What Is Omnichannel Marketing, and Why Does It Matter?

Omnichannel marketing seeks to remove silos and barriers between the channels where your customers find you to provide a more cohesive experience. Here’s why it’s critical for your business.

Imagine you’re shopping for a new pair of shoes. You start browsing a brand’s website on your phone, where you take a quick style quiz. When interrupted mid-purchase, you receive an email showing your saved items.

Later, you visit their brick-and-mortar store and open their mobile app, which displays the shoes you viewed online and helps you locate them in-store. You decide to buy the shoes, earning loyalty points that will be automatically applied to your next online purchase.

This seamless, personalized experience across multiple touchpoints is the essence of omnichannel marketing. In a world where consumers engage with brands through a growing array of channels—website, mobile app, email, social media, in-store, etc.—providing a cohesive, integrated customer journey has become table stakes.

What Exactly Is Omnichannel Marketing?

At its core, omnichannel marketing is about creating a unified, consistent brand experience for customers across all channels and devices.

It means that whether a customer is interacting with your brand on your website, mobile app, social media, email or in-store, they should have a frictionless, integrated experience that feels connected and personalized.

Omnichannel is often confused with multichannel marketing, but there’s a key difference. Multichannel marketing means a brand has a presence on multiple channels, but those channels may operate in silos. With omnichannel, all channels work together in harmony, sharing data and insights to provide a holistic customer experience.

For example, a multichannel retailer may have a website, a mobile app and physical stores, but the customer’s experience with each may feel disjointed. They might use one loyalty program in-store and another online. The brand’s website may not know about the customer’s past in-store purchases to make personalized recommendations.

In contrast, an omnichannel approach would unify these touchpoints. The customer’s preferences, purchase history and interactions would be known and acted upon across all channels. They could start an order on one channel and easily complete it on another. Personalized recommendations would be based on a complete view of the customer’s behavior across channels.

Why Omnichannel Marketing is Critical for Business Growth

Here are a few key reasons why omnichannel matters:

Improved Customer Experience

Today’s consumers expect consistent interactions across an ever-growing number of touchpoints. Research indicates that around 73% of customers use multiple channels during their shopping journey. By providing a cohesive, personalized experience across channels, brands can increase customer satisfaction and reduce friction.

Increased Engagement and Loyalty

Omnichannel customers are more engaged and loyal. They have a higher lifetime value than those who shop using only one channel. Consistent messaging and unified experiences across channels foster deeper brand connections and advocacy.

Higher Conversion Rates

Omnichannel strategies drive a 287% higher purchase rate than single-channel campaigns. When customers receive relevant, timely communications based on a holistic understanding of their needs and behavior, they’re more likely to convert.

Better Data and Insights

An omnichannel approach requires connecting data across customer touchpoints, giving brands a more complete, 360-degree view of their customers. These rich, integrated insights can inform smarter segmentation, personalization and customer lifecycle marketing.

Competitive Advantage

As customer experience becomes a key brand differentiator, those who can deliver smooth omnichannel journeys will stand out from the pack. Brands that lag in omnichannel strategy will appear disconnected and out of touch.

Key Components of an Omnichannel Strategy

Building an effective omnichannel marketing strategy requires careful planning and orchestration across several key areas:

Unified Customer Data

The foundation of omnichannel is a centralized, 360-degree view of the customer. This requires integrating data across multiple touchpoints into a unified customer profile. Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) play a crucial role here.

Consistent Messaging

Your brand should tell the same story everywhere. This means aligning messaging, offers and creative across touchpoints, and tailoring content based on individual customer preferences and behavior. If you’re promoting a summer sale, that message should be the same whether customers see it on Instagram, email or in your store windows. No promoting sandals on your website while your store focuses on sneakers.

Clean Cross-Channel Experiences

Customers should move effortlessly between channels without losing context. This requires connecting backend systems and processes to enable fluid experiences. They might browse on their phone during lunch, continue on their laptop at home and pick up in-store tomorrow—like hitting pause on Netflix and resuming exactly where you left off.

Personalization at Scale

Customer data should be used to deliver relevant experiences across all touchpoints. This may mean leveraging AI and machine learning to automate personalization, from product recommendations to targeted offers based on past purchases. If someone always buys running gear, show them new athletic collections. If they prefer in-store pickup, make that option prominent.

Measurement and Optimization

As with any marketing strategy, omnichannel efforts need to be continuously measured and optimized based on performance. This requires unified measurement systems and test-and-learn approaches to refine tactics over time. Use these insights to identify which paths lead to purchases, where people get stuck and how to improve the overall experience.

Common Omnichannel Obstacles (And How to Overcome Them)

While the benefits of omnichannel are clear, most organizations face some common challenges:

1. Data silos: Customer information is often scattered across different systems. Your store staff might not know about online purchases, while your website doesn’t recognize loyal in-store shoppers. Breaking down these silos and unifying data into a single view of the customer is a foundational step for omnichannel.
2. Legacy systems: Outdated, inflexible technology stacks can make it difficult to connect customer touchpoints and enable real-time, cross-channel interactions. Modernizing martech and CX infrastructures is often a necessary enabler for omnichannel strategies.
3. Organizational silos: Marketing might be planning a big online campaign while the stores are running a different promotion. When teams operate independently like this, it creates a disconnected customer experience. Success requires getting everyone—marketing, sales, IT, customer service—working together toward common goals.
4. Skills gaps: Building effective omnichannel experiences requires people who understand both individual channels and how they work together. This often means training existing teams and bringing in new talent with specialized expertise.
5. Measurement complexity: With customers bouncing between your app, website and store, it’s tricky to understand their full journey. For example, did they buy in-store because of an email, an Instagram ad or both? Getting clear answers requires careful planning and the right tracking tools.

The Path Forward

Becoming an omnichannel-first organization is a journey, not a destination. It requires a fundamental shift in mindset, capabilities and ways of working that touches every part of the organization.

Some key steps on the path forward:

1. Define your omnichannel vision: Map out what great customer experience looks like for your brand. What specific touchpoints will customers use? How will different channels work together? For example, how should online browsing connect to in-store visits? Your vision should detail these interactions and set clear goals for your team.
2. Assess your current state: Conduct an honest assessment of your current omnichannel maturity. Examine how your channels currently connect (or don’t). How integrated are your customer data and touchpoints today? Where are the biggest gaps and opportunities? Use these insights to prioritize initiatives.
3. Build the right capabilities: Evaluate your tech stack, data infrastructure, marketing processes and team skills against your omnichannel vision. Identify where you need to invest, modernize or upskill to enable more seamless cross-channel experiences. Again, consider a CDP to unify data and drive personalization at scale.
4. Foster cross-functional collaboration: Break down walls between departments. Marketing, sales, store operations and IT need to work as one team. Create groups that focus on specific customer journeys rather than individual channels. Set shared goals that encourage teams to think about the entire customer experience.
5. Start small, then scale: Don’t boil the ocean. Start with a specific use case or segment, and scale success from there. Continuously test, measure and optimize your omnichannel approach based on results and feedback.

Most importantly, never lose sight of the customer. Omnichannel is about creating frictionless, valuable journeys that make their lives easier. By keeping the customer at the center of your strategy, teams and technology, you’ll be well on your way to omnichannel excellence.

Enabling Omnichannel Success: The Role of Customer Data Platforms

Customer Data Platforms have emerged as a key solution for overcoming many of the challenges associated with omnichannel marketing.

By providing a centralized hub for aggregating and activating customer data across touchpoints, CDPs enable organizations to:

• Break down data silos and unify customer profiles
• Enrich customer understanding with behavioral and contextual data
• Segment audiences and personalize interactions across channels
• Orchestrate consistent, relevant customer experiences
• Measure and optimize omnichannel performance

Leading CDPs like Progress Sitefinity Insight go a step further by embedding powerful AI and machine learning capabilities to help organizations predict customer needs, propensities and next-best-actions.

For example, a retailer using Sitefinity Insight could leverage AI-driven insights to:

• Identify high-value customer segments based on past behavior and engagement patterns
• Deliver personalized content recommendations by combining online behavior and CRM data
• Track and analyze customer journeys to understand behavior patterns and optimize engagement
• Use AI-driven attribution modeling to measure campaign performance and improve results
• Enable real-time segmentation and personalization across banking, retail, healthcare and other industries

By unifying, enriching and activating customer data at scale, CDPs provide the critical foundation for executing effective omnichannel strategies and delivering business impact.

Request a demo of Sitefinity Insight to see if it is the CDP for you.