What Brands Need to Know About Omni-Channel Customer Experience?

What Brands Need to Know About Omni-Channel Customer Experience?

As a marketer, do you ever feel like your audience is one-step ahead of you? People started Googling certain keywords more than others so we plunged into paid search. Some became smartphone savvy and we started thinking mobile-first. Others started spending more time on Facebook or LinkedIn or Instagram these days and we decided that we gotta be social!

Any doubts about “Customer is Always the King”?

The digital age has provided marketers with an opportunity to provide seamless brand experiences to their customers. Experiences that make customers feel valued. With the influx of machine learning and AI-based tech brands are empowered with the ability to provide personalized experiences to their customers where they need very little help to navigate through a journey designed exclusively for them – be it physical stores, web, mobile, social, or email.

Such are the wonders of this new age digital world and yet we find omni-channel to be broken.

Why is Omni-channel Broken?

Omni-channel experience for a customer equates to a multi-channel approach for marketers. This means there are many cooks in the kitchen – content writers, creative production specialists, video and graphics artists, programmatic experts, and more. In short, there are a lot of people involved in helping the brand achieve its business goals and for ease of understanding we will divide them into two groups: brand marketers and performance-based marketers.

When put together their ultimate goal is to work across mediums and utilize every single potential channel to come up with the secret sauce for the client. However, individually the goal of brand marketing is to create a powerful brand while that of performance-based marketing is to encash that brand. Omni-channel marketing is supposed to merge the two-sides of marketing.

Some brands focus all their attention on the brand story and the creative narrative and end up neglecting what drives the user acquisition and conversion. Other brands get too tactical and leave creative out of their storytelling. Moreover, there are gaps in effectively customizing the same campaign for different channels – display ads, social media creative, 3 seconds video clips – because each channel demands its own media types and formats and brands lack the tools to deliver seamless adaptations.

CMP: A Crucial Element in Perfecting a Unified Omni-channel Customer Journey

By now, it is clear that the gap lies in two places: how teams collaborate and the tools at their disposal for providing a perfect omni-channel experience.

A Creative Management Platform (CMP) will help convert the fragmented customer experience into a unified seamless journey. It helps you adapt, localize and personalize your marketing campaigns effectively. By using an end-to-end CMP like Mediawide, brands can efficiently store, manage and organize their creative assets for both – digital and print in our fully-integrated Digital Asset Management systems. Also, one can control and govern user permissions allowing various teams to gain access to branded content.

Our CMP works on the principle of create-once-use-many times and allows users to edit, review and publish customized assets across various channels. For example, our integration with Marketing Automation Platforms like Mailchimp, HubSpot, Adobe Campaign Standard and Oracle Eloqua allow marketers to pick a master video template, edit the name, product, price information for a particular customer and deliver it via email. For hundreds or thousands of customers, this can be easily achieved through a process known as batch adaptations that works across both, banners ads, personalized videos and print collateral like personalized brochures, letterheads, gifts, etc.

Furthermore, choosing a CMP that comes with an in-built workflow management system that allows teams across departments and geographies to review, comment, and approve/reject assets is crucial so everyone is on the same page. It also saves teams a lot of time otherwise wasted on internal back-and-forth communication.

Lastly, although digital is picking pace, print is not dead. Hence, Mediawide CMP is possible the best choice for any enterprise because we’re the only such platform in the market that caters to all media types – video, web and print.

Conclusion

Whether it is new product promotion or ability to create rewarding customer relationships, personalization is a sure shot way of enhancing customer experience. After all, if another company implements this strategy ahead of you it will give them a competitive edge while you are left in the dust and this can be noticeable to your customers who may end up switching to your competitor due to a more evolved, omni-channel customer journey.

Customer satisfaction plays an important role for any business. It is the leading indicator of customer loyalty, happy customers, customer retention and increase in revenue. Not just that, it is your key differentiator that helps you attract new customers in competitive business environments.

Ish is the Director of Go-to-Market Strategy responsible for driving Mediawide’s revenue growth. He has consulted several well-known international brands across Automotive, Retail, Airlines, Financial Services, Insurance and Technology verticals.