Omnichannel personalization: Engage channels with data

Omnichannel personalization is the process in which marketing teams tailor and connect content across multiple channels, such as email and various social media sites. It involves delivering personalized and cohesive content, messages, and interactions to individual buyers or target accounts, regardless of the channels they use.

The concept remains the same across offline and online versions but there are some key differences.

Offline

Offline channels cover everything from brick-and-mortar stores to call centers and leaflet promotions. Offline channels tend to be more relevant to B2C businesses but, in a B2B setting, you may find that in-person events make offline personalization possible.

First-hand feedback or data from a face-to-face survey helps personalize their online journey and offline outreach.

Online

Online personalization covers all web-based channels – from your website to social media strategy, or from email to tailored advertisements. For instance, if a customer spends time on your product page, you may set up personalization that pushes targeted product ads to them, knowing that they are interested.

Overall you are tailoring and enhancing customer experience (CX) with your brand by using a core understanding of your audience.

Why omnichannel personalization is important

Personalization in any form creates a far more direct approach to marketing than just going for generic messaging. By personalizing content, you ensure that your target market – whether the entire audience or an individual – is seeing what they want to see.

For omnichannel marketing, personalization is important because you will often have very different audiences on different platforms. If your business uses social media, you’ll notice that the audiences of TikTok and Facebook differ vastly.

Personalizing all content across channels, taking each specific channel into account and the target audience means that you’ll get the best effect. Keeping your audience in mind while creating a cohesive message will also ensure that consumers who see your content across different platforms aren’t given wildly different messaging that might be confusing.

It was recently found that personalization can reduce customer acquisition costs by as much as 50%, lift revenue by 5 to 15%, and increase the efficiency of marketing spend by 10 to 30%. With such great differences, there’s no reason not to personalize your omnichannel marketing strategy.

With a key understanding of your audience, their needs, and tailoring their experience you not only see a reduction in customer acquisition cost, but you also find a reduction in churn and increase in customer retention. Essentially, instead of trying to convince people why they should buy, show your audience what they want to see and solve their problems!

Omnichannel vs. multichannel – differences

While omnichannel marketing and multichannel marketing are similar, the key difference is cohesiveness. Where multichannel marketing will consider each channel as a separate entity, omnichannel marketing considers them, and your marketing efforts, as a whole.

Consistent branding, messaging, and a cohesive strategy show your audience that when they are choosing your service, they know exactly what they’re getting. It creates a level of trust between you and your customers and solidifies your brand recognition and reputation.

They may seem similar, but it’s been shown that companies that use omnichannel marketing over multichannel see greater brand recognition and a better chance of converting warm leads.

Omnichannel vs cross channel – differences

Omnichannel marketing and cross-channel marketing are related strategies that differ primarily in their approach to customer experience and integration.

Omnichannel marketing emphasizes a seamless and cohesive customer experience across all channels, ensuring that interactions are integrated and consistent throughout the entire buyer journey. It aims to provide a unified experience where customers can seamlessly transition between channels without disruption.

Cross-channel marketing, on the other hand, involves using multiple channels to reach customers but may not prioritize integration or a unified customer experience.

In cross-channel marketing, each channel operates independently, potentially leading to fragmented interactions. While both strategies involve leveraging various channels, omnichannel marketing places a stronger emphasis on creating a holistic, customer-centric approach.

How to get started with omnichannel personalization

Getting started with omnichannel personalization involves several key steps. Here’s a comprehensive guide to help you get going with effective, personalized omnichannel marketing that truly engages your audience.

1. Define your objectives

Clearly outline your goals for omnichannel personalization. Identify specific business objectives that you want to impact with your efforts, such as improving audience engagement, increasing conversion rates, or boosting customer loyalty. Have this aligned across all teams to ensure a cohesive message across your business.

If you’re interested in the psychology of audience attention and engagement, we’ve got a guide.

Click to read Demystifying the psychology of attention | Turtl

2. Understand your audience

Understanding your audience comes in many forms. To start with, map your customer journey. Our on-demand No gaps content mapping webinar reveals what you need to know to get this right.

If you understand how customers have previously moved from lead to closed, with consistent refinement, you can predict the content needed to help other customers move through your pipeline seamlessly.   This leaves you with a friction-free funnel, shorter sales cycles, and more conversions.

Read how to accelerate your pipeline and remove any blockers.
Find out how to manage your sales pipeline and measure success.

Detailed buyer personas help you understand your target audience. This includes demographics, preferences, behaviors, and pain points. The better you understand your customers, the more effective your personalization efforts will be.

Your ideal customer profile (ICP) is a persona based on your best-fit prospects. Use engagement data, or even ABM data to refine your ICPs to get a more accurate measure of who your target audience is.

4.  Audit your data

Conduct a thorough audit of your existing customer data. Ensure that data is accurate, up-to-date, and stored in a centralized location. Identify gaps or inconsistencies in the data and keep your database clean.

3.  Integrate data sources

Integrate data from various sources, such as CRM systems, marketing automation platforms, content creation software, and social media analytics. A unified view of customer data across channels is crucial for effective personalization.

5. Use analytics tools with real-time data and automate

Use analytics tools to gain insights into customer behavior and to understand how customers move across channels. You can identify patterns and determine the most effective touchpoints for personalization. Behavioral data is worth its weight in gold.

Turtl Analytics gives you real-time content interaction updates –  data that’s crucial for personalized omnichannel automation. Integrate Turtl and automate relevant, personalized content journeys for any number of recipients. If campaigns shift, you can update Turtl content live, without upsetting your workflow.

6. Develop a personalization strategy

Define a personalized experience for each customer segment. Determine the types of personalization you want to implement for each one – such as product recommendations, targeted content, or personalized promotions.

Personalized content is proven to improve reader engagement by 84%. Ideal if your goal is account-based marketing.

Find out how to build a solid ABM strategy.

7. User personalization engines

We have to toot our own horn here and recommend Turtl’s Personalization Engine which allows you to create deeply personalized content, for any number of accounts or sends, in minutes. Personalization engines like ours allow you to scale marketing efforts automatically to ensure that each lead sees relevant content that resonates.

8. Test and optimize

Test, test, and test again. We don’t say this lightly; without consistent analysis of your strategy, how your personalization is affecting leads, and whether certain messaging works better than others, you’re starting from scratch every time you put out content. Set up A/B testing and optimization processes to continually refine your personalization strategy.

9. Create omnichannel consistency

Ensure a consistent brand experience across all channels. Develop a strategy for delivering personalized content seamlessly, whether it’s on your website, email, social media, or other touchpoints. Want to learn more about the core digital channels you should use in your omnichannel strategy? Check out our comprehensive guide below.

Click to read 6 key marketing channels to generate and capture demand

10. Monitor and adapt

Regularly monitor the performance of your omnichannel personalization activity. Use analytics to assess the impact on key metrics and make data-driven personalization adjustments based on customer feedback and changing market dynamics to improve results.

Omnichannel and customer experience (CX)

Omnichannel marketing and CX  are intrinsically connected, with omnichannel strategies designed to enhance and optimize the overall customer journey.

Omnichannel experiences focus on providing seamless, integrated interactions across various channels, ensuring consistency and continuity throughout the customer lifecycle.

By unifying online and offline touchpoints, such as websites, mobile apps, social media, physical stores, and customer service, omnichannel approaches aim to create a cohesive and personalized experience.

Omnichannel personalization acknowledges that customers may transition between channels during their journey, and it seeks to eliminate silos, allowing for a more holistic understanding of customer preferences and behaviors.

Ultimately, the goal is to meet customer expectations, improve satisfaction, and build lasting relationships by delivering a unified and exceptional experience across all points of engagement.

Omnichannel and brand experience (BX)

Omnichannel marketing strategies play a pivotal role in shaping and reinforcing a brand’s overall experience and the outward face of the business. Omnichannel approaches contribute to a cohesive BX  which in turn makes the customer experience much more fluid and recognizable.

This strategy enables customers to transition effortlessly between channels while still knowing clearly which brand they’re interacting with. By fostering a sense of continuity, you can reinforce brand values, messaging, and visual identity. The result is a unified brand experience that resonates with customers and strengthens their connection to your brand – ultimately contributing to loyalty and advocacy.

Barriers to omnichannel

So you feel ready to jump head first into omnichannel personalization, but hold on! There are still barriers to omnichannel marketing and personalization that you have to consider before diving in.

Essential tech stack

Omnichannel marketing can, in theory, be done relatively low-tech. However, this takes much more time, effort, and money than investing in tools that make this process easy and streamlined.

Ensuring your tech stack includes the best content marketing tools not only saves time and money, but it also greatly increases the accuracy of your data, and your personalization.

Social media management

We’d recommend social management platforms like Agorapulse or Hootsuite. Using tools like these allows you to have an overview of all your social media channels in one place rather than having to create different reports for each site. It also allows you to post simultaneously on these platforms which will help to keep the messaging consistent across multiple channels.

Customer relationship management systems (CRMS)

Tools like Hubspot allow you to keep a close eye on how your customers are interacting with your website and outbound content. Understanding customer behavior is the first step in many decisions you make as a marketer. CRMs are also essential tools to help define lead-scoring models. 

Automated personalization tools 

Automated personalization tools save you serious time and effort with your omnichannel marketing.

These tools allow you to personalize at scale by choosing audience segments and automatically showing audience groups different parts of your content depending on how you set it up.

Integrate Turtl with your CRM and automate content journeys from triggers set in Turtl. They can be reader-led workflows, or predesigned journeys based on the data refinements. You can send personalized long-from content to any number of accounts.

Lack of customer insight (data)

You may have guessed by this point but at Turtl, we are all about data. And that’s because of how important it is in today’s marketing world – especially for omnichannel personalization.

Without a core understanding of your customer, your content won’t engage. Collecting data has many nuances, from how you collect to the type of data you collect.

Zero-party vs first-party

Zero-party is when data is willingly given to you by the audience themselves. If someone signs up for your newsletter, receiving their name and email from the sign-up form would be zero-party data. The same goes for surveys people respond to, or any preference options they take either on your website or through your service. Having a solid customer feedback strategy can inform things like your content marketing strategy, product-led growth, and, of course, your omnichannel marketing strategy.

First-party data covers any collected information through a service. For example, if you collect insights from social media analytics or even Turtl Analytics, that’s first-party data. This is because you get the data directly from the platform you’re using, not directly from the source.

Demographic vs firmographic

Demographic data covers the basics of who the person is. For instance, age and gender can be considered demographic data. These tend to be more useful when targeting groups on a much larger scale, and often more so for B2C businesses where firmographic data is not relevant.

Firmographic data covers organizations and individuals. Some personal pieces of information are considered firmographic data like job titles as these may be important for targeting decision-makers. However, typically firmographic data will focus on an organization’s size, annual revenue, and industry. Firmographic data is especially important for B2B businesses as it enables us to build an accurate ideal customer profile (ICP).

Knowing preferred channels

A core understanding of your audience, through your customer journey map, sales funnel, and lead scoring, will help you to understand which marketing channels work best for your business.

You may find that direct email marketing works better at securing conversions than social media. Ensure that you have a solid understanding of where your customers view your content and prioritize accordingly.

Data silos

Often you may find that different teams and departments store different elements of customer data. Data silos refer to a locked-off space for a specific team to see certain customer/lead data e.g. a Hubspot account that only certain team members have access to. Ensuring you have a comprehensive look at the entire data landscape streamlines processes and avoids duplicated efforts.

Channel conflict vs team goals

Channel conflict happens when different teams responsible for different channels clash. It doesn’t have to be a battle, but without a business messaging guide and unified team goals, you may find clashes happening far more often than they should.

Align your teams and ensure everyone’s goals line up to serve the same purpose.  Consistent and cohesive internal and external messaging will ensure reduced friction and a more interconnected customer experience.

Turtl takeaway

Now that you’ve read our top tips for getting started with omnichannel personalization, and the barriers that might get in the way of a smooth process, we think you’re ready to get stuck in. So why not speak to Team Turtl to see how our platform makes omnichannel personalization easy as pie?