What is Omnichannel marketing and how to use it

In today’s fast-paced world, consumers engage with brands across multiple touchpoints — in-store, online, and beyond — to meet their unique needs. However, every customer has distinct preferences, and omnichannel marketing acknowledges and caters to these differences. While some shoppers prefer personalized, high-touch services, others value low-touch, 24/7 access. Effective omnichannel marketing involves creating seamlessly integrated channels that cater to customer preferences and guide them toward the most efficient solutions.

The Rise of the Omnichannel Experience

Customers increasingly demand a personalized and compelling user experience that blends digital and physical interactions. Approximately 60% to 70% of consumers research and shop across in-store and online platforms, highlighting the importance of robust omnichannel strategies.

Omnichannel marketing refers to the integration and cooperation of various channels, both physical (e.g., stores) and digital (e.g., websites), to deliver a consistent and convenient brand experience. The primary goal is to create a seamless, user-friendly journey that offers multiple fulfillment options, such as:

• Buy Online, Pick Up In-Store (BOPIS).
• In-store browsing with online checkout.
• Flexible return options across all platforms.

Organizations across diverse industries, including retail, healthcare, finance, and technology, are leveraging omnichannel strategies to meet evolving customer demands.

What Makes Omnichannel Marketing Effective?

Omnichannel marketing is all about blending branding, messaging, and touchpoints—both online and offline—to provide a cohesive experience as customers move through the sales funnel. This approach takes a consumer-centric view of marketing, ensuring that interactions across all channels are positive, consistent, and tailored to individual needs.

Key Elements of an Omnichannel Marketing Strategy:

• Consistent Brand Identity: Maintain a recognizable tone, message, and vision across all channels.
• Personalized Messaging: Deliver content and offers based on customer preferences and behaviors.
• Journey-Based Content: Tailor communication to reflect the customer’s stage in the buyer’s journey and past interactions.

This approach creates trust and loyalty, ensuring customers feel valued and understood no matter where or how they engage with your brand.

Today’s path to purchase something often looks like this:

Omnichannel vs. Multichannel: What’s the Difference?

Understanding the distinction between omnichannel and multichannel marketing is crucial for building a customer-first strategy.

Omnichannel: Focused on creating a unified customer experience. All channels—whether a physical store, mobile app, or website—are interconnected to provide a seamless and consistent journey.

Example: A customer starts browsing on a mobile app, adds items to their cart, and completes the purchase in-store without losing any context or information.

Customer-Centric: The customer is at the heart of every interaction.

Multichannel: Centers around the product or brand, aiming to reach the widest possible audience across disconnected channels. Each channel operates independently, which may result in a fragmented customer experience.

Example: A brand promotes the same product separately on social media, email, and in-store, but the experiences and messaging differ between channels.

Product-Centric: Focuses on promoting products rather than creating a cohesive journey.

Top channels you should use for your omnichannel strategy

Let’s discover which channels you can use if you’re small or medium eCommerce. 

Search ads on Google and Bing

Search ads are a cornerstone of digital marketing, allowing businesses to appear at the top of search engine results when potential customers look for relevant products.  

The main goal is to show the right ad and product to the user while he searches for it. So your ad is like an answer. As soon as the user visits the website you can collect cookies and build your strategy based on each specific potential customer.

META advertising

META platforms, including Facebook and Instagram, offer advanced audience targeting capabilities, making them ideal for eCommerce businesses. here you can use different targeting options and a wide range of ad types. So use dynamic ads to display the exact products the user is looking for. In this way, you will increase your ad personalization and remind you bout your brand. 

Use ads with wider targeting to reach the audience and increase brand awareness. Use stories and reels, and experiment with different types of content to increase your engagement.

Here you can also upload your database to create Look-a-like audiences and target them. So these users will be more qualified. 

TikTok ads

TikTok has emerged as a powerful platform for reaching younger audiences with authentic and entertaining content. TikTok’s algorithm helps businesses reach highly engaged audiences, even with modest budgets. 

By my opinion this source is good for increasing brand awareness and being the part in the conversion path. Engage with users with your content and let them remember you.

Pinterest advertising

Pinterest is a visual discovery platform where users actively search for inspiration, making it an excellent channel for eCommerce brands. If you’re selling furniture, jewelry, or clothing – this platform will give you conversion and customers. Here you can create visually stunning pins with clear product descriptions. Create different renders to show how it looks in the room or on people. 

SMS

SMS marketing is a direct and immediate way to reach your customers with updates, offers, and reminders. Don’t spam, just remind about abandoned cart, viewed product or special offers.

Push notifications

Push notifications allow you to re-engage app or website visitors by sending timely alerts about promotions or product updates.

Email marketing 

One more of eCommerce marketing, offering a reliable way to nurture leads and retain customers. Different platforms can offer you a wide range of opportunities you can use to increase your revenue and sales. Such options as segmentation and personalization in product feed increase both engagement and sales.

Btw, with email marketing, you can collect additional information to use it in your marketing. Such options as birthday date, wedding date, clothing size, baby’s birthday, etc. 

Also, you can connect these bases with other sources like META or Google to create a highly effective strategy. 

Visual search 

Visual search technology enables customers to find products by uploading images instead of typing keywords. Here we had an article about visual search optimization .

People are searching for your products in different ways, not only in classic search or shopping but also by the images tab. So optimize your images on the website with descriptive alt tags to improve searchability.

Augment reality 

AR allows customers to virtually interact with products, such as trying on clothes or visualizing furniture in their homes. You can find good examples of using it on the IKEA app, Amazon AR view, Nike Fit, or Gucci AR shoes. 

Now let’s discover how to connect all these sources in one Omnichannel strategy.

The hardest point here is to receive user visits on the website. So to achieve it you have to have a strong offer and beat your competitors in advertising. I perfected the following funnel to work with different channels: 

I usually recommend our clients to start with at least 2 channels. For example, if you’re eCommerce and need sales – launch Google Ads and configure automated flows with email marketing. Google will provide you with traffic and a good audience and automated flows will close those who abandoned the view or product in the shopping cart.

It always depends on your budget and you don’t need to use all the sources. Check competitors and what they use, ask your friends how they purchase online and choose only the sources you need to have the highest profit.