Email as an integral part of an omnichannel strategy

Jessica Mok: Omnichannel is really a state of mind and a business strategy. It’s showing that brands and customers who implement this strategy into their business have a desire to deliver high-quality customer experiences wherever and whenever the consumer wants to engage with them. It’s less about the quantity of contact channels but the seamlessness and ease in which consumers can learn, engage, and ultimately buy or convert through the channel of their choice.

Sal: Absolutely agree. As the lines between channels continue to blur, customers expect a single experience as they flow from an email, to an app, to a website or store. Customers expect you to recognize and value them no matter when or where they show up in their journey.

Jessica: It’s all about focusing on the message, what are you trying to communicate to the consumer and is it time-sensitive information. For every type of message, each channel has a unique value. Email is still key in driving engagement with all audiences, existing and new. Especially when it comes to long-form educational content or detailed information like a special promotion, email is still a leading channel.

Email ownership and consumption span across one’s lifespan. It’s your most direct channel to your customer or prospect, there is no intermediary. And it is also delivered on multiple devices, making it easily accessible. The message is always there for when they need it. The value is accelerated when you can combine email with other channels like SMS and mobile app notification and social media. This accelerates conversions and increases loyalty. Consumers decide how they want to engage with us, not the other way around. But there’s always a foundation, and that is email.

Over 4.3 billion people use email, and more than 361.6 billion emails are sent each day.² With a poor email program, you’ll likely miss out on the majority of your target market and face challenges expanding across other customer touchpoints.

Sal: We also believe email is one of the most important channels in the customer journey. According to Statista there are 4 billion daily email users and this number is expected to climb to 4.6 billion by 2025.³ This is why we are so pleased to be able to offer the industry leading B2C marketing automation platform like Acoustic Marketing Cloud to our customers.

Jessica: As the channel with the most interaction and engagement, email enables brand consistency, it also integrates well with other channels so it should be positioned across touchpoints along the consumer’s buying journey. Marketers should make every effort to personalize their email message making it a well-curated experience for each individual – from the subject line to loyalty points to closest store location and more. And with dynamic content you could even drive consumers to offline locations for a seamless hybrid experience.

Email addresses are also key identifiers, enabling brands to use the ID as a starting point in getting to know the consumer. Making email the foundation and key to reaching omnichannel marketing. Building and executing successful omnichannel campaigns isn’t easy, brands need to make sure that they are capturing and activating the right data to deliver exceptional experiences and placing email in the center to ground the efforts can only help brands find momentum and accelerate their efforts.

Sal: These are excellent points. Acoustic provides the perfect canvas for marketers to plan out their omnichannel journey on a workflow with rules built-in for what to do at each step based on timings and customer engagement…or lack of engagement.

Jessica: Personalization leaves a positive and lasting first impression and by targeting messages based on the consumer’s behavior and experience further encourages them to make a purchase or complete an action – since your driving messages based on their intent.

Additionally, personalized emails help your message stand out from your crowded inbox making it more likely to be opened and clicked on. When brands send the right message to the right audience at the right time, it only improves the overall customer experience. For example, by personalizing communication efforts, an airline customer of ours was able to increase open rates by 80% and increase click-through rates by 38%. And a retail customer was able to increase open rates by 61% and show an increase in revenue by 35%.

However, brands must make a conscious effort to instill data ethics across the organization and use customer data in the way the consumer wants it to be used. Ensuring that you follow a human-centered data policy will make your brand stand out from the crowd.

Sal: At Data Axle, we also believe hyper-personalization and relevancy along with a well-thought-out plan for communications, paired with the right technology is essential to creating a winning marketing program. That’s why we have partnered with Acoustic. Our industry leading Consumer demographic, behavioral and psychographic data for personalization and over 100 prebuilt models on lifestyle, hobby and interests can be appended to the customer data in Acoustic Marketing Cloud and used to support highly targeted and relevant communications and offers.

This has been a very insightful conversation with our partners at Acoustic and I’d like to thank them for their participation in our ongoing “Ask the Expert” series until next time, thanks for joining us!