; they're essentially abstract representations of your ideal or typical customer. If you sell products for babies or toddlers, for example, your target customer and audience is going to be new parents, but your product pricing is going to tell you what age demographic those parents fall into. Knowing who you’re selling to makes it easier to build campaigns that are relevant to their needs and desires.

From there, you could use customer data to fine-tune your buyer personas and identify the aspects of your brand that resonate strongly with your audience. This might sound like a lot of prep work, but it’s a critical step.

2. Optimise customer experience across channels

Depending on the number of channels you’re currently using, you may need to expand your approach before moving to the next step. Omnichannel campaigns are typically most effective when they include at least three or four platforms, but the right channels for your brand ultimately depend on your target audience and where they spend the majority of their time.

Another key aspect of omnichannel marketing is standardising the experience on every channel. Your customers should know what to expect when they engage with your brand. That includes everything from matching colours and styles to maintaining a consistent tone across multiple social media channels.

Of course, it’s also crucial for the experience to work well on each of those channels. For example, even if you have a dedicated mobile app, you should also test out your website on a mobile device to make sure it’s easy to browse through products and make a purchase.

Optimisation could include reducing loading times, using high-resolution product images and videos, offering more responsive customer support, or streamlining the checkout process. Even seemingly minor changes can make a massive difference to conversion rates.

3. Use A/B testing

A/B testing can be highly effective in even single-channel campaigns, but you’ll get even more out of it in an omnichannel context. At the most basic level, A/B tests simply compare two different ad variants to help marketers determine which one is more likely to lead to success in an upcoming campaign.

In other words, A/B testing gives you the opportunity to try multiple ideas on a small scale before committing to any particular option. Depending on the marketing software you’re using, you might also be able to run multivariate tests and analyze several variables at the same time.

With that in mind, A/B testing is incredibly open-ended, and you can use it to compare variants of essentially any element. For an email you could adjust your subject line, sender name, call to action, images, greetings, and more. Over time, the information you gather through A/B testing will help you to avoid mistakes and build more efficient campaigns.

When running a traditional A/B test, it’s critical to isolate a single variable in order to target your results. If you change five elements at the same time, for example, it will be impossible to determine which ones were responsible for your results.

On the other hand, multivariate testing opens up new opportunities that aren’t available with conventional A/B tests. Multivariate tests automatically change multiple elements and run separate tests for each one.

Of course, this makes the scale significantly larger compared to A/B testing — even just two options for five different elements leads to a total of 32 variants. That said, you’ll essentially be able to perform five A/B tests at the same time, making the process significantly more efficient.

4. Leverage omnichannel marketing software

Your success with omnichannel marketing can also depend on the capabilities of the software you’re using. Different platforms offer a wide variety of pros and cons, so it’s worth taking the time to check out a few different options and see what works best with your existing practices. Some even offer a free trial, giving you the chance to see the features in practice before committing to a paid subscription.

Some conventional multichannel marketing providers can work well in an omnichannel setting, but certain tools are designed specifically for omnichannel campaigns. For example, you might want to configure workflows that move between channels or respond differently depending on which channel the customer is using.

Overall, every platform is unique, and there’s no “right way” to approach omnichannel marketing. That said, running sophisticated omnichannel campaigns manually is almost impossible (and extremely inefficient), so it’s crucial to find software that works for you and your brand by streamlining critical tasks and offering informative analytics.

Switching to omnichannel from single-channel or even multi-channel is a complex process, but it doesn’t have to be overwhelming. These four tips will help you to make a smoother transition and achieve better results in your first omnichannel campaigns.

About the Author

Marouane El Baghati is an SEO specialist at Omnisend – a marketing automation platform for e-commerce merchants. With Omnisend, you can create advanced automation workflows, smart customer segmentation and targeting, and use multiple channels to reach your customer via the same automation workflow: email, SMS, push notifications, Facebook Messenger, and more.