Omnichannel Customer Engagement: How to Personalize at Scale

Effective marketing automation is a key part of a successful omnichannel customer engagement strategy.

Here we look at omnichannel marketing vs multichannel marketing, and the tools you need to build connected customer experiences at scale.

Every day your customers are hit with a deluge of ads and irrelevant messages – and their patience is wearing thin.

Impersonal messages annoy 54% of people, are ignored by 47%, and are the reason why more than 1 in 5 people switched brand allegiance during the COVID-19 lockdown.

These figures are from our 2020 customer engagement report, which reveals a huge disconnect between the type of communications consumers value and the reality of what they receive from companies today.

A staggering 74% of people are not getting personalized communications from brands, despite the fact that 49% of people are open to relevant communications on a weekly basis – and 31% are more likely to engage with businesses that understand their preferences.

We’ve been talking “right message, right channel, right time” for years now – so how are businesses still getting this wrong?

At the heart of the struggle to deliver personalized, contextual interactions at scale is the mass shift to digital channels – something the pandemic has hugely accelerated.

Today we must meet our customers across a growing array of digital channels, navigating technical complexities and vast amounts of customer data to deliver valuable brand moments at every stage of the customer journey.

We know that:

Despite these considerations and nuances, many companies do not have an omnichannel customer engagement strategy, and still take a multichannel (or even single channel) approach.

The result is disjointed, depersonalized messaging that delivers a poor customer experience that harms customer acquisition, conversion, and retention.

Omnichannel customer engagement is about building connected customer experiences at scale. This starts with understanding the relative strengths and weaknesses of omnichannel digital marketing versus multichannel marketing.

In multichannel marketing, a brand uses multiple channels to engage customers, but without any integration between those channels:

Omnichannel marketing differs from multichannel marketing in several key ways:

The key difference with omnichannel marketing is that you remove the silos. Omnichannel leverages a central point of customer data – which is crucial for providing consistent, compelling experiences, whatever the channels or customer journey stage that applies for individual customers.

But personalizing every individual message, for each customer and each channel, is extremely difficult for companies to do on their own – not to mention time consuming.

So how can companies provide personalized, contextual experiences at scale?

Automating your omnichannel customer engagement is key to improving individual customer journeys at scale, while freeing up marketers to focus their efforts on engagement strategy and optimization.

An omnichannel marketing automation hub unifies customer data across all your touchpoints, providing a single solution that addresses the entire workflow. This allows you to:

Brands like Brazilian fintech Juros Baixos are using omnichannel marketing automation to provide in-moment, real-time guidance based on a customer’s individual context.

Moments, Infobip’s omnichannel customer engagement hub, allows the fintech to deliver proactive, event-triggered communication across multiple channels – all within a single automation flow.

Here’s a quick example of where omnichannel automation can be used to boost engagement across different parts of the customer journey – in this case, to tackle cart abandonment.

Let’s say a customer is browsing your site on their laptop. They add an item to their cart, but soon move onto doing something else.

After setting up an automation sequence to target cart abandonment, you have multiple options:

The beauty of an omnichannel approach is that when this individual returns to your site the following day on a different device, you’re able to recognize them as the same individual with the item in their cart. And where an initial push notification fails to deliver, you can set parameters to automate fallback options using other channels.

Tip: download our omnichannel marketing automation guide for a detailed look at more examples and use cases.

There’s no silver bullet for achieving personalized customer engagement at scale – as we explored in this post.

Even with omnichannel marketing automation, marketers need to continually test, measure, and learn to optimize their strategies and continually improve the customer experiences they deliver.

That said, an omnichannel customer engagement hub gives marketers the unified data and tools they need to continually refine their marketing programs and deliver relevant, timely, and personal messaging – moments that matter.

It’s why companies across a wide range of industries rely on tools such as Moments to power their customer engagement strategies.

To learn more about the business benefits and use cases for omnichannel customer engagement, download our Omnichannel Marketing Automation Guide.