“Though this be madness, yet there is method in it.”
In his famous line from Hamlet, Shakespeare describes a situation in which the main character’s chaotic behaviour conceals his true intent. With the proliferation of channels and devices today, including the growth of IoT and virtual reality, the way users engage with brands and products appears to be trending toward chaos.
Marketers are tasked with understanding and leveraging a vast continuum of user behaviour. Meanwhile customer journeys continue to push the boundaries of complexity. Companies are more challenged than ever to discover the intent behind omnichannel behaviour and leverage it to drive measurable marketing success.
Being omnipresent for omnichannel is worth the time and effort. According to a recent Wunderman study, as we zigzag between devices and touchpoints, 87% of us measure our brand experiences against digital leaders like Netflix, Uber, and Amazon. Omnichannel users spend and engage more with brands and products both online and off-line than single channel customers. The more channels customers use, the greater their lifetime value.
The takeaway for marketers? Revenue and loyalty are increasingly won by effectively masking complexity across channels and devices, and delivering simple, streamlined, consistent, personalised customer experiences. Touchpoints where brands should be present with engaging content and messaging but aren’t can adversely impact marketing outcomes. This experience gap is a risk to effective engagement and omnichannel marketing success.
Closing the experience gap
How can companies understand and capitalise on omnichannel behaviour when haphazard customer journeys are increasingly the new normal? Omnichannel marketing success requires a comprehensive understanding of user behaviour as well as the ability to transform behavioural and demographic data into timely engagement and conversions.
To future-proof marketing effectiveness companies need to define and implement data-driven approaches to marketing that are continually informed by analytics. It’s imperative to engage users across touchpoints with timely, personalised messaging. This calls for cohesive data strategy and marketing technology solutions to help close the experience gap.
A customer data platform (CDP) can help forward thinking marketers organise their data, enhance their audience segmentation and campaign planning, increase content engagement, streamline cross-channel marketing orchestration, and optimise analytics efforts. Strategy and cohesive technology solutions are vital to long term success. With the right strategy and CDP solution, marketers can transform omnichannel complexity and uncertainty into competitive advantages and measurable results.
CDP benefits and advantages for omnichannel marketing
How can CDPs help enable marketing success in the complex, uncertain world of omnichannel?
Benefits to explore and acquire:
- Open, extensible data architecture.
- Flexible enterprise data integration.
- Data accessibility.
- Feature & function rich marketing execution.
- Unified and streamlined marketing orchestration from planning through execution.
- Business friendly UI/UX.
- Continuous marketing process improvement.
Omnichannel advantages to be gained:
- Unified customer profiles with cross-channel behavioural attributes.
- Identity resolution, device stitching, data enrichment.
- Ease of audience analytics, precision segmentation and targeting.
- Increased conversion rates from more and better engagement across channels.
- Machine learning readiness (for content personalisation and next-best actions).
- Seamlessly coordinated cross-channel engagement with fast activation of customer segments across channels.
- Timely, contextually relevant, and optimally formatted messaging across touchpoints.
- Closed loop analytics that inform segmentation and campaign strategy.
- Agility and overall speed to value.
- Streamlined marketing execution across the extended enterprise/partner ecosystem.
- Cohesion of paid, earned, and owned marketing platforms and point solutions.
- Streamlined reporting and analytics.
- Rapid response to changes in user behaviour across channels.
- Effective data governance.
