Omnichannel Marketing Examples – Implemented by 10 Amazing Brands

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In the strictest sense, omnichannel marketing means offering customers a seamless brand, message, and experience across every channel (including print, email, online, and in-store).

Customers might interact with a brand via a blog, a tweet, an SMS, or a Facebook post. In omnichannel design, brands must deliver consistent messaging across all touch points and provide a seamless customer experience.

As a customer moves from a print ad to a social media platform, or an email to a webpage to a brick-and-mortar store, or an AI chatbot to a phone call, every experience must be as consistent as every branding and message.

Moreover, if it’s not, customers might dump a brand in favor of another one that offers unified browsing and buying experience.

Omnichannel Definition: What is it and Why is it Important?

The complete definition of an omnichannel marketing strategy can be a difficult thing for marketers. There isn’t a single definition, and each approach has pros and cons, so if you’re looking to pursue an omnichannel strategy, consider this as a starting point.

When you try to understand the omnichannel meaning, imagine the most powerful tool to improve your brand’s visibility. It would change how you do everything, from creating new products/services to interacting with customers. And it would do it by simply making your brand available everywhere it’s needed, whether through your website, email, social media, or mobile app. That is what omnichannel looks and feels like.

And what does an omnichannel experience do? Provide a seamless experience across multiple devices/channels. It makes your brand accessible to anyone, anywhere they may want to interact with it. This fosters not only brand awareness but also brand recall, making your brand more accessible. Let’s say you want to increase the number of leads you’ve generated.

Why is Omnichannel Marketing Important to Brands?

Omnichannel marketing helps businesses stay agile. It allows teams to interact with consumers across various devices and create a consistent message across all channels. This can create a heightened brand familiarity, bringing the consumer’s journey with the brand together. This not only fosters brand awareness but leads to enhanced customer loyalty, which is what you are looking for to create a profitable business strategy that will last.

Fact: Omnichannel marketing is not multichannel marketing

To be clear, Multichannel marketing is the more comprehensive and holistic approach to marketing, while omnichannel marketing is an approach of indiscriminate and disconnected digital marketing.

Omnichannel marketing unifies how you communicate about your brand and makes it accessible across all channels and devices, increasing reach, reducing friction, improving customer experience, and boosting brand equity. Think: ‘multiple ways to reach and interact with your customers across multiple devices and touchpoints.

Both types of marketing are crucial for businesses of various sizes and can be the key to success. But, while both can yield the same results, they’re not necessarily the same.

What Is the Purpose of Omnichannel Marketing?

Omnichannel marketing is the seamless integration of the many diverse channels organizations can use to interact with consumers and prospects. By taking advantage of multiple marketing channels and touchpoints, organizations can create a true customer experience on desktops, mobile phones, tablets, or brick-and-mortar stores.

a) Increased Customer Engagement

Omnichannel marketing is another way to engage with your customers across multiple channels. This could be your website, social media, direct mail, or phone calls. Whatever the method, remember that it will improve customer interactions, retention rates, and brand exposure.

b) Increased Customer Retention and Lifetime Value

Omnichannel marketing efforts increase customer loyalty and brand recall. Omnichannel marketing efforts provide both the consumer and the retailer with an equal, seamless experience. This approach fosters more profound brand memories and recall that promote repeat purchases and retention throughout the journey through multiple experiences.

c) Omnichannel Marketing Boosts Brand Awareness

Omnichannel marketing can help you increase consumer awareness of your brand’s latest products and services. You can build a strong and consistent presence on social media by actively seeking out and using customer input during brand activation. This approach can create a heightened familiarity for your consumers, increasing their willingness to interact with your brand via multiple channels.

d) Improved Sales and ROI

With an omnichannel marketing campaign, you can improve your order rate. Multiple touchpoints help improve brand recall, which automatically improves ROI.

Making the Customer’s Mindset Part of Your Omnichannel Marketing Strategy

You might wonder how we got here to the place of seamless experiences and exceptionally high customer expectations. Well, it starts with customers who hopped from the desktop or mobile device and online to in-person and back again.

And as they did so, retailers had to learn to keep up and find newer ways to increase customer engagement.

It used to be that consumers were either shopping online or in person.

Now, the new normal is to browse online first, with no intention of buying but only as research before going into a brick-and-mortar store.

Alternatively, shopping at a physical location and then going online to buy is also perfectly normal.

What’s even bewildering is that it’s even common practice to be online while in a brick-and-mortar location. Research shows that 81% of U.S. smartphone owners use their phones in-store to check prices, look up product information, and find a specific item.

However, that’s not the real reason to develop an omnichannel marketing strategy. There’s also the payback for doing so:

Research states that in 2021, the average customer engagement rate of marketing campaigns used in three or more channels was 18.96%, while single channels recorded only 5.4% of customer loyalty.

If you’re considering omnichannel for your brand and wondering how to go about it, note that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach. Companies also differ in how they go about it based on their industry, target audience, customer journey, and goals.

10 Brands That Use Omnichannel Marketing Strategy to Improve Customer Retention

For an overview of the different ways to use omnichannel marketing strategy, check out these 10 brands below:

1) OYO Rooms Tackles Omnichannel Engagement

OYO is a hospitality unicorn and has about 1800 hotel properties located across 500 cities. OYO used MoEngage, an omnichannel marketing platform to deliver a seamless experience across their app and their website. It also used Push AmplificationTM to achieve a 44% boost in push notification delivery rates.

Read the complete case study on how Oyo used omnichannel marketing to achieve success.

2) Target: Partnering with Pinterest

Target partnered with Pinterest to integrate Pinterest’s Lens into their app so people can use their smartphones to snap a photo of something they like and have the Target app show them a similar item available for purchase. It was the first time Lens was integrated into another brand’s app. As an example of omnichannel marketing, this is a way to offer a seamless experience for a customer who sees something they want to buy, and they can immediately discover whether or not Target sells something similar—and order it right then and there. Moreover, using this strategy, Target was able to increase its sales to almost 10%.

Partnering with Pinterest is the only channel you should be using to grow your business if all of your other social media channels have yet to produce any results. If you haven’t been using any other social media yet, you might not know that there are a number of really effective channels that you could try to optimize.

Learn more about “Retail Omnichannel Growth Strategies“.

3) Singapore Airlines: Unparalleled Omnichannel Marketplace

It’s not only retailers (or e-tailers) who can become masters of omni-marketing channels but aviation companies as well. Singapore Airlines sets a good example of offering a seamless experience to their customers.

They have always been lauded for their innovation, and for a while, they have been creating a powerful, customer-oriented omni experience. This flagship airline is partnering with AOE-integrated airports and shopping malls by fusing online and offline experiences. With this partnership, customers can easily shop, pre-book, enhance in-flight options and earn loyalty in real-time.

4) Zumiez: Multiple Ways to Buy

Zumiez is an omnichannel digital marketing master is proven by its top ranking with Total Retail. In the 2017 “Top 100 Omnichannel Retailers” report, Zumiez got the top rank with 100 points in seven criteria, including offering an omnichannel experience. This apparel retailer lets customers effortlessly cross over channels with combinations like buying online while picking up in-store, earning loyalty points across channels, offering multiple ways to reach out to customer service, and even providing more than one way to return merchandise.

5) Sephora: The Makeup Master is a Master of Marketing

Sephora makes many of the lists of best omnichannel marketing retailers because they blend the online and in-store experiences so well. While in a brick-and-mortar location, the brand experience is consistent with beauty tips, informed salespeople, free makeovers, and, of course, products to try. Online, customers can use their Beauty Bag accounts to track purchases (“What color was that lipstick again?”), scan items while they are in the store, see tutorials, keep a wish list and much more. Offering this experience to their customers helped this #1 beauty retailer to gain an approx. 100% increase in mobile orders.

6) Value City Furniture: Bringing Omnichannel Home

Value City Furniture has mastered in omni channel marketing campaigns, digital marketing priorities by realizing the conundrum faced by customers who want to shop online but also want to take furniture for a “test drive” before buying. They offer an “Easy Pass” platform that lets customers build a shopping list online and then head to a nearby brick-and-mortar location.

There, sales teams can pull up the list and show the customer the furniture in real life. While at the store, people can also start a wish list in their online shopping cart and find additional product information online. By offering ease of shopping, this furniture company was able to increase 55% of its overall shopping engagement.

7) Bank of America: Omnichannel Banking

Many believe that omnichannel marketing is for retailers (e-tailers) only. However, this fact stands corrected as omnichannel is becoming a way of life for customers (and will soon become one for marketers, too). Fintech companies especially need to offer a seamless customer experience, whether it is a physical bank transaction, online transaction, or an ATM withdrawal.

The Bank of America (BOA) has been utilizing omnichannel experience for its customers for a long time—from allowing them to hook up to free Wi-Fi and continue bank transactions while waiting in a branch to offering tablets while sitting in a kiosk with a bank manager. However, they went a step ahead and started the ‘Robo-branch’ initiative where customers don’t need to wait for a teller to get free; instead, they can share their grievances with a machine. The conversation, issue handling, and experience are all the same.

8) Disney: The Champion of Omnichannel

You can’t read about omnichannel marketing strategy without knowing Disney’s omnichannel marketing strategy. They have set the bar so high it’s what other retailers aim for.

As Hubspot describes it, “Disney gets omnichannel experience right, down to the smallest details.” A visitor’s experience starts with the website and then moves on to the My Disney Experience tool that can be used to plan every detail of the trip.

Once at the park, a visitor can use the app to figure out the rides and attractions and even see the wait times for popular rides. But that’s not all: The MagicBand is a wristband that lets visitors:

• • • Unlock hotel room doors
    • Enter the parks
    • Check-in at FastPass entrances for rides
    • Get photos
    • Charge food and goodies to their hotel room

Every aspect of it is consistently branded, effortless to use, and an example of omnichannel taken to new heights.

If you’re not yet doing omnichannel marketing, you soon will be if for no other reason than your competitors already are. But—as these successful brands show—you are free to figure out what will work best for your brand and your bottom line.

9) Apple Embraces Omnichannel Commerce

Apple has been omnichannel-aware since the day Steve Jobs launched its first online store in 1997. Apple used microservices to build a headless E-commerce platform capable of transacting hundreds of billions of dollars in sales. The website, apps, brick-and-mortar stores, and even their social media profiles—everything aimed to provide a cohesive experience.

10) Azadea Group, a Retail Website

Azadea Group built end-to-end customer engagement campaigns that offered its customers a seamless experience. They used MoEngage to build personalized messaging that helped them regulate the order flow.

How to Build an Omni-Channel Marketing Campaign

Omnichannel marketing is the process of carrying out marketing via multiple marketing channels, platforms, and devices. The core difference between an omni-channel marketing strategy and one driven by a single marketing channel is the degree of interconnectedness and integration.

The goal of an omni-channel marketing approach is to create a cohesive customer experience that customers can easily use wherever they are. However, that may not always be practical. Keeping your marketing strategy on a single marketing channel will make your marketing appear inconsistent, which could do more harm than good to your business.

Give Customers a Device- and Platform-Appropriate CTA

Omnichannel marketing focuses on the customer. This is another key difference from multichannel marketing. We can build relationships with them over email, social media, phone, and in person, all while building a website for the company.

But what works for an omnichannel marketing strategy is the device- and platform-appropriate CTAs designed based on the customer journey. This makes omnichannel marketing a notch better than your regular marketing campaigns.

By taking a holistic approach to omnichannel marketing, you can create multiple ways to deliver the same content, decrease wasted ad spend, and boost customer loyalty-to-brand impact (LTI). By analyzing multiple KPIs such as page views/converting — across all potential channels, you can make a plan of attack for your business’s future KPIs, too.