Have you already come across the term omnichannel marketing, but you do not really know what it is and, above all, how omnichannel marketing can be implemented? In this article, we will explain what the challenges are on the way to omnichannel marketing and how you can overcome these challenges when implementing such a strategy using the Adobe Experience Platform as a technical basis.
The Adobe Experience Platform in a nutshell
The Adobe Experience Platform - or short: AEP - was built with the aim of combining all relevant components and tools for the implementation of omnichannel marketing in one central platform.
What is Omnichannel Marketing?
Omnichannel marketing is a marketing strategy that aims to offer (potential) customers a consistent interaction with a company or brand across all available marketing and sales channels.
What Role does the Customer Journey play in the Context of Omnichannel marketing?
Omnichannel marketing is hardly imaginable without the concept of the customer journey. It forms the heart of this strategy. Along the journey, the individual touchpoints between a customer and the company are linked - both online and offline. Depending on the phase of the customer journey, customers have different needs towards the company and the aim of omnichannel marketing is to fulfill these needs across all touchpoints. The entire customer journey should be run through in a consistent way in order to make the customer experience as positive as possible.
Omnichannel vs. Multichannel
Consistency is also a good keyword when it comes to considering omni- vs. multichannel marketing. In this comparison, the focus is on a comprehensively consistent customer experience. This is only achievable for companies that pursue an omnichannel strategy, as the way of approaching the customer is standardized across all available channels without exception. In contrast, a company that works according to a multichannel strategy has only harmonized the majority of its channels and not all of themHere, there is often a break in the customer experience, particularly between the online and offline worlds. In this article you can learn more about the differences between omnichannel vs. multichannel.
Challenges on the Way to an Omnichannel Strategy
Pursuing an omnichannel strategy will bring your company many benefits and strengthen customer loyalty to your brand and products. Would you like to find out more about these benefits? Then you are welcome to visit our overview page on omnichannel marketing. However, you will face some challenges on the way to a successful omnichannel strategy, for which we can already present you some potential solutions based on our experience:
1. You have identified gaps in the data view on your customers
Your goal is very clear: you want to choose the best possible approach to meet the needs of your customers. In order to achieve this goal, you need one thing above all: information. Information about who your customers are and what they want. The good news is that this data is probably already available to you. They can be found in your analytics tools and CRM systems and they are waiting to be used. Of course, you can now start to analyze the data in each tool and try to generate information. What if you could bring this data together for each individual customer and assess it as a whole?
The Realtime Customer Profile in the Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) offers exactly this solution. This makes it possible to combine all your customer data - in compliance with data protection guidelines - and use it for further analyses.
2. You cannot create standardized customer segments across all channels
Another key problem in omnichannel marketing is that different marketing tools often work separately from each other and use different data sources. As a result, the segmentation of customers is inconsistent depending on the channel or tool, which makes it difficult to create a consistent, personalized customer experience. For example, an email marketing tool, a CRM software and a social media platform could create different customer segments because they access unsynchronized data. To solve this problem, you need a central program that creates uniform segments.
With the Adobe Experience Platform, the same segments can be distributed throughout all marketing tools and channels to ensure that customers are addressed in a personalized and consistent way across all touchpoints. This ensures a consistent customer journey and increases the efficiency of marketing measures.
3. There are gaps in the evaluations of your omnichannel campaigns
Measuring success is essential for the effective implementation of your omnichannel strategy. A major challenge here is the precise and comprehensive evaluation of campaign performance, as the data comes from different tools and the data sources are therefore not linked to each other. Consequently, the disconnect between systems means that key insights are lost or incomplete, making it difficult to assess the overall effectiveness of an omnichannel campaignTo ensure a consistent and seamless evaluation, Customer Journey Analytics is a solution within the Adobe Experience Platform that integrates the entire campaign data from all channels and platforms used.
This central system makes it possible to analyze the overall success of the campaign across all touchpoints, identify correlations and undertake optimizations without data gaps or inaccuracies.
4. There are conflicts in the allocation of marketing budgets between the different touchpoints
Furthermore, a major challenge in omnichannel marketing is that different teams within a company often pursue different and sometimes even contradictory goals. Sales, marketing, customer service or IT can have their own priorities, which often leads to them working against each other instead of with one another. Moreover, it is often intensified when it comes to allocating marketing budgets, as each team tries to secure as many resources as possible for their own initiatives. These internal political battles are an obstacle to a unified omnichannel strategy.
At the same time, it is crucial for the success of such a strategy that the company's overall goals are in focus and that decisions are made on the basis of objective, data-driven analyses. For this purpose, the Adobe Experience Platform offers the Mix Modeler, which uses campaign data to provide AI-driven and therefore objective recommendations on how marketing budgets should be allocated. This ensures harmonized collaboration across teams to optimally support the customer journey and exploit the full potential of the omnichannel approach.
Conclusion
Omnichannel marketing offers companies the opportunity to address their customers in a consistent and highly personalized way across all channels. Nevertheless, there are a number of challenges on the way to implementing a successful omnichannel strategy, including fragmented customer data, inconsistent segmentation and difficulties in evaluating campaigns.
The solution to these problems lies in the use of central tools such as the Adobe Experience Platform, which brings together all customer data, as well as Customer Journey Analytics and the Mix Modeler to efficiently manage budget allocation. This makes it possible to exploit the full potential of omnichannel marketing.
Have we sparked your interest?
Anna Graser
