Marketing is now undergoing significant and rapid changes. Marketers are now moving away from the traditional “push-based” marketing and moving towards a better and more personalized marketing strategy. A multi-channel communication with the customer may seem to work, but from the customer viewpoint this is like speaking a different language through each one of the touch points. The customer experience is fragmented.

Omni Channel Defined

Omni channel brings the interconnectedness among touch points and blurs the distinction among channels, seeking to provide customers with a seamless buying experience, whether they are shopping online using their mobile device or desktop or shopping from brick and mortar stores.

Omni channel from a customer perspective is like having a “universal translator” even though all the channels are speaking differently to them. Marketers need to provide a continuation of the interaction regardless of the device or channel. With this marketing strategy, individuals can now engage to a company at a physical store, mobile app, and online website or through catalog and social media. Every piece of customer experience is complementary and consistent.

Getting started with an Omni Channel strategy

 

Customer centricity

The first requirement of an omni-channel strategy is the ability to build your marketing plan around the consumer, rather than the channels by which you operate. To date, marketing planning has been based on the technology and the platform, such as a mobile strategy or a social media strategy. Omni-channel marketing is driven by the needs of the customer, and as such, means looking at consumers’ behaviors and needs first, and then choosing the right platforms and channels to satisfy these requirements. The ultimate goal is to deliver a seamless and consistent experience with your brand, at any time, and on whatever platform customers and prospects choose to use.

Tracking Customers and Prospects from a Single ID

Delivering a truly seamless omni-channel experience relies on your ability to track consumers across all the channels and platforms they use to interact with your brand, from websites, tablets and apps, to social media, call centers, physical stores and more. To the extent possible, each customer and prospect should be tracked with a unique ID via your CRM system, or enterprise data warehouse. Unique IDs enable you to string together — in chronological order — all the marketing touchpoints to which a user is exposed, so you can get a holistic view of each customer and his/her interactions with your brand.

multi-omni

The “universal translator” is then nothing but the shared customer profile among the channels.  It is the glue that connects the experience while the customer moves through the interaction. Hence, it is imperative that this profile be kept current by updating it frequently with the latest information.

Data Infrastructure (including Big Data)

Your marketing ecosystem may well include millions of prospects and trillions of possible touchpoint combinations. As such, you need a technology infrastructure in place to collect and manage this massive amount of marketing interaction data. Only once the infrastructure is in place to collect this data are you able to use it more effectively to understand consumer behavior and the way your target audience interacts with media, which is fundamental to an omni-channel marketing approach.

Drawing Actionable Insights

Finally, omni-channel marketing relies on having the right measurement technology to draw actionable insights from the big data you’ve collected. Who is converting — and who is not? How, when and where are they converting? Which creative is working — and which is not? Holistic measurement of your marketing efforts provides answers to these complex questions by identifying the true customer journey and how combinations of channels, campaigns and tactics influence purchases and other conversions. Marketers can then feed these actionable insights back into their multichannel optimization process.

http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/211093/the-magic-behind-omni-channel-marketing-success.html

Understanding How Tag Management and the Data Layer Fit In 

In digital marketing, “tags” are snippets of code that most digital marketing vendors require their customers to embed in their web pages. The problem with these data- collecting tags is that they require IT resources to deploy. So, even though it’s marketers who buy and use these solutions, they depend on an already overburdened IT staff to deploy and manage them.

Enter “tag management”, a new category of application that eliminates that friction point by providing a single master tag to control the other tags. Marketers can then manage their solutions by themselves, quickly and easily, through a web-based interface, without having to burden already overburdened development resources.

The real star of tag management, however, is the “the data layer,” which creates a common, standardized language between all tag-based digital solutions. The significance of a data layer is that it allows your previously siloed marketing applications to share data and become truly integrated for the first time. This enables maximum flexibility and eliminates the question of which marketing cloud to use. You can use CRM from Salesforce.com, enterprise analytics from Adobe, email from IBM, and retargeting, advertising, affiliate marketing, and testing from any number of point providers.

http://www.the-makegood.com/2014/08/18/how-building-your-own-marketing-cloud-redefines-whats-possible/

 DataLayer

Benefits of an Omni Channel Strategy

  • Improves Customer Satisfaction and Perception

The Omni Channel helps improve customer satisfaction and perception. This allows customers to seamlessly and conveniently move between in-store and online shopping.

  • Increases Sales

Increased sales are one of the positive by products of a properly executed omnichannel strategy.

  • Accurate  Collection of Data

Data is vital in the field of marketing for this helps in tracking customers’ behavior. With visibility all across channels, marketers can deliver a more personalized experience. This is also an excellent building block for turning customer data to loyalty-driven services.

  • Improves Productivity

Omni Channel can provide more efficiency and result in increased employee productivity.

A proper Omni Channel strategy can revolutionize your entire business. Action plans and insights gained from real time analytics can link customer data from online and offline channels. This will drive a new wave of transformation in your marketing endeavors.

At Radian Consulting, we use these principles as a guide in creating and publishing a cloud based data layer to be leveraged for omni-channel marketing.  Contact us for additional details on a solution that can be operational in a shorter time frame and without the requirement for additional resources.