Omnichannel Marketing Challenges and How to Overcome Them

Introduction

Are you struggling to overcome the omnichannel challenges of creating a centralized platform for all your business interactions? With a unified sales management approach, ensuring consistency over the 4Cs of omnichannel marketing – customer experience, context, content, and collaboration becomes a real issue.

This article explains how business owners and customer experience (CX) teams can address the common problems of seamlessly integrating multiple marketing channels. We start by defining omnichannel marketing and its importance before discussing the leading challenges and how to overcome them.

What is Omnichannel Marketing?

Omnichannel marketing is a strategic business approach that focuses on providing a seamless and integrated customer experience across multiple channels or touchpoints. Businesses with an omnichannel marketing strategy try to create and maintain a consistent brand experience. They ensure the same customer service whether the interaction is through the company’s website, mobile app, social media, physical retail store, or any other marketing channel.

This definition of omnichannel marketing addresses how customers prioritize personalized and convenient customer experiences. Interested buyers want to engage your business on their own terms such as switching between channels or devices without interruptions in their sales journey.

Importance of Omnichannel Marketing for Businesses

An effective omnichannel customer strategy for your marketing, logistics, and supply chain teams is important for the following reasons:

• It is a crucial marketing strategy for businesses aiming for seamless, personalized customer experiences.
• Helps to meet or exceed customers’ expectations regarding the ability to access information, make purchases, and engage your brand through multiple channels.
• Effective for adopting an omnichannel approach to drive operational efficiency and save costs.
• Helps business owners to optimize inventory management and gain a competitive advantage.
• Omnichannel marketing enhances customer engagement, loyalty, and lifetime value through consistent brand interactions across multiple channels.

Omnichannel Challenges for Marketing Teams

1. Maintaining Personalized Customer Experiences

Many customers will return to a brand that already knows their preferences and promises a higher chance of a personalized sales experience. Hence, providing a relatively personal and “preference-understood” sales journey is among the omnichannel challenges for CX teams. With different channel marketing alternatives for buyers, prioritize the use of automated customer relationship management (CRM). You should also ensure selected management tools have customer success software features like customer segmentation, journey mapping, usage analytics, and dashboard reporting.

2. Tracking Customer Sales Journey Across Multiple Channels

Monitoring the customer’s sales interaction across connected business channels is one of the leading omnichannel challenges. For example, a prospect might discover a brand through a social media post and then call customer care. However, they may not complete the purchase until a follow-up email from the customer success team.

Identifying the individual contributions of sales departments to that lead conversion process becomes difficult without a multi-touch attribution model. This problem occurred because of the omnichannel customer service strategy that streamlined the process.

3. Measuring The Right KPIs at Each Stage of The Customer Success Journey

Solving the omnichannel marketing challenges of tracking the customer sales journey leads us to the problem of measuring the right KPIs. Focusing on the wrong key performance indicators for customer journey mapping can affect marketing effectiveness. Start by breaking down your sales process and carrying out a categorized analysis of your marketing channels to identify the most important KPIs. You should also segment the customer journey while ensuring a stage-by-stage analysis using automated reporting tools.

4. Effective Integration of Online and Offline Marketing Channels

The benefits of CRM software integration across multiple channels are only one side of the omnichannel marketing strategy. There is also the challenge of how to unify your offline or non-digital marketing channels with online business platforms for seamless customer interactions. An illustration is the problem of effectively tracking and comparing the results of your field marketing with social media advertising.

Solving such omnichannel challenges requires setting up special, unique reference codes for your non-digital touchpoints. Attributing the offline networks to online databases becomes easier since you have a unique code for each one.

5. Pricing for Products and Services

Setting a standard price for products and services across all your channel marketing platforms under an omnichannel selling strategy is quite a challenge. The overall cost price for each channel is different when you consider the separate supply chain and logistics.

For retail stores, the manager might sell item X at a higher price than online platforms due to physical fees and local e-commerce expenses. Some customers will try to understand while the majority calculating opportunity costs will not. A transparent pricing model that uses inventory management software to display automated product information can help.

6. Maintaining Brand Consistency

Maintaining a consistent branding style across all your omnichannel selling platforms is necessary for product visibility. Most customers will only recognize your business when you repeat the same logos, color, or lettering style. It is called product branding but is also part of the popular challenges of omnichannel marketing.

One solution is opting for channel marketing options that provide full customization features to ensure brand consistency. Retailers and every marketer should also understand your company’s digital identity in terms of branding since it depicts professionalism to many customers.

7. Consistent Checkout Process

The objective of the omnichannel customer experience is to ensure smooth and easy sales transactions regardless of the purchase platform. Available checkout options should be standard across your marketing channels. The same payment systems should be accepted whether the customer buys through your physical retail outlets or a digital medium. For example, it is confusing to the buyer if the mobile app accepts PayPal online but the website checkout does not accept it.

How to Overcome the Omnichannel Challenges for Marketing Teams

Implementing a successful omnichannel marketing strategy can be complex and challenging despite the benefits of the logistics and supply chain method. We have summarized how to overcome omnichannel challenges into two suggestions:

1. Investing in a Robust Customer Data Platform (CDP)

Solving the challenges of omnichannel marketing requires businesses to invest in a reliable customer data platform (CDP). Businesses implementing CDP technology can leverage machine learning and artificial intelligence to develop customer insights. The technology helps to build integrated customer profiles using data across multiple business channels. This creates a 360-degree overview of customer interactions that eases the omnichannel challenge of creating personalized customer experiences.

2. Implementing a Centralized Content Management System (CMS)

Another marketing strategy to overcome the top omnichannel challenges is a centralized content management system (CMS). Implementing an excellent CMS that manages all your marketing content such as images, videos or sales copy ensures consistency in brand identity and messaging.

This is important for omnichannel customer strategy where buyers interact from different channels with the hope of getting the same experience. A unified content management system consolidates data across channels such as email, social media, or in-store purchases into one centralized place.

Conclusion

Overcoming the omnichannel challenges of achieving personalized customer experiences and brand consistency across business channels is important for continuous growth. With advancements in the digital landscape, customer expectations keep evolving, and implementing centralized sales management tools becomes important.

Marketing, logistics, and supply chain teams can study the challenges in this article and how they impact the customer experience and satisfaction scores. Business owners should also be open to trying AI in customer success tools and machine learning to analyze collected data for deeper insights into building stronger B2B or B2C relationships.