Omnichannel Marketing Automation: The Complete Guide for Growing Businesses

The customer experience is changing. There are more ways for people to find your brand than ever before, from social media and ecommerce platforms to your website and offline advertising. Customer expectations are also changing, as they look for speed and convenience in every interaction.

Your challenge as a small business owner? Giving customers a consistent experience across all channels. No matter where people find you, they should get the same brand voice and messaging. Omnichannel marketing — and omnichannel marketing automation — aims to meet this expectation, as it makes use of the numerous ways to reach customers and speak with a consistent brand identity. 

By automating aspects of your omnichannel marketing, you can get to know your customer and maintain your messaging across platforms. In the process, you’ll gather invaluable data and learn how to scale and grow your company for long-term, sustainable success.

Let’s take a look at the ins and outs of omnichannel marketing, what it achieves, and how automation can help you make the most of it. 

What is omnichannel marketing automation?

Omnichannel marketing gives your customers the same shopping experience no matter where they encounter your brand: through social media, your ecommerce store, or in a brick-and-mortar location. It’s distinct from multichannel marketing, where you sell across several channels, but each of those experiences is different.

With omnichannel marketing automation, you can leverage technology to save time and combine data from all of your channels. As a small business owner, you’ve got a lot on your plate, and automation allows you to reach customers when you’re busy working on other things. This approach supports a seamless customer experience, sales efficiency, and a central spot to house all of your data. 

The 4 Cs of omnichannel marketing

Omnichannel marketing is strongest when it’s done right, and that’s where the 4 Cs come in. These are the four critical components to any omnichannel strategy. 

1. Consistency

Delivering a consistent brand experience on every channel helps customers know what to expect from your business and builds trust with your audience. Your brand voice, messaging, and visuals (logos, colors, imagery) should stay the same regardless of the platform. Maintaining consistent store hours, committing to response times, and providing your business’s contact information on every platform also contribute to the customer experience. 

In terms of brand imagery, consider Amazon and its offshoots like Amazon Prime Video. The smile arrow logo appears on every Amazon platform, from their website and social media to their item packaging. Emails to confirm customer orders and alerts about new programming on Prime Video have the same look as the properties’ websites, helping maintain consistency.

2. Convenience

Customers like it when you meet them where they are and make your interactions effortless. In a way, this is the heart of omnichannel marketing, as customers can interact with your brand with ease regardless of their chosen platform.

Depending on your offerings, you can provide convenience through curbside order pickup, expanded business hours, or a wider delivery or service region. For product-based businesses, giving customers the option to purchase directly from your website, through ecommerce sites like Amazon, or on social media shops allows them to choose what’s most convenient for them. For example, Ticketmaster allows customers to purchase event tickets online and through their app, and links to event pages on their social media profiles.

3. Continuity

A proficient omnichannel approach holds onto the conversation with a customer across channels. With omnichannel marketing automation, you can utilize data integration to ensure a continuous experience. Automation can guide customers through the buying journey by maintaining continuity on different communication channels, like SMS, email, social media, and web chatbots. 

4. Customization

If you’ve ever made an Amazon purchase, chances are you’ve received an email promoting similar or related items within a few days. This is customization in action! 

Keep customers engaged by automating targeted ads or emails highlighting products that are relevant to their interests. If they’ve spent time browsing one category of items on your website or made past purchases, you can use that information to suggest new products that might catch their attention.

The 4 pillars of omnichannel marketing

The 4 Cs of omnichannel marketing are made possible by the nuts and bolts that support it. These are the 4 pillars: data, integration, messaging, and optimization.

Pillar 1: Unified customer data

Having all your customer data in one place helps create a single view of your audience, but also of each customer. You can gather location, purchase, and browsing data to get a sense of where they are and what items pique their interest. Automation allows for seamless gathering of this information across channels and combines it so all the pieces fit together.

Pillar 2: Channel integration

Integration brings all of your channels together to give you a full view of your audience, whether they’re email subscribers, past customers, or social media followers. That way, you can provide consistent messaging and interactive capabilities on every platform. 

Sometimes, there are challenges to full integration, such as a social media platform not having full compatibility with your ecommerce site. Work around this by creating connections between channels, like adding links to your ecommerce site on your Instagram posts or automating daily inventory checks to keep your social media shops up to date. 

Consider this Facebook post from Vogue magazine. The post links out to an article on Vogue’s website, and the hero image asks the viewer a question, encouraging them to leave a comment below and get a conversation going. This cross-channel activity creates traffic on both sites and further integrates Facebook followers and website readers.

Pillar 3: Consistent messaging

Each channel is a stream of communication with your customer. With omnichannel marketing automation, you create a consistent and coordinated message between channels while sending out channel-appropriate content. You can automate and coordinate your content workflow to meet these objectives.

Consistency isn’t just about content — it’s also about timing. Sales, for example, should be announced at the same time on every platform to give all customers easy and immediate access to deals.

Pillar 4: Measurement and optimization

The last pillar measures the effectiveness of your omnichannel marketing automation. It’s critical to look at key metrics to assess your success, such as impressions, click-through rates, and conversions. You should also take note of which channels lead to the action you want from your customer, such as a sale. 

This process of marketing attribution assesses where you should give credit when the deal closes for a customer. Did they click from your social media post through to a landing page on your website? You might credit both with the conversion. As your marketing strategy continues to unfold, using automation and collected data to remarket your offerings can improve your marketing return on investment (ROI).

Build your omnichannel marketing automation strategy

Now that you have a strong sense of why automation of omnichannel marketing is essential, you can take the next steps to build your strategy. You’ve got all the information you need at your fingertips! 

Step 1: Audit your current customer journey

Start your omnichannel marketing automation process by mapping the journey of your current customers. This allows you to see how they reach that point of conversion: did they follow a social media link, a paid ad, or an organic search link? By mapping this journey, you can identify the touchpoints and friction across channels. 

Perhaps online branding sparks interest in your social media pages, but customers stop with a follow — they never convert. Ask yourself what’s missing in your marketing on specific channels and fill those gaps. Tools like Hotjar, Heap, and Google Analytics can get you started with journey mapping.

Step 2: Unify customer data

The more data you have in your back pocket, the stronger your marketing will be — but you must follow legal and ethical data protection practices! That might mean limiting the collection and storage of personally identifiable information or tracking customer behavior based on IP address only. If you’re based in the United States, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has a handy guide on protecting personal information. 

Automating the collection and integration process means your customer data is always up to date. Data platforms like Salesforce, Treasure Data, and Twilio, among many others, streamline this for you.

Step 3: Select the right channels

Omnichannel is often described as using “every” channel to reach your customers, but in practice, you should prioritize the channels that matter most to your business. That depends on your industry and offerings — a B2B software company might have little use for Instagram but thrive on LinkedIn, while a fashion brand might rely heavily on Instagram and ignore LinkedIn completely. 

Once you prioritize your channel investment, you should also balance your channel mix so you’re reaching people where they are. Fashion consumers might respond well on Instagram, but also want to see a website or email messages about new stock before buying. 

Step 4: Automate workflows

Level up your omnichannel marketing automation by automating your workflows as well. This can include everything from sending out automated welcome emails when a new customer signs up for your email list to sharing shipping updates via SMS. This not only increases your customer data, but it also serves the customer by helping them through the conversion process. 

Automation facilitates cross-channel communication as well. For example, you can implement automated chatbots on your website. After browsing for a set number of seconds, a web visitor will be invited to join a chat to get more information or set up an appointment. Always be sure to conduct testing to ensure the right result: you can play with the number of browsing seconds before a chat window pops up, or do A/B testing to see if a contact form instead of a chat leads to more interested clients.

Step 5: Implement, measure, and refine

Once you have your strategy outlined, it’s time to launch it! To assess your success, track several key performance indicators (KPIs) like:

• Conversion rates
• Customer acquisition cost
• Customer lifetime value

Based on your results, both overall and for each channel, you can continue to tweak and improve your omnichannel marketing automation strategy. As your business grows, your primary marketing channels might change, leading to an ongoing refinement of your strategy. 

Common omnichannel marketing automation challenges (and solutions)

Like all parts of running a small business, omnichannel marketing automation comes with a learning curve, but you can overcome challenges with targeted strategies and other technological support.

Data silos

Much like the farming structures that give them their name, data silos are separate “baskets” or “containers” of data that keep sets of information isolated. This can happen when teams use different software that doesn’t integrate, or maintain customer records on private hard drives instead of shared ones. Silos aren’t connected, so data only exists in one place, even if it might be helpful across systems.

Say a software-as-a-service (SaaS) customer service rep speaks with a customer via phone about an issue using their software. During their call, the rep can’t access any information the program has logged about the customer’s product use. This is a problematic silo! The customer service rep needs that data to give the user appropriate advice, resolve their issue, and maintain a consistent brand experience. Automated data-gathering platforms can help eliminate silos so all information is in one spot.

Technology integration

Brands often use multiple technology solutions within their business, but this can lead to major issues down the road. Not only will data be trapped in separate silos, teams will end up wasting valuable time and energy tracking down the information they need and there will be more room for human error when analyzing data. Plus, you could miss valuable information about your customers and your customer journey that could make your marketing less targeted and effective.

Resolve this by ensuring all of your software integrates with each other before implementing them in your business. Doing this requires a quick conversation with a sales rep or some investigation on your own — ask if your platforms are compatible and check for any barriers or complications for full data integration.

Content creation at scale

As you market across several channels, you must provide a continual stream of content, all platform-appropriate and in your brand voice. But posting regularly and creating unique content for every platform is a massive time commitment for small business owners! To work around this, try repurposing past content or developing multiple versions of the same post as you create it.

For example, you can take the transcript of a previous webinar and develop it into a blog, LinkedIn post, or podcast script. You could also upload the webinar to YouTube and create 30 – 90-second clips to post on Instagram Reels, TikTok, or YouTube Shorts.

Skills and resources

Give yourself a solid foundation to start omnichannel marketing automation by building a strong team or developing your skills as a small business owner. Teams that execute on omnichannel marketing strategies should encompass several skills:

• Digital marketing, including social media, organic content, and search engine optimization (SEO)
• Data analysis, including marketing KPIs and customer journey mapping
• Automation of marketing activities, such as emails and customer response workflows
• Content creation across multiple channels

Small teams can perform many of these functions with the right solutions. You can also outsource much of this work to agencies, such as content creation and automation, so you know you’re getting high-quality work and analysis. You can also adopt technology solutions like email marketing automation software.

Choosing the right omnichannel marketing automation platform

If you’ve decided an automation platform is the way to go, consider how the options available align with your needs as a business. As with any investment, it’s a good idea to look at the information carefully before making a decision.  

Must-have features

Some features are must-haves for any business that embarks on an omnichannel marketing automation strategy. Your chosen solution should be able to:

• Implement effective customer data management that makes vital information available across your business and avoids data silos 
• Create a campaign that works across channels, such as a basic capacity to post simultaneously on your website and to all of your social media properties
• Automate some workflows, with pre-set times for posting
• Manage and integrate data in one place, while also providing the reporting and analytics you need to make decisions

Questions to ask potential providers

Your potential software providers should have answers to your key questions, which could include:

• Does your solution integrate with my current data collection software and other technology?
• Will your solution follow the growth and scale of my business over time?
• What ongoing support do you provide for the solution?
• Will you train my team on how to use the new solution?
• What are the costs of this service? 
• Will costs increase as my business grows?

You should be able to find a solution that fits your business needs and allows you to build integrated marketing campaigns that take advantage of omnichannel marketing automation. 

Implementation considerations

Once you have chosen potential solutions, it’s a good idea to think about how long it will take to get each one up and running. You might opt for the one that gives you the best balance of a reasonable timeline, features, and capabilities. Before starting, take inventory of your existing technology resources to see if they are ready to support the solution. 

Also, don’t forget the human factor! You and your team need time to learn how to utilize your new solution effectively. Once you’re all up and running, develop a new workflow that takes the new solution into account. This can be an adjustment for everyone, but it can benefit your marketing strategy and the business overall. 

Take the next steps with omnichannel marketing automation

Omnichannel marketing helps you meet customers where they are with a consistent brand image and voice. Your customers get the convenience of a seamless shopping experience no matter how or where they choose to interact. 

A successful omnichannel marketing strategy relies on consistency, continuity, convenience, and customization. That’s best achieved with integrated data, cross-channel content creation, and robust software support. As you develop your strategy, you can continue to refine it to maximize your returns. 

Automation increases the success of omnichannel marketing by supporting personalization and data integration. You can support your efforts by using one of many omnichannel marketing automation solutions. Choose the one that’s the best fit for your existing technology and business objectives. 

It’s great to start small and scale up as you learn more and build on your omnichannel marketing successes. Done right, it can give you a competitive advantage as you learn more about your customer and deliver exactly what they need.

To get started on your omnichannel marketing automation journey, check out Constant Contact’s library of on-demand marketing webinars. Learn how to plan and execute a strategy that drives growth and achieves your goals!