How to Create and Execute Your Omnichannel Marketing Strategy

As a marketer, one can always draw parallels between cricket and omnichannel marketing. Yes, even in omnichannel marketing, all your departments must fire. From email marketing to WhatsApp marketing, all the channels must have a well defined campaign calendar before the start of every month.

Omnichannel marketing is the way a brand displays its products, offers, and support services to customers or prospects on all channels, platforms, and devices. Read our guide to learn how to create your omnichannel marketing strategy.

Table of contents

• What is omnichannel marketing?

• Elements of omnichannel marketing

• Customer retention using omnichannel marketing

  • 1. First email
  • 2. Second email
  • 3. Third email

• How to do omnichannel marketing with Mailmodo?

What is omnichannel marketing?

Omnichannel marketing is the way a brand displays its products, offers, and support services to customers or prospects on all channels, platforms, and devices. From email marketing to WhatsApp marketing, all the channels must have a well defined campaign calendar before the start of every month.

Elements of omnichannel marketing

Let’s discuss a few key elements of omnichannel marketing.

• Campaign calendar

You should always be aware of the budget and bandwidth you will consume at the start of every month. This can be streamlined when you make a detailed campaign calendar at the start of every month, defining how many campaigns you will send and which channels you will be using for each campaign.

• Email marketing

Plan your email campaigns around festivals, upcoming planned site-wide sale offers, important announcements, and newsletters promoting blogs and RSS feed mailers. Emails should be sent when there’s a need to reach out to more users. However, ensure that you are implementing a sunset policy, removing users who aren’t responding for an extensive period.

Also, interactive widgets in the email help to increase the conversion rates. Mailmodo enables you to have gamification widgets like Spin the Wheel, NPS Surveys, Embed Email Polls & Quizzes within the email itself.

• Push notifications

Plan your push notifications (PN) around moment marketing themes that can be sent instantly. Push notifications require only a copywriter’s bandwidth, hence keep 2-3 push notifications reserved for moment marketing themes like weather changes, etc.

Plan 2-3 rich notifications and plan more push notifications so that the designers have more bandwidth for the emails. Push notifications are the notifications sent without any banner whereas rich notifications are push notifications sent with a banner.

• WhatsApp marketing

The WhatsApp campaigns should be more targeted as WhatsApp is charged at up to 80p/msg. Considering the cost, WhatsApp campaigns should be targeted at getting a higher retention rate. Hence, when you send WhatsApp campaigns, target cohorts like ‘shopped at least once in 6 months but never in the last 30 days.

Related guide: How to Enhance Customer Experience to Drive Retention and Growth

• SMS marketing

SMS marketing campaigns should also be given weightage and can be sent along with the push notifications. Eg. If you have sent a push notification with a discount on your best-selling lipstick on Monday, on Wednesday, you can send an SMS campaign suppressing users who have transacted from Monday’s campaign.

• Social media

Social media marketing has emerged as one of the strongest channels, especially for brands in the beauty, travel, fintech, and fashion sectors because these sectors have the most Gen Z’s and young Millenials who are super-active on social media like Instagram. This is the channel where you should be super creative and like push notifications, social media marketing should promote all moment marketing themes.

On social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook, the brands should promote any ongoing sale with a link to the website/app. Reels on Instagram help create brand awareness and influencer marketing has emerged as one of the most profitable channels for awareness. This is because micro-influencers want to promote brands for free or at cheap prices and they have a very segmented outreach.

So, when planning your campaign calendar, ensure that you account for all types of events like World Earth Day, World Labor Day, etc.

Related guide: A Comprehensive Guide to Social Media Lead Generation

Customer retention using omnichannel marketing

Marketing automation is where all the channels synchronously work together and solve a business problem. A typical example of an abandoned cart nudge where all the channels are used is as follows:

• Abandoned cart

Reducing the drop-off between an add-to-cart and transaction. Automation ends as soon as any user completes the transaction for the abandoned cart.

1. First email

The first email is sent 30 mins after abandoning the cart.

Subject line: Hey {$name}, Did You Leave Something Behind?

Discount offered: No

A PN is sent 60 mins after abandoning the cart, reminding the user to transact.

2. Second email

The second email is sent 3 hours after abandoning the cart, if a user has still not made a purchase

Subject Line: Your Picks Are Selling Out Quick

Discount offered: No

3. Third email

The third email is sent 23 hours after abandoning the cart if a user has still not made a purchase. This is the last email in the series

Subject line: Here’s a 10% off on your cart items!

Discount offered: Yes. 10% "Cart10"

If all 3 emails aren’t opened,12 hrs after the 2nd email nudge, send an SMS,Whatsapp, and PN with the 10% discount.

• End automation

In the above flow, refer to how each channel has been used. Since emails are cheap, email is used most frequently in the entire journey, whereas WhatsApp & SMS have been used with minimum frequency. Each journey has a purpose, it tries to solve a business problem. In the above journey, the business problem is the drop-off between an add-to-cart and a transaction.

One thing to note is the power of interactive widgets in your emails which can elevate the conversion rate by 200%. At Mailmodo, you can complete the cart journey within the email itself!

Related guide: A Complete Guide to Marketing Automation

How to do omnichannel marketing with Mailmodo?

Even though Mailmodo is a full stack email marketing tool, you can integrate omnichannel tools like Clevertap, Moengage, Hubspot etc. with Mailmodo using webhooks. This will enable you to continue your omnichannel marketing program without any interference.

All in all, omnichannel marketing plays an integral role in increasing the returning customer rate and increasing the overall store revenue. However, just having access to all the channels isn’t enough.

Like the skipper of the cricket team decides when to shuffle the batting order and which bowling order is best suited for the conditions, you have to be super smart while deciding the right channel for the right audience. Read our guide on how to define your ideal customer profile for each channel involved in omnimarketing.