The Positive Impact of Combining Omni-Channel Marketing with Personalized Messaging.

Remember back in 2003, Best Buy came up with the “customer centricity” approach to compete with Walmart’s electronics department? This approach focused on the customer’s journey, from online, to in-store and to post-sales support. The move kicked off a new breed of marketing—omni-channel marketing.

Yes, that’s right. Omni-channel has been around for 15 years.

Omni-channel is not new, and neither is personalization. The seed of personalization was sown back in 1998 when Amazon founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos, shared with The Washington Post a vision that the success of online retailers would depend on “their ability to analyze each customer’s tastes and create unique experiences from the moment they walk in the virtual door.” Bezos continued with what a personalized e-commerce site would look like, and since then has built this personalized experience for Amazon customers: “If we have 4.5 million customers, we shouldn’t have one store, we should have 4.5 million stores.” What’s been highlighted is Bezos’ roadmap for bringing back the “small-town, custom-made” personal touch from the pre-Industrial Revolution to e-commerce on a mass scale, with proper implementation of electronic “mass customization tools.”

Fast-forward to recent years, and beyond online retail and e-commerce sites, discount travel websites have also leveraged personalization by directing online travelers to their website where they can peruse a curated listing of options solely based on their online search—featuring preferred location, price, and attractions all in one place.

Today, the combination of the two—omni-channel personalization—in the world of digital marketing, especially digital advertising, has become the Holy Grail for most marketers. Why? I chalk it up to three factors:

  1. Changing consumer behavior: Currently, consumers research products using one channel. They get friends’ recommendations on another channel. And, they buy products on yet another channel. That isn’t all necessarily bad news for brands. In fact, a Fluent survey from Business Insider Premium Research found consumers who engaged with brands on multiple channels made purchases more often.
  2. Marketing teams working in silos, such as email, search, social media marketing and advertising; and for a long time, digital advertising has been outsourced to agencies, while most of the other marketing functions are being kept in-house.
  3. Multiple marketing and advertising platforms: The sheer number of  channels and platforms make it difficult for marketers to get a single view of the customer, along their journey.

These are the reasons that omni-channel personalization is a “must” for savvy marketers.

The omni-channel experience is a multi-channel sales approach that provides a consumer with an integrated customer experience. It’s about serving relevant content to micro-segments of consumers across select channels—while they are thinking about purchasing a product or experience, at a specific time of the day, or weather condition.

The key to serving that relevant content is data.

My company, Jivox, has been working with global brand customers on bringing the power of personalization to omni-channel campaigns. While the industry continues to debate and discuss omni-channel and personalization, today, we are sharing a benchmark report that takes samples from more than 40 advertising campaigns in seven verticals that used multiple channels—all in an effort to educate marketers on how to leverage personalization within their omni-channel efforts. The results of the report show 4.3 times the engagement when omni-channel is paired with personalized dynamic creative optimization (DCO). Clearly the two make for a winning combination.

Download the report for all the insights.