Maximizing Customer Engagement with Multichannel Marketing
New to eCommerce? Find out how to maximize customer engagement using Multichannel marketing solutions in this post.
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According to IDC, 77% of brands recognize customer experience as the competitive differentiator transforming businesses into reputed brands. It is a powerful customer loyalty magnet that even trumps the likes of service or product and pricing!
However, the thing with customer experience is that it needs to be consistent, whether the customer journey starts from social media or via cold calls, whether someone uses self-servicing to address a concern or raise a ticket through email.
This is why engagement through multichannel marketing is gaining popularity. It decouples the customer experience from the channel and introduces uniformity in how businesses treat customers.
Here’s looking at how you can boost customer experience and heighten engagement through a multichannel strategy.
What Is a Multichannel Customer Engagement Strategy?
As the name suggests, a multichannel customer engagement strategy spans different direct and indirect channels to interact and connect with customers. As such, businesses may use a variety of channels, like email, social media, phone, direct mail, etc., to interact and engage with customers.
How Is Multichannel Different from Omnichannel and Cross Channel Engagement?
If you have been researching multichannel marketing, you may have come across terms like omnichannel and cross channel. While the basic premise of all three is the same, that is, to engage with customers across different channels, they contain specific, nuanced differences.
For starters, multichannel engagement is a patchwork of different engagement channels. However, these various channels remain in siloes.
On the other hand, omnichannel follows a more holistic approach to customer engagement. Here, the channel switch does not affect customer experience as businesses offer seamless continuity.
Finally, cross channel engagement expands on omnichannel by making the engagement device agnostic. However, its scope is limited to a singular interaction or transaction.
In summary, multichannel involves multiple channels but may not coordinate between them; omnichannel creates a consistent and centralized hub for all channels; and cross channel transitions across channels and devices until the primary objective is met.
Advantages of Multichannel Marketing
Multichannel marketing is a low-hanging fruit for small businesses just starting to prioritize customer experiences. It is comparatively easier to set up and orchestrate. It offers the following benefits:
- Enhances customer experience by making brands approachable through a buffet of channels.
- Boosts brand visibility across multiple channels, some of which can be as off-beat as instant messaging platforms!
- Encourages a more diversified and innovative approach to marketing as different channels have different needs.
- Increases brand awareness and reinforces brand reputation.
- Unlocks multiple channels to capture customer data.
- Leads to effective ROI calculation of the different marketing strategies, individually and as a whole.
- Lays the foundation for customer retention and loyalty.
Challenges in Multichannel Marketing
As attractive as it seems, embracing a multichannel marketing strategy can present the following challenges:
- Orchestrating customer engagement across multiple channels can be tricky, especially when it needs to be strategized.
- Marketers are responsible for running highly choreographed and micro-managed campaigns to engage customers.
- Finding the customer, channel, and content synergy can be difficult.
- Organizational silos can cause a misalignment between the stakeholders and disjointed customer experiences.
- It can overwhelm marketing teams if they need the tools, platforms, and technologies to manage multiple channels.
Essentials of Multichannel Marketing Strategy to Boost Customer Engagement
A multichannel marketing strategy contains several elements. Some of the primary ones include:
Cross-sectional customer data
Customer data is the heart of a successful multichannel marketing campaign. It requires bringing together customer data from different sources, platforms, and channels to create a 360-degree customer profile. It should capture their likes, dislikes, and preferences so that businesses can curate a marketing campaign that engages with the customer on a whole new personal plane.
Companies often use tools like customer data platforms (CDPs) or Customer Relationship Management (CRM) databases to unify their data and generate insights from them.
Multichannel Customer Engagement Platform
As mentioned previously, a multichannel strategy can cripple the marketing teams if you fail to equip them with the tools and technologies necessary. Even if you are a small business with limited marketing and engagement channels, a customer engagement platform (such as MoEngage) is an asset to your MarTech stack.
It centralizes all your multichannel customer engagements so that businesses can have a unified view of all the past and ongoing interactions to add value at every touchpoint and make it rewarding for the customer. It also comes with powerful advanced analytics that can help with campaign optimization.
Think of a multichannel engagement platform as the backbone of all operations.
Targeted marketing collateral
Targeted marketing collateral is the final piece of a multichannel marketing strategy. It acknowledges that although businesses require multiple channels to carry out customer engagement, not all channels are alike. As such, they will have to dig into historical campaign performance to identify the high-value channels and prioritize them.
The heterogeneity of marketing channels also requires marketers to diversify their content offerings and distribute them using an appropriate channel. At the same time, such assets must stay consistent with the brand voice, personality, and value proposition. Such a blend will ensure consistent customer experiences across channels.
Closing Thoughts
Multichannel marketing is the fulcrum for delightful customer engagement. Businesses that follow such a customer-first approach often see increased revenue (by 4-8%), reduced customer churn (by 67%), and accelerated growth. With such a promising future, it would be criminal not to capitalize on such an opportunity!
