Is Omni-Channel The Future Of Marketing?

Today, consumers are more connected than ever before and have higher expectations. In order to succeed, marketers must predict and address consumers’ needs and wants to deliver better customer experiences. Omni-channel technology is a relatively new innovation that has already revolutionized the way marketers operate by providing a single, centralized customer engagement management platform, streamlined digital data streams, powerful analytics tools, and one-to-one messaging. The convergence of data into customer profiles that include location data, purchase histories, preferred channels and devices, and demographics information has helped turned what used to be a monologue between brands and customers into a dynamic dialogue.

How Omni-Channel Technology Works

Omni-channel customer engagement technologies integrate customer experiences across all media touch points to help marketers better manage the chaos of a multi-channel fragmented world. There are several companies that are spearheading this technology, including IBM, Adobe, and QWASI. Their platforms help bridge the gap between what consumers do during their purchase journey, how their perceptions of brands influence their behaviors, and how they use technology to make purchasing decisions. Omni-channel technology also delivers deep insights into how customers interact with brands, products, and services across industries and markets to help marketers, retailers, business intelligence managers, and other stakeholders make critical, real-time data-driven decisions.

What Managers Can Do With Omni-Channel Software

• Send personalized one-to-one messages based on customer preferences
• Know what type of smartphone, tablet, and desktop a customer is using
• Use iBeacon technology to send customers special deals and discounts based on their location
• See customers’ entire purchase histories
• Review customers’ location data via visual mapping
• Check email open rates
• Send messages to segmented audiences
• Gain real-time, data-driven insights into consumer behaviors
• Create their own attributes based on a marketing campaigns’ goals

Media is the Message

Today, marketers are faced with vast volumes of quickly moving data coming in from every direction. Having customer data in different places makes it difficult to see patterns and identify business opportunities and problem. With omni-channel technology, data is no longer contained in separate databases and flows into one easy-to-use interface thanks to an intelligent API layer that operates in the background. While there are many omni-channel technologies out there, QWASI is one of the most cost-effective options because it doesn’t require a complicated or expensive onboarding process thereby reducing the work load for technology teams so they can continue to dedicate their attention to other critical business areas.

With Omni-Channel Platforms, Managers Can:

• Tell better brand stories
• Deliever relevant real-time messages
• Better understand how and where customers are consuming content
• Create highly targeted, personalized communications
• Use insights to strategically plan marketing campaigns and business decisions
• Predict trends and make more informed inventory decisions based on data

Media is the message that tells the story of a brand and delivers value to customers. Omni-channel marketing helps managers better understand how customers are consuming content and through which media touch points to help them make more informed, real-time marketing and planning decisions. By integrating both the medium and the message, omni-channel technology allows brands to create highly-effective, targeted, and personalized communications and reach their audiences with context.

Making Sense of Big Data 

Big Data is a term used to describe the volume and availability of structured and unstructured data. Many industry experts claim that more data may lead to more accurate analyses as well as the ability to make better predictions. Omni-channel technology platforms help marketers make sense of vast volumes of data by collecting and curating it into a single, attractive user interface. Many omni-channel interfaces like QWASI’s curate data streams from multiple channels and devices into customer profiles that allow marketers to segment consumers and parse data. These technologies provide enhanced 360-degree views of customers to help marketers make more informed decisions regarding personalization. By having access to purchase histories and location information marketers can use attributes to target customers based on their interests and preferred modes of interaction.

While omni-channel technology is a relatively new phenomenon as more companies and technologies work towards creating seamless brand cross-channel experiences, it will likely gain more popularity since it offers a unified solution to the data disparity currently characterizing the multi-channel model.