An omnichannel marketing platform allows businesses to run promotional campaigns across multiple channels to ensure their marketing content reaches their audience effectively.
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Relying on a singular channel for your business communications is not a great choice in today’s fast-paced environment. Customers no longer have the patience to wait for a day or even hours for a response to their queries.
Due to this reason, traditional outreach channels like email have become more of a one-way channel rather than a two-way conversational one. So, brands have to implement an omnichannel marketing infrastructure to reach out to their target audience efficiently and on time.
Having said that, to manage marketing initiatives across multiple channels, you need the right promotional platform that matches your business and allows you to maximize the ROI for your marketing efforts.
That is why, in this blog post, I’ll tell you all you need to know about choosing a marketing platform that not only lets you handle conversations across numerous channels from a single tool, but also builds solid relationships with your customers by engaging them throughout the stages of the sales pipeline.
As the name suggests, an omnichannel marketing platform is a tool that you can use to run promotional campaigns over multiple communication channels from a centralized location. These channels can range from trusty SMS or email to modern channels like WhatsApp, RCS, or live chat.
On top of that, you can respond to incoming customer chats in real time, enabling you to encourage them to come to a purchasing decision quickly. Plus, with the advanced omnichannel marketing tools, you can automate your communication with the help of chatbots and workflows to keep the conversation going even after your business hours.
Overall, these omnichannel solutions allow you to leverage more than one channel for running effective promotional campaigns without having to switch between different tools or jump through multiple inboxes to look for unread messages.
At the core of omnichannel marketing platforms is the support for numerous channels integrated into a solid solution so you, as a business, can use them to manage your outreach easily and effectively.
These tools mostly handle all the heavy work across all aspects of running marketing campaigns, ranging from creating messaging templates to successfully sending them to the selected contacts. Below are the steps to demonstrate how an omnichannel marketing tool works:
The first step to using any multichannel marketing tool is to import the contact information of the users you wish to interact with using marketing messages. Also, to make the most of your marketing campaigns, you need to segment your audience into smaller groups so you can send highly personalized marketing messages that resonate with the interests of your target audience.
Your omnichannel platform should come with integration with external tools for a streamlined flow of data, eliminating the need to manually enter contact information into the system to run outreach campaigns at scale.
The core aspect that makes omnichannel marketing tools stand out from the rest is their ability to include numerous communication channels to connect with your customers. Plus, since these channels are interconnected with one another, you can switch between them according to the preferences of customers.
Before you can start using multiple channels via a unified marketing solution, you have to finish setting them up for sending messages. Each channel has its own setup process and requires different kinds of things. For example, setting up WhatsApp requires you to link your WhatsApp Business account with the marketing tool in order to send bulk WhatsApp messages.
Depending on your needs and customer preferences, you have to decide which channels you need for your marketing initiatives. So, choosing a tool that comes with a range of channels can be a great choice for your business communications.
Automation is a big factor when it comes to communication. Customers want their inquiries resolved promptly and without much back and forth. Most advanced omnichannel marketing tools do include automation capabilities to let you engage customers seamlessly.
Automated conversations or canned replies are some of the best ways to resolve customer support issues without requiring your support teams to handle repetitive queries. For instance, using multichannel marketing tools, you have the option to build automated workflows like WhatsApp chatbots that can interact with customers directly from the WhatsApp app.
These days, marketing has shifted to personalized promotional rather than sending random messages and hoping for a conversion. That being said, utilizing a reliable omnichannel marketing platform can help you make your outreach more effective. Here are some of the advantages of using an omnichannel promotional solution:
One of the biggest advantages of an omnichannel promotional tool is that it allows you to leverage more than one channel for sending promotional content. Having the ability to switch between multiple channels if customers are more active on a particular channel.
This capability to jump between channels greatly increases your chances of getting conversions by enabling you to interact with them on their preferred channels. For example, if a user is more active on social media platforms, it doesn’t make sense to keep engaging them on communication apps like Messenger or WhatsApp.
By having an omnichannel tool, you can keep an eye on how well your campaigns are performing across various channels to ensure you make the most of your initiatives. With the data for all the channels available in a single location, you can easily figure out the channels that drive the most customer engagement.
Most omnichannel promotional tools these days come with enhanced messaging capabilities to personalize your messages using custom variables to better resonate with your audience. Sending un-personalized messages is a sure shot way to get ignored by potential customers.
However, if you send highly tailored marketing messages, it greatly increases the likelihood of recipients interacting with your messages and following through with the action you want them to take.
The secret to a successful business is to retain your existing customers in the long run. In fact, increasing your retention by 5% can increase the overall revenue by up to 25-95%. This goes to show that maintaining a solid customer retention strategy is crucial for prolonged business success.
For that reason, having an omnichannel marketing platform lets you run a multichannel engagement strategy to make sure you are connected to your customers regardless of the channels they might use. Also, being available on numerous platforms makes it easier for them to reach out to you should they have a question. This way, they don’t have to rely on the specific channels that they may not be active on or that involve installing a new app.
When adopting an omnichannel marketing strategy, you have to ensure that you send prompt replies to recipients’ incoming messages. That’s why a unified solution that gives you a centralized inbox to see and manage all the conversations is a must for reliable customer support.
Omnichannel marketing tools usually have a shared inbox that allows your team members to view customers’ chats from a unified location without needing to switch between separate inboxes for individual channels, thereby improving the sales efficiency for your agents.
All these benefits demonstrate that having an omnichannel marketing tool can be an excellent choice for you, irrespective of which industry you operate in. It lets you combine your marketing with customer support flows to streamline the entire customer journey over numerous touchpoints.
Now that you know the advantages and inner workings of an omnichannel marketing platform, let’s look at the factors you need to consider when choosing a multichannel marketing tool for your business. Moreover, selecting a platform that complements your brand is an investment that will pay for itself in the long run. Plus, changing your marketing platform constantly can lead to decreased revenue for your business.
With that said, here is what you need to know when deciding on your marketing tool:
Omnichannel marketing platforms stand out due to their multichannel outreach capabilities, but lack in terms of other features that might be useful for businesses. For example, these tools usually don’t have a native CRM or automation tool for running drip marketing campaigns. For this reason, it should come with robust integration functionality for you to effectively link it to your existing infrastructure.
So, when choosing a marketing platform, look for its integration capabilities and custom APIs that you can use to connect it with your current marketing stack. Think about this: how effectively can your marketing platform be integrated with the solutions you already have? The answer to this question should be a benchmark for your search.
Your marketing platform should not be too complex for your team to use. Having too many features or a complicated UI can limit your reps from making the most of the tool, thereby lowering the overall efficiency of your team.
Choose a platform that offers a user-friendly interface with straightforward navigation for you to get started with your marketing campaigns easily. Having a platform with a lower learning curve will allow your internal members to familiarize themselves with its capabilities more easily.
As you are running marketing campaigns over different channels, it is important to keep track of their performance so you don’t keep wasting resources on channels that are not performing well.
Having a reporting dashboard to keep an eye on your initiatives allows you to make informed decisions to increase the ROI for your efforts. These reports will provide you with actionable insights in a visual manner, making it easier to understand what needs to be improved and what is already doing well.
When picking a marketing platform, you have to not only think about your current requirements but also the future needs of your business. Choose a solution that can grow with your business and let you manage your ever-evolving marketing requirements.
You do not want to outgrow the capabilities of your marketing platform within the span of a couple of quarters and go through the trouble of looking for a new marketing solution again.
So, to ensure this doesn’t happen to you when your target audience grows, check beforehand if your omnichannel marketing platform is scalable to match the speed of your business growth.
Modern marketing starts with understanding. A powerful omnichannel marketing platform should combine customer data from every touchpoint (website visits, email clicks, mobile app activity, purchase history, and other interactions) into a single, continuously updated profile.
This unified view helps your team move from being ‘reactive’ to being ‘proactive’. Instead of blasting generic messages, you can deliver relevant content tailored to where that customer is in their journey. It’s the difference between feeling like a brand knows you and feeling like it’s spam.
AI is all the rage these days, and rightfully so. It lets you streamline your marketing by crafting personalized messages within a matter of seconds to help you kickstart your marketing campaigns.
A reliable marketing tool should have this kind of AI-driven feature, so you don’t have to spend hours crafting a perfect marketing message to engage your audience.
For instance, if you are running a promotional campaign to market your new product launch, you can utilize the AI to create tailored marketing content with images of the product to attract attention and let the potential customers come to a purchasing decision more quickly.
All the factors that I have mentioned above have to be considered before you commit to a marketing platform to enhance your promotional activities.
Having said that, to help you save time and resources from going through numerous marketing platforms, I can recommend a modern multichannel marketing tool that allows you to effectively run not only marketing campaigns but also provide seamless customer support. You guessed it, Zixflow!
Zixflow is an all-around business suite that comprises various channels like WhatsApp, RCS, email, and SMS for you to incorporate one or all of them into your marketing strategy. In addition to that, Zixflow has a unified inbox for you to manage the incoming messages effectively and assign reps to them for prompt resolution.
That is not all. The automation builder and sales cadences of Zixflow enable you to automate your conversations without needing human intervention. The drag-and-drop workflow builder lets you set up custom triggers for each node so the system can adapt to the customer interaction and send tailored messages.
Here is a video giving you an overview of Zixflow:
After going through this guide, you might have gotten a pretty good idea that choosing the right omnichannel marketing platform can make or break your promotional strategy.
Having the correct tool can let you streamline your marketing activities over different channels while maintaining a consistent brand image.
For this very reason, Zixflow is a standout platform that is designed for businesses of all sizes, regardless of the industry. Ranging from its customizable CRM to a friendly interface, the tool is built for brands that need a centralized solution to manage all their marketing efforts without jumping between multiple tools.
So if you want to see Zixflow in action, you can sign up for free or book a demo to discuss a tailored scenario where Zixflow can help you achieve your marketing goals.