Leverage the power of automation to stay on top of your omnichannel marketing strategy.

With the introduction of new automation tools, omnichannel marketing has become a buzzword in recent years.

What is Omnichannel Marketing?
A strategy that focuses on creating a channel-agnostic brand experience that is both seamless and well-integrated across all customer touch points, both online and offline.

Ecommerce shoppers access information about your brand via multiple channels, such as your website, social media and physical retail store. As opposed to multichannel marketing, where the various channels may not be fully integrated, omnichannel marketing ensures a coherent experience across every touch point.

Omnichannel marketing has become increasingly important with the explosive growth of ecommerce during the global pandemic. According to McKinsey, the pandemic compressed 10 years of growth into just three months. With more customers shopping online, the omnichannel approach has never been more relevant for retaining customers and staying competitive.

In this article, we cover the ways where automation can help with omnichannel marketing at every stage of the conversion funnel.

Automating Omnichannel Marketing at Each Stage of the Conversion Funnel

Omnichannel marketing can be challenging—integrating data from multiple channels and creating a consistent brand experience across platforms is no easy feat. With the help of automation, you can leverage the power of technology to stay on top of things. Automating various aspects of omnichannel marketing will allow you to simplify complex processes you'd otherwise have to manage on your own.

Some examples of technologies that support omnichannel marketing include:

• Phantombuster: Provides over 200 code-free automation and data extraction tools across over 20 social media platforms. It allows you to automate processes like following social media pages, sending customized messages, and more.
• Autopilot: Customizes journeys based on the customer's behavior and builds multi-channel workflows to send automated messages.
• Unbounce: Duplicates your most successful landing pages and helps you run A/B testing to identify the ones with the highest conversion and lowest bounce rates.

You'll be spoiled for choice when it comes to marketing automation tools—the trouble is figuring out which tools are right for your brand.

We'll move step-by-step through the conversion funnel and explore some of these awesome tools so you can have a better idea of what might work for you.

The Browsing Stage

This is the first phase of the conversion funnel. Customers are simply browsing your online store or coming across your promoted posts on social media. Your goal at this stage is to turn casual browsers into interested buyers.

How can your omnichannel marketing strategy benefit from automation at this stage? Here are a few ways:

Automate Social Media Marketing

Social media is one of the most important ways to connect with your target audience. Automation here involves scheduling content, producing consistent data analytics, reposting evergreen content and more. These automation tools can cover all social media accounts: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and even LinkedIn.

For example, MobileMonkey, a Facebook Messenger tool, has the following features:

• Chat blasting: Leverages a chatbot to send out message blasts on Facebook Messenger, very much like scheduling email blasts
• Facebook post autoresponders: Captures leads from organic Facebook posts, by following up when potential customers interact with your posts
• Drip campaigns: Sends sequenced messages across Facebook, SMS and online chats, catching customers at different stages in the conversion process, and renewing brand awareness each time

Feel free to check out more of such tools here. In summary, tools that automate social media marketing can help you extend your reach without compromising on time.

Generate Consistent Product Descriptions

Arguably the most crucial touch point in an online shopper's experience, product detail pages (PDPs) are the place where users decide if they are going to take the plunge and convert, or if they'll just continue to browse. It's crucial that the content on your PDPs reflects your brand as part of your omnichannel marketing strategy.

Hypotenuse AI allows you to generate thousands of unique product descriptions in seconds while maintaining a consistent brand voice across your store. Feed a list of specifications and information about the product into the AI, and it will use that input to create eloquent, flowing descriptions.

Hypotenuse's product creates product descriptions in several styles, from plain and regular to luxurious and creative. The descriptions below were written entirely by an AI:

Automated product description tools allow for a consistent tone across multiple channels. Online retailers like Walmart and Amazon often have their own guidelines for product descriptions and demand unique copy if you're hoping to boost your SEO. Automating the product description writing process can help you:

• Generate descriptions that are consistent in terms of tone and style for an integrated and seamless marketing experience.
• Write product descriptions specific to multiple retail channels, such as Amazon, Walmart, eBay and more.
• Save your copywriting team time (and headache!) and allow your marketing team to take a more macro view of their ecommerce strategy, overseeing AI-generated output.

The browsing stage is one where you try to convert browsers into customers. Focus on using omnichannel automation tools to maximize social media efforts to increase traffic and optimize your PDPs to boost SEO and conversions!

The Shopping Cart Stage

Moving down through the conversion funnel, we follow a browser-turned-customer who has added items to their shopping cart. This stage is pivotal: 70% of visitors who enter the cart stage never purchase. The question is: How do we drive a customer to purchase a product?

Unify Cross-Platform Customer Engagement

Interested buyers often interact with your business via multiple channels - they may send a support message on Facebook, view collections on your Instagram, visit your physical retail store and eventually purchase online. But it can be hard to track all their touch points in one place. In the process of unifying cross-platform customer engagement, incorporating business text messaging as part of your omnichannel strategy can significantly enhance direct communication with customers. This approach ensures consistent and personalized interaction across various channels, including SMS, which is crucial for maintaining a seamless customer experience.

DelightChat is an automation tool that pulls customer conversations from various support channels so you can engage your customers from a single platform. It also helps you organize and manage support tickets within your team, as well as automate replies to queries you frequently receive.

Another tool you can check out is Gladly, which combines different support channels into a single conversation timeline. It offers a more customer-centric (as opposed to ticket) approach that highlights each customer’s transactions and preferences.

Moving down through the conversion funnel, we follow a browser-turned-customer who has added items to their shopping cart. This stage is pivotal: 70% of visitors who enter the cart stage never purchase. The question is: How do we drive a customer to purchase a product?

Customers will never have to repeat themselves throughout the enquiry process. Employees can easily access a customer's history, allowing for ease of information transfer and a consistent customer experience across channels.

Personalize the journey to checkout

To get users to convert, ecommerce stores integrate personalized incentives at checkout, such as free gifts or special promotions that make the user feel special and the purchase urgent.

With automation ecommerce tools like Shopify Flow, you can personalize your checkout options for individual customers, without compromising on time.

Personalized incentives at checkout include:

• Gift with purchase (GWP)
• Buy one get one free (B1G1F) promotion
• Individualized sales and local delivery shipping rates
• Showing unique payment methods to each customer.

For Good American, this tool helped manage product tagging and filtering. This automated workflow tagged item fits, colors and sizes to streamline customers' search for the right pair of jeans.

Personalizing the customer experience in the Shopping Cart Stage results in shoppers leaving more satisfied and feeling like they'd personally engaged with the brand.

Reduce Cart Abandonment

The nightmare for ecommerce brands is cart abandonment—buyers get to filling their shopping carts with items, only to disappear into the abyss before checking out.

One way around this is to use a tool like Emarsys Predictive Recommendations, which recommends customers their abandoned products left in their shopping carts, as well as similar products bought by other customers. According to Emarsys, companies that took this up experienced up to 67% higher clickthrough rates with emails that contain such recommendations.

For example, online retailer Rue La La uses Emarsys to reach out to customers who have abandoned their carts. They use automation to display an abandoned cart message to visitors before they leave their site and send personalized abandoned cart emails to customers. Their audience is segmented and different cohorts receive abandonment messages on different channels based on their behavior.

Ensuring that customers purchase the items they've shown interest in is crucial at the Shopping Cart Stage. Automation can help ensure that customers are retained within the conversion funnel by:

• Offering consistent customer service across channels
• Personalization of checkout incentives
• Automated CRM to minimize cart abandonment

To Purchase & Beyond

Congrats! Your customer made a purchase—however, their engagement with your brand shouldn't end here. According to Bain & Company, it costs a brand seven times more to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one. Once customers have purchased your product, how do you make sure they come back for more?

Personalized followups across channels

One way is to deploy personalized followups across channels. This means that after a purchase has been made, you can send the customer an email or text asking what they thought, whether they have feedback, and whether they'd like to buy anything new.

This is a strategy used by Sweetwater, a music technology and instrument retailer. After placing and order, customers receive an automated email followup and a phone call from a sales engineer. This is followed by another call after the items arrive.

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This might seem excessive, but it works because music gear often includes highly personal, big-ticket items. Sweetwater aims to create an experience that aligns with how personal these purchases are for customers.

Omnichannel brands like Sweetwater use automation across their channels to track individual customers' progress through the conversion funnel. Once they've hit a certain milestone—like a purchase—you can automate a follow-up email to them, checking in in a way that is relevant to your product.

Keep in Touch

Every customer purchase should feel like a victory, but you shouldn't get complacent. Omnichannel marketing automation is about staying connected to your buyers through frequent and consistent interaction.

Automating a customer relationship management (CRM) strategy can help you deliver the right message to the right person at the right time. This helps you stay connected with your loyal customers and push them towards further purchases!

PUMA Europe worked with Emarsys to create templates and code that allowed block targeting and automation. Its CRM was segmented geographically—each user received emails in their own language, with prices in their own currency and promotions exclusive to their region. Within six months, PUMA Europe grew email revenue by triple-digits year-on-year and boosted newsletter subscriptions by 50%.

Staying connected with your buyers after they purchase transforms a one-off buyer into a long-term customer that's loyal to your brand.

Conclusion

At every stage of the conversion funnel, automating omnichannel marketing can help boost conversions and move users towards valuable actions. If you're an ecommerce company looking to step up your cross-channel customer engagement, this might be the strategy for you.

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