Today’s customers use multiple channels to learn about and purchase products.
The standard customer journey no longer applies. Instead, potential customers will experience your brand across social media, Google search, email, chatbots, paid ads, and in-store visits. Often all on the same day.
With omnichannel marketing, your goal is to provide customers with a truly seamless experience from the first time they’re aware of your brand through their entire path to purchase.
But how do you know what’s working and what isn’t across your omnichannel strategy? That’s where data and analytics come into play.
Here’s what we’ll cover in this post today:
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Omnichannel data is generated whenever a customer interacts with your company.
It’ll show you behaviors, values, and preferences, helping you build customer profiles to create highly relevant experiences.
Instead of your data being siloed, omnichannel data isn’t platform or channel-specific. Instead, all of your data is integrated together to paint a more holistic picture of your customers.
This data not only shows you how customers engaged with you in the past and present but can help predict how buyers will act in the future.
Omnichannel analytics refers to the process of collecting and analyzing your customer data across every active channel, platform, and campaign you’re running.
Having all of this data in one place lets you view your entire omnichannel customer journey in real time. So you can see the different ways a customer has already engaged with your website, ad campaigns, customer service team, and even past purchases.
This lets you see which touchpoints are the most effective, so you can create more cost-effective campaigns that drive better results.
This helps solve the big problem of data attribution.
Omnichannel analytics data allows you to properly attribute each sale to the right channel, along with the marketing campaigns and communication strategies that led to that sale.
Compare this to traditional ecommerce analytics, which only provides you with data from a single source, like website visitors.
Sure, you can see how they engage with your website via data like bounce rates, common exit pages, and average session duration.
However, this doesn’t paint the entire picture of who this customer is, the other ways they’ve interacted with your business, and what marketing campaigns they’ve been exposed to.
With omnichannel analytics, you get access to every data source.
You’ll be able to tie together events, social shares, email opens, referrals, product or service reviews, and much more. No marketing or customer data point is left unturned.
As we touched on above, omnichannel data and analytics give you a real-time look at how your customers engage with your brand.
Here are a few of the biggest benefits it’ll bring your company:
Omnichannel analytics brings all your data together in one place. This shows you how your customers behave across multiple platforms and channels.
Since customers will switch between platforms and channels during the buying process, you can ensure your messaging and brand experience are consistent.
Whether your customers are checking out your products on Amazon, using your mobile app, reading an email about an upcoming sale, or watching an Instagram ad, they’ll be left with the same impression of your brand.
Omnichannel personalization makes your customers feel like they’re the only ones that matter.
Not only does this help build a deep bond with your visitors and customers, but it can increase your revenue between 5 to 15 percent.
Everyone wants to feel like they’re unique, and your customers are no different.
With the data you collect, you can custom-tailor your marketing campaigns and product recommendations to uniquely suit that customer.
Some examples include targeted display ads, personalized email sequences, product recommendations based on actions they take, abandoned cart emails, and more.
With omnichannel analytics, you get a 360 view of your customer at all times, so you can make data-backed decisions to help them become a customer for life.
The performance of your marketing campaigns hinges on how well you know your customers.
Your omnichannel data will help show the current success of your campaigns, which channels convert the best, and what produces the highest quality leads.
For example, maybe you’ve found that users who join your email list via social media tend to spend less overall than visitors whose first exposure to your brand was from a referral partnership.
With so many channels and platforms to focus on, your omnichannel marketing data will help you decide what you need to double down on and what can be abandoned.
It’ll also show you which customer segments are more responsive to different campaigns and platforms.
Whether you’re in retail or are selling across multiple marketplaces, omnichannel analytics gives you a clear picture of your inventory and inventory turnover ratio.
This gives you accurate data about when you need to restock.
You’ll have clear data that shows which items sold best during certain promotions, which items have been the most popular, and the products with the lowest sales.
This lets you further optimize your store, plan out future orders, and earn more revenue.
Your repeat customers will spend 67% more on average than new customers.
That’s why so many brands put a lot of effort into providing stellar customer service. However, it becomes even more important when customers are engaging with your support team across multiple channels.
You may have customers sending a Tweet to your support team, responding to a chatbot on your website, creating a support ticket, or making a phone call.
Your omnichannel data will help you see which channels your customers prefer and keep track of support requests, so you don’t miss a single customer request.
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To achieve the benefits outlined above and start making better business decisions, you need to implement a system that can capture this vital data and present it in a way that is actionable.
Let’s look at how you can put together descriptive analytics reporting that will enable you to level up your omnichannel marketing strategy.
The important thing is to choose an omnichannel analytics software that integrates with your current website builder and existing tech stack.
Popular ecommerce builders, such as Shopify, offer integrated omnichannel analytics.
Whereas, other platforms like ActiveCampaign, are able to integrate with WordPress and a wide range of plugins, making automation even easier.
Since you’ll be pulling data from multiple sources, like Google Analytics, your ecommerce platform, your email service provider, social media, etc, you’ll want to ensure they’re all supported.
This is the only way to access and view your data in real time, so you’re not stuck manually parsing your dataset.
With every channel feeding you customer data, you need to analyze the metrics that are the most important revenue drivers for your business.
You want to be able to measure customer engagement so that you can take away the most valuable and cost-effective ways to improve the user experience.
Some important customer engagement metrics include: cart abandonment rate, conversion rate across platforms, active users over time, customer retention, and churn rate. With this data, you can adjust your customer engagement strategy for maximum success.
Finally, it’s time to implement your learnings to your company and start optimizing. Allow your data and findings to guide which process to optimize first.
For example, you might learn that email marketing campaigns with free shipping codes yield the highest conversion rates.
Now you know how to optimize your email offers by enticing customers with offers they want, and can transfer this optimization to other marketing channels.
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of omnichannel analytics and the benefits it can bring your brand.
By understanding and applying insights from your omnichannel analytics data, you can optimize your customer experience across every platform to boost acquisitions, conversion rates, and customer retention.
This means seamless marketing experiences across every channel, happier customers, and more revenue for your store.
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