How to Create an Effective Omnichannel Strategy

In 2021, The Bay’s Holiday Your Way campaign reached 10.1 million targeted people in Canada. The reason? Omnichannel marketing strategy. Unlike previous years, the eCommerce company leaned into TikTok’s popularity among Gen Z holiday shoppers and regular traditional marketing channels to amplify its holiday shopping offers — leading to an increase in brand awareness, more sales, and more customers.

Like The Bay, you can drive exceptional results with omnichannel marketing — but only if you have the right strategy. An effective omnichannel marketing strategy is data-driven, customer-centric, and built around one key messaging. Follow these five steps to create an omnichannel marketing strategy for your eCommerce business.

1. Set your primary goal

Set one overarching goal for your omnichannel marketing efforts — like boosting customer acquisition or improving customer retention — so your omnichannel marketing efforts are unified. Without a goal, your omnichannel marketing efforts can easily go out of scope, with different members of your team moving in different directions, and it will be harder to measure the impact of your strategy.

An example of an effective goal is: We want to increase customer satisfaction rates by 12% in 3 months. This goal is SMART — Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. It states exactly what the business wants to achieve, has set parameters for tracking success, is realistic and relevant to the overall business objectives, and is set within a defined time frame.

2. Map your customer journey

Customer journey mapping enables you to choose the right channels for your omnichannel marketing strategy. It shows you how buyers move through your sales funnel — from their first interaction with your brand until they purchase the first item from your store. This helps you understand buyers’ behaviors at different interaction points so you can create one seamless experience for them.

You need data to map the customer journey accurately. And you can get the required data by:

1. Gathering customer feedback through surveys
2. Collecting customer behavior insights from marketing and analytics tools like your CRM, social media platforms, and websites
3. Researching your competitors to know how their customers interact with them

All of these data sets help you segment the customer journey by persona. Personas are distinct customer groupings based on specific criteria like gender, income level, and educational background. And each persona would have a unique customer journey.

After analyzing the data, create customer journey maps for different customer segments on a slide deck or using tools like Miro and Qualtrics. The final result might look like this:

3. Choose your channels

Channels determine the content format you use to engage with customers and the tools and features you use for omnichannel marketing. For example, an eCommerce store using Instagram will create visual content and use features like Shopping, Reels, sponsored ads, and link in bio to get in front of its customers.

You can’t (and shouldn’t) focus on all the channels at the same time. Rather, only invest in channels that can yield the highest ROI for your business. A simple rule to choosing the right channels is: Go where your target audience and customers are.

Customer behavior data and competitor research insights can show you the most relevant channels for your business. For example, research shows that Gen Z adults (ages 18–23 years old) are most active on Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube, while Facebook is the preferred platform for millennials.

4. Craft your key messaging

Your key messaging serves as the narrative for your strategy. It communicates what you want to achieve and why the target audience should care, concisely and effectively.

Effective key messaging encompasses three elements: your goal, your unique selling point (USP), and the benefits of that goal for your target audience. Dollar Shave Club — a lifestyle and grooming eCommerce company, reflects these elements in its key messaging — driving tons of sign-ups to its razor subscription service:

Decipad — a no-code analytics software — also captures these elements in its key message:

Key messaging also influences the type of content you create to engage with your customers. For example, if your key messaging is “launch your website faster using no-code, without hiring a developer,” then the content you create will center on the business benefits of no-code website builders and similar topics.

Your key message should be channel-agnostic so it’s the same across all touchpoints and creates a consistent experience for customers. But you can use different content formats to relay this message to the target audience on different channels. For example, using threads for Twitter and Reels for Instagram.

5. Set up your tool stack

You need the right tools to automatically track customers’ behaviors and interactions per channel and deliver personalized follow-ups. For example, order history data in your Point-of-Sale system provides information about a customer’s most frequently purchased items (online and offline). You can use this information to send personalized emails to the customer when you restock these items.

The specific software in your tool stack depends on your goals and the channels you’re using (most channels have built-in analytics tools). You can start with these three tools and expand the stack as required.

Customer Relationship Management Software

Customer relationship management (CRM) software is a tool for tracking all the interactions customers have with your eCommerce store — from their first contact to their first purchase and their post-purchase experience. Key features to look out for in your CRM are:

• A contact management system that serves as a database of all customer information
• Email integrations for effective email marketing
• A file manager for organizing marketing materials

Customer relationship management software is important for omnichannel marketing because it helps you manage large volumes of data from leads and customers. It also gives you a bird’s-eye view of what stage customers are in within the buyer’s journey.

Content Management System

A content management system (CMS) is a central hub for creating, distributing, and managing content assets like blog posts, landing pages, and newsletters. Content management systems can be monolithic, hybrid, or headless depending on their structure.

A headless CMS is the best for omnichannel marketing because it allows you to create one content asset and deliver it to multiple channels in different formats at the same time, like to your website and mobile app. This helps you communicate consistent key messaging with your customers.

Conversion Tracking Software

Conversion tracking software enables you to measure the performance of your omnichannel marketing strategy based on the goals and key performance indicators you set.

In a conversion tracking tool, you can see how many customers are clicking your ads, interacting with your content, or performing whatever next action is required to help you achieve your omnichannel campaign goals. These insights help you identify loopholes in your strategy for future optimization.

You’ve created your omnichannel marketing strategy. Now what?

Your omnichannel marketing strategy is only as effective as its implementation process, so you need to get the latter right. Some tips to help you nail it:

1. Use a headless content management system to organize and distribute one content asset to multiple channels in different formats
2. Match your content to the right channel
3. Iterate the strategy based on feedback and data

Storyblok can help you implement your omnichannel marketing strategy effectively. You can manage all your content in one single content hub and publish it no matter where your users consume it.

See how Storyblok’s omnichannel features work.