Omnichannel marketing is a powerful tool for optimizing the customer experience and building brand loyalty. However, without addressing the key obstacles to omnichannel marketing, businesses cannot reap the benefits. Of course, the specifics of these obstacles will vary from business to business and require some digging and analysis. Although, there are three common main challenges that can stand in the way of any would-be successful omnichannel initiative.
- Collecting accurate data
- Consolidating accurate data
- Using accurate data
As you can see, the crux of all three challenges is accurate data. While clearly necessary for reaching business objectives, many businesses lack a sophisticated approach to data quality. And what’s more alarming than lacking a sophisticated data quality strategy is the fact that 48 percent of businesses still have no idea how bad their data quality actually is. Being able to manage and use the data you collect effectively is the only way to ensure that your omnichannel marketing efforts aren’t wasted.
What is omnichannel marketing?
Before we get into how to establish good organizational and collection processes surrounding data quality, we need to clarify some misconceptions of what omnichannel marketing really is. Omnichannel marketing is the integration of multiple channels that a brand uses to interact with customers in order to provide a consistent experience for the consumer and increase the chance of a conversion.
It is important to note that omnichannel marketing is not the same as cross- and multi-channel marketing. The trick to multi-channel marketing lies in using the numerous channels a business employs to engage prospects and customers, and cross-channel marketing success lies in the creation of a seamless experience across those multiple channels. Meanwhile, omnichannel marketing is the marriage of both strategies—done well.
- An example of multi-channel marketing: Using your brick-and-mortar store, call center and website together to engage prospects and customers.
- An example of cross-channel marketing: Creating a seamless, disturbance-free experience for a customer who orders something online and goes to pick it up in-store.
There may be a fine line between the three, but distinguishing between them is the first step to optimizing your omnichannel marketing initiatives. Here’s what successful omnichannel marketing looks like:
Let’s say a customer enters your store with a smartphone in hand. Effective omnichannel marketing means that her smartphone was used to personalize her in-store experience, including recommended offers or special discounts based on what she was looking at through every channel (e.g. TV, display, search, email, direct mail). Her experience should be consistent across channels, and that is only possible if the preferences and configurations on one are accounted for throughout.
Omnichannel marketing requires a deep knowledge of who your customers are—online, offline, and across devices—and across all the touch points they interact with during their journey to a purchase.
How to optimize your omnichannel marketing
The caveat to great omnichannel marketing lies in its foundation: good data. By measuring customers’ interactions across channels, you can plan your omnichannel marketing initiatives accordingly to discover whether or not they use on- or off-line channels before buying something, if a specific marketing campaign influenced how frequently they make a purchase and if one channel is particularly effective at drawing them into a local store. The following are the three most important factors to optimizing your omnichannel marketing solutions:
1. Collect accurate data
Companies are collecting data from more channels than ever before—3.6 channels to be exact. However, all this data coming in from various channels is not typically formatted the same way. Different departments prioritize and organize the importance of information differently, and even the types of data collected will vary.
A strong data foundation is key to driving omnichannel marketing success. Marketing activities like email campaigns, direct mail, and person-to-person interactions all rely on good data collection practices, and unfortunately, any given point is susceptible to data quality errors. For example, if a sales representative accidentally mistypes a domain name, marketing emails sent to that customer won’t get delivered and the marketing fails.
The best way to use your data with confidence is to make sure only good data enters your database from the get-go with solutions that have real-time validation capabilities. Real-time verification technology solutions ensure that only squeaky-clean data enters your CRM, or other database.
For example, emails are essential in today’s marketing activities—cart abandonment, shipping and order processing communications all rely on accurate email addresses—and yet undeliverable emails still compromise seventy-eight percent of companies.
Contact data is too valuable to your omnichannel marketing to get wrong. If you can overcome the challenge of collecting accurate data, you can prevent a lot of the headaches surrounding fixing errors later on.
2. Consolidate your data
As companies start to consolidate data, new challenges start to arise. Unconsolidated data creates a massive problem in creating a single customer view, arguably the most important factor to achieving omnichannel marketing success. Marketers understand that a single customer view leads to higher conversion rates, better customer retention and an increase in customer lifetime value, just to name a few.
Seventy-two percent of marketers find data fragmentation to be their greatest challenge. In a detailed report from eConsultancy and Tealium, marketers reported that even when they do manage to find the data they need, they may discover other issues. These issues include data only being available in one particular application, resulting in blind spots, or a lack of standardization, leading to an inability to “translate” the data and duplicate data entry. Thankfully, there are several tools and methods available to fix duplicate entries and standardize data.
Data matching solutions and batch cleansing solutions can help to identify and consolidate records across multiple databases, improving customer intelligence, profiling, management and ultimately providing access to the single customer view. Overall, maintaining a strong data quality strategy will help minimize the amount of work you need to do to correct errors. An example of a strong data quality strategy involves:
Determining the types of data causing problems and how it’s used
- Locating where the data is stored
- Monitoring how data enters and moves through an organization
- Understanding who is responsible for managing the data
- Continuously validating the data
3. Use data strategically
The third challenge behind successful omnichannel marketing is knowing how to use your data for your business objectives. With the abundance of data businesses collect, it can be challenging to make sense of it. However, validated data is of little use if you can’t use it to answer important questions like “Is the data collected used to estimate the likelihood of customer conversions?” or “ Are you able to see that someone who purchased from your website only to return it a month or two later is the same individual?” Upon collecting data, businesses must know how to use it to measure customer behavior and determine how to boost conversions.
Before, using data for strategic objectives fell in the hands of executives like chief marketing officers, chief technology officers and chief finance officers. However, with the growing embrace of data-driven decision-making, a new role—the chief data officer—has emerged to handle everything from data governance and strategy to using data as a valuable business asset.
While there doesn’t need to be a chief data officer instated in every business, there should be an individual or team that understands how to leverage the data as a strategic asset. Learning how to use data for your omnichannel marketing is really a matter of asking questions that will drive actions, effectively managing collected data and ensuring that data quality stays a priority.
Level up your omnichannel marketing strategy
Data quality is the fundamental first step in developing an omnichannel marketing strategy. It can be easy for data to get lost in translation as it moves between people and the actual database. Although there are many roadblocks in place, businesses can maintain accurate data to enhance the customer experience and bring more conversions.
Only through good data quality can you build a strong foundation for omnichannel marketing, keep up with your competitors and avoid extinction. Start investing in your omnichannel marketing tools today. To learn more about omnichannel marketing solutions, contact Experian Data Quality. We are happy to help you start at the foundation, by providing the tools you need to maintain accurate, valuable data, like phone and email verification, so you can optimize your customer experience.
*Originally written by Shirley Zhao, 2015.
