Introducing the 10X Power of Omnichannel Marketing

By Nick Pietropinto

In my last article, I wrote about the reasons why your single-channel direct-to-consumer (D2C) digital and social media marketing may be hitting a wall with diminishing returns. I also introduced a powerful strategy for breaking through that wall: omnichannel marketing. Now let’s dive into that a bit deeper.

First, I want you to think about all the potential opportunities your customers have to interact with your products and brand on any given day — on social media, TV, radio, podcast, outdoor billboards, magaines, and in person. Perhaps you’ve heard of the “Marketing Rule of 7,” which suggests that a prospective customer needs to be exposed to a brand’s message at least seven times before they buy your products or services.

Now let’s take that basic rule even further: Google research tells us that a buyer requires seven hours of interaction across 11 touchpoints in four different locations before the decide to purchase. And even that might not be enough to break through the clutter. Which means that if you’re focusing your marketing on just Facebook or Amazon or another single channel, chances are you’re going to hit that wall sooner rather than later.

That’s where a robust omnichannel strategy comes into play. Before we delve into it, let’s clarify a common misperception. Omnichannel is not to be confused with multichannel. True, multichannel marketing employs more than one channel for campaigns, but that’s where the similarities end. With multichannel marketing, there’s little to no differentiation or personalization in the marketing content used across various channels. Valuing quantity over quality, multichannel casts the widest net possible to drive up customer engagement.

Omnichannel marketing, on the other hand, is much more strategic and, therefore, more effective. An omnichannel strategy employs multiple channels that may include digital and social media, TV, radio, email, podcasts, web, influencers, print, outdoor billboards, mobile apps, SMS, and more to reach and attract customers. But unlike multichannel marketing, omnichannel takes a completely customer-centric approach driven by data about consumer behaviors, preferred channels, and where the consumer is in their customer journey.

Leveraging this data, an omnichannel marketer will know exactly which message to show customers, using the best channels at the best time to do so. As such, omnichannel marketing becomes a highly personalized experience that generates a much higher conversation rate.

The power of omnichannel to drive conversions and sales can be attributed to a number of other factors, as well. By leveraging multiple channels and capturing consumer data from each one, omnichannel marketing provides much greater visibility into how consumers engage as they switch from one channel to the next. This data can come from CRM and email platforms, website analytics, paid searches, SEO and keyword tracking, social media analytics, mobile app usage, sales or call center teams, and more. All this data provides insight into customer motivations and dynamics at each touchpoint, allowing you to create campaigns that specifically address those needs.

An omnichannel marketing strategy also allows brands to make sure they're creating a unified, consistent, and seamless customer experience and messaging across all channels. This works effectively to increase brand awareness, recognition, recall, and loyalty, which — in turn — leads to repeat sales.

Even better, omnichannel marketing has a butterfly effect. Much like compounding interest that allows your money to grow over time, omnichannel campaigns also have a compound benefit that builds with each layer to propel your marketing into 10X mode. When you make a change or enhancement to one channel, the ripple effect extends across all your channels so that they're continually reinforcing each other. This butterfly effect also means that your omnichannel marketing campaigns end up reaching audiences who might otherwise never encounter your brand or products.

If this all sounds too good to be true, just take a look at the numbers. Research reveals that companies with well-defined omnichannel customer experience strategies achieve a 91-percent higher year-over-year increase in customer retention rate than organizations with no omnichannel strategy. An analysis of more than 135,000 campaigns sent in 2021 — representing more than 610 million messages — showed that marketers who used three or more channels in a campaign received an astounding 494-percent higher order rate than those using a single-channel campaign approach.

But while many companies are striving to create an omnichannel strategy, success can be elusive. In a survey of senior consumer packaged goods (CPG) executives, 80 percent of respondents said they had launched omnichannel efforts, but less than 25 percent were confident in the direction they were going. And while more than 87 percent of them agree that having an omnichannel marketing strategy is critical to their business success, only 8 percent have succeeded in implementing one.

The moral of the lesson: if you truly want to tap into the power of omnichannel, you must make sure you have the right strategy, data, and partner in place. When creating and implementing your omnichannel program, make sure you’re checking off all the critical boxes:

• Are you capturing the data you need to make the best decisions about where and when to place your campaigns?

• Does every touchpoint in your customers’ journey, across every channel, provide a consistent experience?

• Are you delivering relevant, personalized messages, based on data you’ve captured about your customers’ behaviors and preferences?

To maximize success, you’ll also need to identify the most effective cadence for your omnichannel campaigns — where, when, and how often to engage with your audience. That includes investing the right amount of money in just the right channels at just the right time to create that customer awareness, which then unlocks other new channels that continue to amplify your exposure and expand your reach even further. Once you get that formula down, you’ll be able to maximize that butterfly effect and accelerate your marketing into 10X mode.

Creating that winning formula, however, doesn’t happen by magic. It takes experience, resources, and a data-driven methodology that most D2C businesses simply don’t have on hand. That’s why working with a seasoned, proven partner with omnichannel expertise makes sense. The partner you select should be able to serve up the data you need in a single, easy-to-read dashboard. They should have a clear methodology to create that formula for your omnichannel marketing mix. And they should have the relationships and resources to negotiate and find the most advantageous terms for your media purchases.

One last thought: when it comes to your marketing strategy, you may feel inclined to put all your eggs into one digital basket. Be wary of marketing partners who focus only on digital and/or social, and here’s why: traditional TV, for example, is still very much alive and kicking and deserves a very active role in your omnichannel marketing strategy.

Keep in mind that more than 60 million U.S. households still have pay TV. Estimates indicated that U.S. adults will spend an average of two hours, 33 minutes watching TV each day in 2023. And TV leads the way when it comes to which device consumers are most willing to engage with advertisers. Despite its growth, in 2023, ad spend for subscription over-the-top (OTT) is expected to remain at just one-sixth of linear TV ad spend. There’s a reason marketers continue to invest more in linear TV marketing.

In my next article, I’ll address why linear TV is far from being “dead,” and why it actually should be a key component of your marketing mix. We’ll also take a closer look at how to incorporate linear TV into your omnichannel marketing program. In the meantime, feel free to reach out to me with any questions about how to optimize your omnichannel marketing to grow your brand and D2C success.

Nick Pietropinto is the founder and CEO of Double Diamond VIP. He can be reached via email at nick@doublediamondvip.com. For more, visit TryD2C.com.