Katie Morley
Jan 15, 2024
Katie Morley
Jan 15, 2024
Omnichannel personalization is the key to delivering consistent and relevant customer journeys. By creating personalized experiences across all channels, marketing teams achieve far better engagement, conversion rates, retention, and acquisition costs.
However, most brands face significant barriers to achieving omnichannel personalization. To start, they must overcome customer data silos and fragmented martech stacks. Plus, getting the right solutions and people to manage the process can be an ordeal, particularly for companies with big customer bases.
But with recent advances in marketing technology, omnichannel personalization is no longer a pipe dream. In fact, we’ve seen lots of brands implement it successfully and grow their conversions, revenue, and marketing return on investment (ROI).
For example:
In this guide, you’ll learn what omnichannel personalization is and how it differs from the more standard multichannel personalization. Then, we’ll show you the key benefits and foundational steps for implementing it with Insider — our cross-channel marketing and personalization platform.
Insider can help you implement omnichannel personalization across all touchpoints, from your website and mobile app to channels like email, push notifications, SMS, and WhatsApp. Visit our website or schedule a demo with our team to learn more.
What is omnichannel personalization?
3 foundational steps for getting started with omnichannel personalization
How Insider’s platform enables omnichannel personalization
3 brands driving ROI with Insider’s omnichannel personalization tools
Maximize your revenue with Insider’s omnichannel personalization suite
Frequently asked questions (FAQs) about omnichannel personalization
Omnichannel personalization is the process of tailoring the experience of each customer to their needs and preferences across all touchpoints in their journey.
It builds on the principles of personalized marketing but operates across multiple channels (e.g., your website, mobile app, email communications, and so on) to deliver relevant, contextual, and timely experiences at every step.
Every company has a different amount of experience with personalization. Regardless of where you may be, the steps below are a good starting point for working toward omnichannel personalization. In the sections below, you’ll learn how each of these steps lays a solid foundation for successful omnichannel marketing.
Getting a full picture of your customers’ experience — including their behaviors, preferences, and interactions with your brand — isn’t easy.
With the number of customers’ digital touchpoints increasing and customer information locked away in different systems (e.g., email marketing software, analytics platforms, CRMs, customer survey tools, and so on), having all your data in one place is critical for making fast data-driven decisions.
That’s why one of the best ways to get started with omnichannel personalization is to create 360-degree customer views, usually with the help of a customer data platform (CDP).
CDPs help marketers overcome data silos by combining data from digital (e.g., website, email, or social media) and in-store customer interactions.
For example, Insider’s enterprise CDP enables the creation of rich, 360-degree customer profiles that serve as a basis for omnichannel personalization. These profiles contain the key information you need to personalize each customer’s experience, including:
Put simply, CDPs help you uncover and understand customer needs and preferences. They also help you avoid having to navigate and integrate different systems constantly, which simplifies your workflows and decision-making.
Plus, if you’re working with a Campaign CDP like Insider, you’ll have access to built-in personalization and marketing automation tools for various digital channels (e.g., on-site, email, SMS, WhatsApp, and more). This means you can aggregate and activate your customer data from one place, which simplifies your martech stack even more.
For more details, check out our guide on how CDPs help marketing teams drive growth and efficiency.
In the past, marketers had certain limitations in how they could segment their audiences. Most marketing tools relied on standard characteristics (like devices, locations, and technologies), which, while useful, typically weren’t enough for precise segmentation.
With today’s advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and segmentation software, you can get much more granular and effective in your segmentation and targeting efforts.
You can target customers based on predicted behaviors, such as likelihood to purchase or engage on a specific channel. For example, Insider lets you create precise segments by using over 120+ traits, characteristics, and behaviors across three different audience types:
For more information on building detailed customer segments, check out our customer targeting guide.
A CDP helps to unify customer data. Segmentation helps you identify who to target. From here, you need to activate your customer data across channels.
Data activation means using your customer data to send the right message to the right person, through the right channel, at the right time.
Having an enterprise marketing solution with broad channel support and personalization capabilities can ease your efforts in that context because you won’t have to connect a bunch of additional systems to build successful marketing campaigns.
In contrast, using multiple disconnected systems often drains digital marketing teams’ time, energy, and resources, resulting in inconsistent customer experiences and suboptimal results.
That’s why Insider provides native support for 12+ channels. This gives you the ability to personalize content, messaging, and product recommendations across:
For example, you can send personalized messages via email, push notifications, SMS, or Facebook Messenger in response to transactions, events, or user behaviors. You also have a plethora of proven templates for all of these channels that you can easily customize.
You can even design end-to-end conversational buying and checkout experiences through WhatsApp Commerce, allowing your customers to discover, browse, or buy without leaving WhatsApp.
If you’re interested, we’ve explored lots of omnichannel marketing best practices in our guides to:
Insider lets you achieve omnichannel personalization by enabling the three foundational steps discussed above — data aggregation, segmentation, and broad channel support — and a few additional capabilities.
In this section, we’ll explore additional features that let you personalize at scale and orchestrate cross-channel journeys with Insider’s customer journey builder — Architect.
Insider combines the power of unified customer data and AI to help marketers deliver relevant, contextual, and timely experiences at every step of the customer journey across any channel — and at scale.
Here are just a few of our personalization tools that you can use to tailor content, messaging, and product recommendations to each use:
Insider’s AI-powered Smart Recommender lets you deliver relevant product recommendations across different pages of your site. It enables you to utilize all kinds of product recommendation strategies, like recently viewed, frequently purchased together, top sellers, and many more.
Put simply, you can use Smart Recommender to ensure users are always seeing products that are personalized to their needs and preferences.
You can also extend these recommendations beyond your website and mobile app to channels like email, push notifications, SMS, and WhatsApp. For example, Chow Sang Sang used Smart Recommender across their website and email communications to achieve a 23.5% increase in conversion rate.
To learn more about how Insider’s Smart Recommender works along with additional use cases and benefits, check out our guide on product recommendation engines.
Insider’s EUREKA — an AI-powered site search and merchandising tool — also helps your customers find what they’re looking for faster when searching your site.
EUREKA customizes search results to each customer based on browsing history, preferences, or market trends. It also improves search precision with advanced filtering.
For example, if a customer is loyal to one brand of sneakers, has an affinity for a certain price range, and searches the keyword “sneakers,” EUREKA can automatically populate the results page on your app or website with relevant affinity- and price-based recommendations.
This type of personalization alone can massively improve conversions, bounce rates, and AOV.
Insider’s InStory enables you to speed up and enhance your customers’ product discovery through personalized Instagram-like stories. You can embed these on both your website and mobile app.
Again, our AI algorithms analyze visitors’ past purchases, real-time behaviors, and interests, so they can personalize each story to the user opening it.
For example, the marketing team at Joker used InStory to deliver relevant and personalized brand stories for each user, including last-minute deals, top picks, and new arrivals.
In less than a month, Joker’s marketing team was able to improve the overall conversion rate by 18%. Additionally, the group of visitors who were shown the InStory personalization displayed a 73% uplift in conversion rate compared to the control group. Click here to check out the full case study.
Templates save you time and effort, enabling you to launch personalization campaigns and see ROI faster.
That’s why Insider has a massive library of 100+ pre-built templates for different use cases and channels. For example, you can use channel-specific templates for email, SMS, and web push, but also journey templates for omnichannel use cases.
Using these templates doesn’t require any coding. You can customize them with a simple drag-and-drop editor and quickly do things like:
It’s one thing to access multiple channels and personalize the content on them. However, connecting and personalizing the entire journey across those channels is a much bigger challenge.
Insider makes this process much easier with Architect — our flexible customer journey builder that lets you build consistent, personalized omnichannel journeys across 12+ touchpoints, including:
Architect offers a simple and intuitive drag-and-drop editor to create personalized experiences across all these channels.
While there are plenty of templates you can use, you can also start from scratch. You can choose from seven different ways to start each journey via this editor, as shown here:
For more details on the various starters available, check out our customer journey builder.
While building a fully integrated customer journey can seem overwhelming at first, Insider’s AI capabilities make it easy by doing a lot of the heavy lifting for you. Below are additional features that will help you create consistent, relevant customer experiences.
Insider lets you A/B test pretty much anything, from simple messaging and call-to-action (CTA) changes to send times and entire journey flows on different channels. That way, you don’t have to guess what’s going to perform best. In Architect, you can easily direct different sets of customers to different channels to see which one performs better:
You also don’t need to manually evaluate the results of each test. Insider’s A/B winner auto-selection feature uses machine learning algorithms to detect the winning path in an A/B test and automatically directs users to it. That way, you don’t have to analyze results or change journeys manually.
For example, suppose you want to see whether a customer segment might prefer email or SMS as an outreach channel. You can set a winning metric (e.g., conversion rate or open rate) as well as a calculation duration (e.g., 7 days). After that, Insider will automatically send future messages through the winning channel.
This capability can save you tons of time and let you scale your A/B tests across channels and use cases.
This feature automatically sends each message at the time that individual customers are most likely to engage. This eliminates the need for guesswork or multiple rounds of A/B testing to determine the optimal time to trigger each step in your campaigns.
If there is no available data for certain users, such as those who have recently shared their contact information with you, Insider will send them the message immediately. As users interact with your brand through your website, mobile app, and other channels, our platform will analyze their behaviors, allowing you to utilize STO in the future.
If you’re struggling to figure out which channel works best, Insider’s next-best channel predictions feature can automatically select the channel that has the highest chance of engaging and converting each customer based on their behaviors and preferences.
Instead of guessing which channel customers would want to use, this feature analyzes their past behaviors and automatically uses the channel they’re most likely to engage on. All you have to do is click on the “Next Best Channel” option and add your channels:
Insider’s Sirius AI™ can help you put even more of your omnichannel personalization work on autopilot. Sirius AI is a set of tools designed to help you spend less time on manual tasks and focus more on driving conversions and revenue.
For example, you can use Sirius AI to:
Overall, Insider’s AI personalization tools ensure you’re taking every opportunity to generate more revenue, improve conversions, and maximize your marketing spend.
Below, we’ll explore how three brands are driving successful omnichannel personalization with Insider and improving metrics like conversion rate, customer acquisition cost, and revenue.
If you want to explore even more examples, click here to browse all the case studies on our site.
Looking to engage its customer base and improve the ROI from its martech stack, Slazenger turned to Insider to create personalized cross-channel customer experiences.
Their eCommerce team needed to personalize customer experiences across channels by targeting the right segments of users with contextual, relevant messaging.
Using Insider’s cross-channel journey orchestration solution, Slazenger engaged shoppers with contextual messaging about products in which they’d already expressed interest.
Slazenger started by creating personalized messages to nudge cart abandoners across web push, SMS, on-site, and email. First, the customer would receive an automated cart reminder notification on their preferred channel (email, on-site, or web push). Then, Architect would send them a coupon code via SMS.
As a result, Slazenger recovered 40% of its potential revenue within a single campaign. They also sent targeted price drop notifications via email and web push in additional campaigns to create a sense of urgency and encourage buyers to return and complete their purchase.
Within two months, the company achieved a 700% increase in customer acquisition and 49x ROI with Insider’s omnichannel personalization and journey orchestration capabilities.
Here’s what Slazenger’s eCommerce Director says about Insider:
For additional details on how Slazenger used Insider’s cross-channel customer targeting capabilities, check out the full case study.
Online furniture store HipVan, was facing high drop-off rates on its product pages. Visitors would come in through Google Ads and if the product was not what they were looking for, they would exit. HipVan’s existing product discovery solution was also ineffective in converting and retaining customers.
Using Insider’s AI-powered Smart Recommender and A/B testing capabilities, HipVan achieved a conversion rate uplift of 6.03% in one month, resulting in 80 new customers per month. However, it was creating a personalized omnichannel strategy across web push, emails, and mobile app push that allowed HipVan to deliver consistent:
Using Insider’s cross-channel journey orchestration tool, HipVan created personalized retargeting campaigns based on the stage of the user journey and the customers’ reachable channels. This resulted in a conversion rate uplift of 46.7% compared to the sitewide average in the previous quarter.
HipVan has used Insider to drive revenue for more than half a decade. For more details on HipVan’s success story, check out the full case study.
MAC Cosmetics needed to provide personalized product recommendations to customers and promote complementary products to buyers (cross-selling) across their web and mobile web channels. The company also needed to engage mobile customers and cart abandoners across channels to improve conversions.
The company used several of Insider’s features to tackle these challenges. First, they used Insider’s AI-powered Smart Recommender to show products that were tailored to each user’s purchase history and preferences. This helped them achieve an add-to-cart rate of 20.56% and a conversion rate of 2.3%.
MAC Cosmetics also used InStory to create Instagram-like stories and engage users with rich user experiences that promote new product launches with their customers. This move led to a 123.5% uplift in homepage conversions.
They used Architect to drive revenue from the cart abandonment segment, as shown below. By creating unique customer journeys based on each user’s behavior and using personalized web push notifications, they achieved a 14.45% clickthrough rate and a conversion rate of 16.69% across channels.
For more details on MAC Cosmetics’ success story, check out the full case study.
Insider’s omnichannel personalization tools allow you to optimize every touchpoint in the customer journey at scale and generate more revenue with less time and energy. That’s why our solution has been ranked as the top omnichannel marketing platform by IDC.
Users on G2 also rate us as the #1 option across categories like personalization software, mobile marketing software, CDPs, and more.
We’ve helped over 1,200 brands with their omnichannel personalization efforts. Our support team, which has the highest possible customer satisfaction score of 100/100, will help you get everything you need set up so you can focus on creating consistent customer journeys, driving revenue, and maximizing your marketing budget.
Click here to book a demo with our team and learn how Insider can help you reach your business goals.
In a standard multichannel marketing strategy, all the communication channels work in isolation with little to no connection between them. Using multiple channels without complete integration results in a more fragmented customer journey and leads to lower customer engagement, conversions, and retention.
In an omnichannel approach to personalization, customer data is constantly shared between various parts of a brand’s marketing stack. This, combined with the right strategy and martech solutions, enables marketers to tailor each part of a customer’s journey to their characteristics, preferences, and previous interactions. This results in a fully integrated and consistent experience.
The term “cross-channel” is sometimes used interchangeably with the term “omnichannel”. However, while “cross-channel” may describe a fully integrated experience (i.e., the same as omnichannel), it can also describe something between an omnichannel experience and a fragmented multichannel approach.
This means that with some cross-channel experiences, there are cases where data silos still exist and prevent a fully integrated customer experience.
Omnichannel personalization connects all channels to one platform which allows your customers to have one experience with your brand no matter what channel they use. It enables your company to “remember” conversations, keep track of customer behavior and data, and provide a truly personalized and seamless experience in real-time.
You can learn more about these distinctions in our detailed guide on the difference between omnichannel, multichannel, and cross-channel.
In an omnichannel personalization strategy, each step of a customer journey gets triggered by contextual events and accounts for customers’ existing behaviors and preferences. As we discuss in our omnichannel marketing automation guide, this approach has three massive benefits over standard multichannel marketing:
1. Consistency across all channels. Whereas multichannel marketing efforts are often disconnected, omnichannel personalization tailors every part of a customer’s journey to their unique behaviors, characteristics, and preferences.
2. Better message and campaign relevance. Omnichannel personalization takes the complete view of a customer’s journey into account, including the products they’re interested in, the channels they’re using, and more. This ensures you’re always sending the right messages to the right audiences at the right times.
3. Higher customer engagement, conversion, and retention rates. This is a natural result of the previous benefits. Consistent and relevant marketing leads more users to visit your site, buy products, and become loyal customers.
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).
