When digital customer experiences aren’t seamless, they quickly become digital inconveniences. The more technology advances, the more consumers expect it to keep up with their daily lives.
Most of us regularly use several inter-connected devices. It’s often the ease of use and personalisation that takes place during these experiences that makes or breaks how we feel about a brand. That’s the value of omnichannel.
Omnichannel Explained
Omnichannel is an approach to sales, marketing, publishing, and other business disciplines that provides a customer experience that’s integrated and seamless across all channels. There are no barriers or limitations based on whether a customer is consuming content from a mobile device or a desktop computer — every stage of the experience is linked.
By comparison, Multichannel publishing is what most businesses invest in — a beautifully designed website, engaging social media campaigns, perhaps SMS marketing. But as responsive and engaging as those channels might be, if they’re not working together, it’s not omnichannel.
Multichannel leaves a big gap in customer journeys that take place on different channels. But with omnichannel publishing, it doesn’t matter what channel or device the customer is using.
Customers expect Omnichannel
In the explosive digital era that we live in, businesses need to integrate customer-centric narratives if they want to stand out. And customers need to be able to easily experience that narrative no matter the channel or device.
Consider book publishing. While studies have shown that hard copy books aren’t going anywhere — the reality is that most traditional publishers don’t concern themselves with forming relationships with readers. They make deals with authors and leave much of the customer engagement process to their distributors.
The numbers of ebooks and self-published books grow each year. Because this trend disrupts the traditional buying process, traditional publishers now realise that they must start building relationships with readers. On the flip side, Amazon has long recognised the importance of consumer-centric marketing and puts a lot of its efforts towards understanding its users. It asks questions, recommends products based on a customer’s purchasing history and notifies readers when a favourite author has released a new book.
The lesson here is that while content might be king, consumers are close to taking the title.
Effective Omnichannel strategy
The first thing businesses need to do is develop a high-level omnichannel strategy for how to use customer data to integrate your content along different channels. To do that, they must understand why customers interact with each channel, what drives them to do so, and when they’re most likely to engage with it.
The objective is a 360-degree view of users based on how they interact with each channel. Then, build on that data to weave those preferences into every step of the customer’s journey to create a seamless and fully integrated experience.
But not all data is created equal.
There are many platforms, devices, channels, and people to consider, so the key is to identify which data is essential to success. There are significant trends in omnichannel that need to be included in any strategy:
- Create Adaptive Content
One of the best ways to kickstart a robust omnichannel strategy is to start creating adaptive content. Unlike static content for a general audience (if it serves everyone, it serves no one), adaptive content is highly targeted and supports personalised and meaningful interactions across multiple channels.
A customer might be browsing on their tablet but want to make the purchase from their phone — the content should change seamlessly, based on the device used, the context and the user. For example, a CTA might be “click” on a laptop, “say select” from a voice-recognition tool, or “tap” on a tablet. Every part of the user experience is adapted based on how the user is engaging with the content.
- Guide Customers Across Various Touchpoints
A strong omnichannel strategy predicts the customer’s needs and then provides the right content to satisfy those needs. One great example is how many retail brands have started to combine the customer’s offline and online experience.
Retail brand Oasis, for instance, makes sure that all sales associates on the shop floor carry iPads. When helping customers, they can quickly check inventory or even order an item directly to a home address if it’s out of stock. The customer will then receive a notification by email or SMS to let them know their item is on its way.
With this seamless way of shopping, the brand makes everything as simple as possible for the customer, while integrating each stage using different devices and channels.
- Personalise Messages and Optimise Design
Consider how Goodreads connects with users. In its weekly email newsletter, users receive book suggestions based on what their friends are reading. Instead of reading something generic like “top picks,” subscribers get personalised content in which they have a genuine interest.
Adaptive content applies to the visual elements too, and 56 percent of consumers say they would happily purchase from a brand that provides an excellent personalised experience.
Other considerations include how content will look across different platforms and on devices with varying screen sizes. How does it look on mobile, social media or an email newsletter? Content needs to go everywhere, and it needs to adjust automatically.
- Complete Your Omnichannel Publishing Strategy with Headless CMS
A headless content management system (CMS) works as a content hub with a central repository for all your content, and it makes it easy to integrate best-of-breed applications and microservices. This content hub enables greater flexibility than having to rely on the built-in features of a traditional publishing platform — but it also comes with another significant benefit.
Under the hood of a headless CMS, content is created and stored separately from programming and design. Not only does that mean content folks are free to create, optimise, and publish content without help from other teams; it also means that they can integrate with various business applications (such as CRM, translation services, AI tools, A/B testing applications, analytics parsing, and more) so that the same content can be easily re-optimised and re-published — indefinitely — for different audiences, devices, and channels. In short, headless CMS enables publishers to optimise and personalise content on a larger scale than ever before.
For modern businesses, an omnichannel strategy has become a necessity for winning customers and building a loyal audience. And while optimising content for multiple devices and channels may seem daunting — it doesn’t need to be.