Apr 23, 2024
Today’s customer journeys are more difficult to track than ever as customers use a plethora of digital and physical touchpoints to interact with brands. At the same time, most marketing teams use tons of disconnected solutions to reach customers and analyze their behavior.
This creates leads to a cascade of problems:
The purpose of omnichannel marketing is to avoid these issues by ensuring a consistent customer journey across all physical and digital channels.
In this guide, you’ll learn how to achieve that by understanding, mapping, and personalizing your customers’ omnichannel journeys. We’ll start by covering the basics of omnichannel customer journeys and move on to practical advice around data analysis, journey orchestration, and personalization.
Omnichannel customer journey 101: Definition, channels, and channels
How to create personalized and automated omnichannel customer journeys
Take your omnichannel marketing to the next level with Insider
The term omnichannel customer journey refers to the complete experience customers have with your brand across all touchpoints. This includes their interactions with your physical (e.g., your brick-and-mortar stores and branch offices) and digital (e.g., your website, mobile app, emails, social media, chatbots, and so on) channels.
When done well, omnichannel marketing leads to seamless experiences that nudge customers towards the desired goal — whether that’s buying a product, filling out a form, or booking a service — with relevant and contextual messaging at every turn.
However, in many cases, customers’ experiences across different channels are still disjointed, leading to poor engagement and conversions.
For example, say a customer recently bought a pair of shoes using a brand’s mobile app (or directly from its physical store). Unfortunately, the brand doesn’t have a solid approach to delivering omnichannel customer experiences, so it continually targets the customer with online ads, push notifications, and on-site recommendations that promote those same shoes. Besides lowering engagement and annoying customers, this approach costs the company time and money that could’ve been spent on much more targeted offers.
In the next sections, you’ll learn how to avoid these types of issues and maximize each customer interaction using contextual, personalized, and automated omnichannel campaigns.
The steps you need to take to ensure consistent journeys across channels will vary depending on your organization’s size and experience with omnichannel marketing.
Based on our experience of working with over 1200+ leading brands, there are three essential elements for delivering personalized, high-converting omnichannel journeys:
The omnichannel approach to marketing is data-driven and based on reliable insight into your customers’ behaviors. This means the only way to successfully nurture leads and customers across their complex journeys is to first understand how they interact with your brand across touchpoints.
This is a massive challenge for many companies, as their customer data is locked in different systems. For example, today’s marketing teams use a plethora of solutions in their day-to-day, including:
This creates data silos, which prevent marketers from getting a complete, clear view of their customers’ journeys without investing tons of time, effort, and engineering hours.
That’s why a very useful first step to understanding your customers’ experiences is to unify your data with a customer data platform (CDP).
CDPs are built to solve this issue specifically, as they can aggregate customer data from different sources into a single convenient database. They can also resolve omnichannel identities to create clear, detailed, and actionable 360-degree customer profiles.
For example, Insider’s CDP can unify data from any online and offline source, including CMSs, CRMs, APIs, PoS devices, analytics tools, automation platforms, channel-specific tools, and much more. It also gives you detailed views of each customer with crucial information, like:
These unified profiles can serve as a solid foundation for your omnichannel marketing efforts. Once your data is unified, you can be confident that all analyses you perform are based on all the available real-time information you have for your customers and their interactions with your brand.
From here, you can begin analyzing customer behavior in terms of important goals, events, and much more. For example, Insider offers a comprehensive suite of behavior analytics tools to do that, including:
Lastly, if you’re already running omnichannel campaigns, you have a dedicated analytics panel where you can track their results. You can analyze how each campaign performed, see the total number of clicks and conversions, the revenue it generated, and much more.
You can also dive deeper into each channel or step of your campaigns to understand its contribution to the overall results. Put simply, you have everything needed to analyze your customers’ omnichannel journeys in detail.
The final useful tip we can provide for this stage is to create a customer journey map for important segments. Journey mapping is a well-known method for visualizing the process people go through to accomplish their goals.
Most journey maps, like the one shown below, cover a few essential elements, like actor, scenario, customer expectations, pain points, journey phases, actions, and opportunities.
If you’re interested in how to build such maps and why they’re so beneficial, check out Journey Mapping 101 by the Nielsen Norman Group.
With the difficult task of analyzing your customers’ omnichannel experience out of the way, you can begin creating consistent journeys for them. This process is called journey orchestration and it requires a versatile customer journey builder.
For example, Insider offers an omnichannel customer journey builder called Architect. With it, you can use a simple drag-and-drop editor for all sorts of omnichannel use cases — from simple email welcome flows to complex omnichannel campaigns that span across channels and evolve depending on customers’ behaviors.
You have complete control over each step of your omnichannel campaigns. For example, you can select the channels, choose when each message gets triggered, set conditions that need to be met before a message can be sent, and much more.
Plus, you can analyze the results right inside the journey builder by zooming into different steps and tracking key metrics like clicks, drop-offs, revenue, and so on.
You can also leverage various AI-powered features that can save you lots of time and resources when building and optimizing your omnichannel campaigns, including:
As you can see, Architect is extremely versatile when it comes to building and automating different types of omnichannel journeys. Here are three real-life examples of how marketing teams have used it to deliver consistent user experiences and achieve key organizational goals:
2. Chow Sang Sang: This jewelry brand used Insider to create more consistent journeys across their website and email communications. With our solution, their team was able to source product recommendations based on the interests displayed by their customers and promote them in their emails with just one click. This led to a conversion rate of uplift of 23.5% and a 59% boost in average session duration.
3. Generali: This leading financial services company used Insider to deliver an engaging and consistent experience across their website and build a bespoke omnichannel lead validation journey. The journey spanned across the company’s website, email communications, push notifications, and SMS messages. With Insider, Generali saw a 3x increase in leads and a 20% reduction in sales cycle length.
For even more ideas and examples, check out our guides to:
Besides orchestrating contextual journeys, a complete omnichannel experience requires each customer touchpoint to be personalized.
This is just as important as optimal send times and smart channel selection, as it ensures you’re making the most out of every interaction. Insider is an advanced personalization solution that’s built to do exactly that.
You can use our platform to deliver a completely personalized experience across your:
Besides these channels, you can also use Insider to deliver highly relevant ads across Google, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. For a deeper dive into this topic, check out our guide to achieving personalization at scale.
Insider can help you analyze your customers’ omnichannel experience and build personalized, automated, and highly effective campaigns across their preferred touchpoints — from your channel and mobile app to email, push notifications, SMS, WhatsApp, and more.
Our omnichannel customer engagement platform can:
Finally, our easy channel integrations, experienced customer support team, and versatile templates will help you implement a successful omnichannel strategy as fast as possible.
Schedule a demo with our team to learn how Insider can benefit your business specifically.
Written by
Katie Morley
Katie is an award-winning content marketer with over eight years of experience in content strategy, development, and copywriting. As Global Content Director at Insider, she currently oversees content strategy across 26 regions. Fun fact: Katie read 64 books last year (for which she owes a long commute and two week-long holidays where she spent approximately six hours a day with her nose in a book).