Omnichannel Customer Engagement

As the eCommerce environment becomes more sophisticated, customers are using more channels to interact with your brand. Imagine that someone clicks on a Facebook ad to purchase a sale item on your website. They check on their order by calling your support line, leave a review by clicking a link in an email, follow your brand on social media, and join your customer loyalty program via a landing page back on your website. 

Chapter

Omnichannel Customer Engagement

3D Isometric Flat Vector Concept of Cross-Channel, Omnichannel, Several Communication Channels Between Seller and Customer, Digital Marketing, Online Shopping.

As the eCommerce environment becomes more sophisticated, customers are using more channels to interact with your brand.

Imagine that someone clicks on a Facebook ad to purchase a sale item on your website. They check on their order by calling your support line, leave a review by clicking a link in an email, follow your brand on social media, and join your customer loyalty program via a landing page back on your website. 

How many channels is that? 5? 6? In this instance, it doesn't matter because the point is this — these days, customers are following your brand around the internet. In order to effectively drive customer engagement, you have to follow them around as well.

This is omnichannel customer engagement, a concept that has held the key to success in eCommerce business growth in recent years. 

In the final chapter of our complete guide to customer engagement, we're going to discuss the most important thing to remember when putting everything together into a fully realized engagement strategy. Use this strategy to support customers at every step in their relationship with your brand. 

What Is Omnichannel Customer Engagement?

Many people get omnichannel strategy confused with a similar term — multichannel strategy.

Although they're similar, the difference is an important one. While multichannel campaigns communicate with customers in multiple ways, they're typically limited to discrete campaigns, while omnichannel strategies involve creating a fully integrated customer experience. 

For example, a multichannel campaign might involve pairing a few boosted Facebook posts with an email or text messaging campaign. An omnichannel strategy may consider these touchpoints, but in the context of the bigger, more consequential picture. 

Essentially, if you're brand has an omnichannel mindset, it's looking to take advantage of every opportunity to control the customer experience and drive engagement at every turn. 

Benefits of Omnichannel Customer Engagement

When executed well, customer engagement strategies can add value to your eCommerce business. An omnichannel approach can take it to the next level.

Never Miss an Opportunity to Create a Memorable Experience

An omnichannel approach maps all potential touchpoints between your customers and your brand, including marketing, transactional communications, and reengagement. Being able to look at every opportunity available to you can produce a major benefit. 

Suddenly, you can see areas where you're doing well and areas where you could use some help. For example, maybe you're driving a lot of initial sales but not getting as many repeat customers as you'd like. You can make the decision to focus less on marketing and sales, and more on strategies to increase customer retention

Prevent Negative Interactions

A side effect of controlling every interaction is the ability to cut out potential bad customer experiences. When you're able to devote attention to every phase in the customer journey, you can make customers feel valued, as follows:

    Learn Even More About Your Brand

    Some of the tools we mentioned in the last chapter were aimed at understanding how customers interact with your eCommerce site. It's important to master the analytics of every platform — email, website, social media, and more — if you want to have a functional omnichannel approach. 

    As you make changes to the way you support the customer journey, you're able to use this working knowledge of your customer interactions and behavior to measure the effectiveness of the adjustments you make. That strategy provides critical insights into the strengths and weaknesses of your brand. 

    Increase the Effectiveness of EVERY Initiative

    Here are a few statistics from brands who use omnichannel strategies effectively, courtesy of a 2020 Omnisend report

      When you successfully engage your customers at every touch point, the benefits compound. You can see this in your KPIs. You'll see increased engagement with your emails and social media posts. Customer retention, and related KPIs like purchase frequency and average purchase value, will improve. 

      Ultimately, you'll be able to use your budget more efficiently, with a higher ROI on almost everything you do. 

      Omnichannel Customer Engagement Tips and Best Practices

      To this point, we've discussed different customer engagement tools and tactics, tips for making them work to fit your brand, and the channels and platforms where they can have the largest impact. Now, here are three things you need to remember to get an omnichannel strategy off the ground. 

      Give Your Customers Lots of Options

      Your customers don't all want the same thing. That's why it's important to give them options — so that they can engage with your brand in the way that works best for them. Take the payment options you offer in your digital store, for example.

      Some customers are likely perfectly inputting their credit card information, but others may prefer options for PayPal, Square, or ApplePay. Obviously, it's not realistic to satisfy every customer's preference, but the more choice you offer, the more customers will associate your brand with a positive experience. 

      Be Responsive Wherever You Interact 

      If you're going to try to create an omnichannel customer experience, you need to be able to do it responsibly. This means no half efforts. If you're going to commit to something, you want to go all in. Here's why. 

      Let's say you want to add more customer support touchpoints so you start using Facebook messenger to make it easier for followers to get in contact with you. After all, 61% of customers have expressed that brands make it difficult to get help across multiple channels

      If you stop using that channel for customer service because you get too busy, though, suddenly this feature you added to be a boost will become a burden. Rather than alleviating pain points, you've created an avoidable problem for your customers. 

      Use Tools to Make It Easier to Manage

      If executing a truly comprehensive omnichannel approach seems daunting, it's understandable. There's a lot to keep track of, and while the potential is huge, you may not know where to start. 

      Check out our last chapter on customer engagement tools if you're interested in learning more about software options and tools that take some of the manual work out of driving customer engagement.

      It's completely natural to need help. That's where Stamped.io comes in. We provide smart solutions for review management and customer loyalty that integrate with major eCommerce platforms and help your business grow.

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