What is Omnichannel Customer Engagement

The digital world is constantly evolving, with newer channels emerging daily. On the other hand, innovations are being made to existing channels based on user behavior. From social media, blogs, and influencer marketing, to podcasts, content marketing, and display ads, brands are looking to be present at every customer touchpoint and to engage with larger audiences at any given time. This momentum is fraught with both opportunity and chaos, as leveraging so many channels can be an overwhelming experience for marketers and brands.

This means not only identifying the right channels, but also managing them, measuring outcomes, and capturing insights that can influence marketing strategies. Optimizing the experience derives a higher return on investment.

Here is where omnichannel customer engagement comes in as a tech-enabled solution. This marketing approach helps brands seamlessly offer a blended experience across multiple marketing channels while managing all from a single platform.

Core Marketing Challenges Faced by Brands

#1. Building quality and consistency

One of the common issues brands face is maintaining quality and consistency across all channels. Often, some brands build an impressive social media footprint, but their mobile store experience may not match up. This creates confusion among consumers, who get disappointed and drop off. Omnichannel solutions help brands curate a consistently good experience across all channels.

#2. Streamlining data

Every channel generates fresh data almost every minute of the day. Data is valuable for brands. However, it does not tell a unified story without bringing together sales, products, and user data. AI-powered customer engagement is equipped to seamlessly integrate all data, thus empowering brands to derive insights that influence key marketing, sales, and business decisions.

#3. Activating communication

A major challenge for brands is keeping the communication alive with customers after they either make a purchase or leave after browsing. They need a proper workflow to facilitate meaningful communication that builds brand trust and inspires repeat purchases.

Customers must not see communication as spam but as something useful to their consumer journey. Omnichannel engagement platforms facilitate communication with ease and in creative ways. They also enable brands to do it in a scalable way.

#4. Personalizing consumer experiences: Consumers are more likely to engage with a brand if the communication, product recommendations, and other engagement activities are relevant to their needs and interests. Managing such an expectation at scale is a mammoth task, but omnichannel engagement platforms offer solutions to elevate consumer experiences.

#5. Real-time engagement: Expectations among consumers have risen to such an extent that they seek responses in seconds. This could be across social media platforms, online stores, messaging channels, and websites/ apps. An omnichannel retail experience enable brands to rise to these expectations and respond to consumers quickly and efficiently.

Reducing Cognitive Overload for Consumers

Consumers use multiple apps, including social media and messaging apps. Brands, which don't offer a seamless, delightful, clutter-free experience for consumers, will have more drop-offs, higher cart abandonment, and reduced traffic.

Even if platforms have a high level of traffic, it does not necessarily convert to sales. This poses a problem for brands that may be doing a lot in communication and yet cannot derive the necessary results.

This is where a robust omnichannel customer engagement platform can help brands plug in the gaps. Sometimes a 'less is more' approach is more likely to work, provided it is strategic and provides value to the consumer.

Three Brands Leveraging Omnichannel Engagement

A growing number of brands are embracing omnichannel customer engagement channels to help improve efficiency, reduce drop-offs, increase conversions, and boost return on investment.

Some case studies demonstrate how brands can benefit by leveraging smart platforms such as Vizury's Engage360 omnichannel marketing platform. Strategy is key to these journeys, where specific channels are used to derive the necessary results.

#1. PetSutra: Increase conversions, consistency, ROI

One-stop online pet supply store PetSutra was looking to streamline its marketing efforts across multiple channels since its consumers were present across the web, mobile, email, and social media. Scaling up was a challenge, with so many channels being managed simultaneously. The online retailer had Vizury help streamline engagement across all channels to make it cohesive and scalable by leveraging its Engage360 omnichannel marketing platform. Through this approach, PetSutra was able to:

✅Drive high-quality user engagement and conversions across all digital channels, and improve consistency.

✅Connect with users who dropped off from its product and cart pages and improve conversions and the Customer Lifetime Value.

✅Enhance personalization by introducing personalized product recommendations and offers to customers across multiple channels through social media ads, dynamic push messaging, and emails.

This approach helped PetSutra address all user engagement issues by targeting consumers on a 1:1 basis using Vizury’s proprietary algorithms, which enable dynamic omnichannel notifications and advertising. This resulted in a 7X improvement in conversions, a 5X increase in click-through rates (CTR) for product and checkout pages, a 7X improvement in the overall web conversion rate, and a 3.5X improvement in the notification engagement rate with dynamic push notifications, and 2X ROI.

#2. Koovs: Increasing conversions

Online retailer Koovs was looking to increase its conversion rate and customer LTV during their End Of Season Sale, a major event on the brand's calendar. Omnichannel customer engagement platform Vizury recommended two engagement solutions:

✅Personalize the consumer purchase cycles by adding dynamic in-app and push notifications at every stage.

✅Optimize marketing campaigns to boost return on investment.

Through these interventions, Koovs increased conversions by 11%, sign-ups by 43%, and Add-to-Cart improved by 45%.

#3. LuckyVitamin: Reducing cart abandonment

US-based online retailer LuckyVitamin was experiencing a high cart abandonment rate. Despite seeing high monthly traffic, user drop-offs were increasing. Poor performance on these two key metrics resulted in average conversion rates. The brand leveraged Vizury's capabilities to build a strategy to address these challenges.

✅It sent dynamic, hyper-personalized push notifications to create meaningful engagement with users.

✅Based on user activity, it focused on improving cart recovery and reducing user-drop offs.

✅It established active communication to alert users of price reductions, sales, and "back-in-stock" status updates for the products on their wishlist, in-cart items, and those viewed by them.

Leveraging Vizury's Engage 360 platform, LuckyVitamin completely overhauled its push messaging approach. This resulted in a 7X improvement in conversions, user engagement increasing by 3X, and a 4X improvement in click-through rates by leveraging rich media push notifications. Vizury’s push messaging platform helped deliver a 21X improvement in return on investment.

The Takeaway

The digital world is moving towards a framework where brands can sell anywhere a consumer is, from publishing and eCommerce platforms to blogs, messaging services, and gaming apps. This mirrors the trajectory of Internet users, whose behavior is continuously evolving. As they spend more time online, brands need to understand how and where consumers are present and capitalize on the opportunity in a scalable way.

Superior omnichannel customer engagement platforms enable brands to strategize, execute and optimize engagement with consumers with just the right frequency, thus enhancing the customer experience and extending the customer lifetime value with their brands.