How to Understand the Omnichannel Customer Journey

Tracking the customer journey is becoming more difficult. Today’s consumers engage brands on multiple platforms, often moving through several digital touchpoints before they are ready to buy.

Therefore, the concept of omnichannel marketing has risen, allowing businesses to embrace the change to address two critical aspects of modern marketing – technological innovation and customer experience.
 

 
The biggest challenge facing companies today is being able to harness the technology available to provide a seamless brand experience from one touchpoint to the next, thus offering people a better customer experience.

Read on to discover why this omnichannel customer journey is so important today, and find out how you can make it work for your business.

The Digital Evolution

Since the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT), the business world has been rapidly evolving. Digital transactions are now much more than a simple transaction between a company and a customer. Now, businesses are in constant communication with other companies and people without any face-to-face meetings or human interaction.

Year-on-year, new technology continues to transform entire industries, pushing everyone to a crossroads between digital transformation or ‘Digital Darwinism.’

McKinsey research claims that 85% of all customer support interactions will be with AI chatbots by 2020, which indicates the speed of change the business world is undergoing.

Marketing is also changing shape, as companies need to stay agile and react to shifts in the market or changes in consumer interests and behaviors. Over the past few years, more businesses have sought to use multi-channel marketing to engage people on different platforms. Naturally, these channels have begun to merge, making the concept of omnichannel marketing an increasingly popular choice.

Now, it is the only choice worth considering if you want your business to keep its edge among the competition.

What is Customer Journey?

The customer journey is the path that a person will take from the moment they discover a brand or specific product until they make a purchase. In an ideal world, customers would move predictably, making it easy for businesses to cater to their needs. In reality, it’s very different.

Before the dawn of the internet age, people shopped almost exclusively in shopping malls. Before they arrived, they may have browsed some catalogs to get a sense of what they wanted. When they arrived in the mall, they would visit several stores, considering multiple options. Finally, they would return to a specific store, try on some of their preferred choices, before making a purchase.

This is a typical, traditional, offline customer journey.

When you add the internet into the equation, with Google search, social media, paid ads, email marketing, YouTube videos, influencers, bloggers, and celebrity brand advocates, the customer journey becomes much more complicated.

Now, instead of a simple catalog, customers have a myriad of avenues to discover and learn about products. People can jump from one channel to the next in seconds, even using their smartphones to watch how-to videos while considering a gadget in a physical store.

We can use data analytics to track the customer journey, which allows us to learn more about consumer behaviors. This is beneficial because:

• It is data-driven.
• It comes directly from the customer.
• It covers both the business and customer aspects.

 
Nowadays, it’s increasingly difficult to predict each user’s path to purchase. The data patterns that we can track will differ depending on what stage the prospect is in, whether it be brand awareness, consideration, or conversion.

How is Customer Journey Helpful?

For businesses, the customer journey relates to the fact that customers must take several steps to reach a specific goal. Good marketing is about making the customer journey as easy as possible.

If people find the customer journey with your brand too long, confusing, or frustrating, they may abandon your website and never return. We live in a customer-centric era, so it will be easy for them to find a competitor who offers a better customer experience.

It’s vital that you keep customers as your focal point, making everything as smooth as possible depending on their needs.

With data analysis, you can learn more about trends like:

• The most searched products on your site.
• The top geographical locations from which your site traffic arrives.
• The age groups of your site visitors.
• The devices people are using to visit your site or social channels.
• The peak times of the day or days of the week for online activity among your audience.
• Bottlenecks that hinder the customer journey or experience.

 
Data-driven marketing and machine learning pave the way for e-commerce personalization. This is where you can use artificial intelligence to customize your website, ads, and content to cater specifically to each user based on their onsite behaviors, purchasing habits, and previous social interactions.

These techniques improve the customer experience, and make the customer journey better, which, in turn, is more likely to foster trust and loyalty with prospects.

What is Omnichannel Customer Journey?

An omnichannel customer journey is when brands engage consumers on multiple touchpoints before the point of sale. Typically, consumers will start and stop their research on different channels over days or weeks. By using omnichannel marketing, brands can offer a more harmonious experience that brings all the channels together.

When a customer hops from social media on their mobile to the company website on their desktop, they expect a cohesive, enjoyable user experience. If it is frustrating, or if a brand doesn’t have a presence on the user’s preferred channels or devices, the sale will likely be lost.

Today’s consumers want simplicity. They want an easy and enjoyable route to the checkout, with all their questions answered and doubts allayed along the way, regardless of the device or channel they are using.

By perfecting omnichannel marketing, companies can make this transition as smooth as possible, which makes for a highly effective marketing funnel that complements the omnichannel customer journey.

When you have this, you increase audience engagement, and it’s more likely that people will make a purchase – on almost any channel.

The Big Challenge for Marketers in Omnichannel Marketing

As you may expect, the more channels you are tracking, the more difficult it will be to stay on top of customer behaviors. How can you measure every channel’s performance?

It’s vital to get to grips with this, as it is only with accurate monitoring and analysis that you can leverage omnichannel marketing. You must listen to customers and determine how they value different channels, as this allows you to adjust your marketing techniques to offer a better customer experience.

Focus on Customer Experience and Its Value In Business Strategies

Traditionally, business focused on sales only, with little regard for customer care. Over the years, as markets became more competitive, this narrow focus on closing the sale became ineffective when employed on its own. Businesses were forced to find new ways of getting an edge on their rivals, and so, many marketers turned their attention to the customer.

Nowadays, customer care is an integral aspect of sales and marketing. Research shows that many businesses are becoming more customer-centric, offering customer support services across a range of channels, including social media, live chat, and email.

The omnichannel effect is having an impact on financial and marketing strategies, too, but ultimately, everything relates to the customer experience. By analyzing customer behaviors and critical data points on all channels, you can learn much more about the customer journey. This enables you to tailor your strategies in all departments to complement each other.

Measure the Customer Experience

To do this right, you must evaluate the impact of your changes to determine whether your focus on customer experience is generating a positive return on investment (ROI). There is a lot of ways you can confirm this, including:

• Surveys
• Interviews
• Asking for product reviews

 
When you closely monitor your customers, you will be able to track the entire journey they make from the initial interaction with your brand. The more you know, the better you will be able to react by offering a more personalized journey, which can then lead to increased customer satisfaction and brand loyalty.

How to Apply Customer Journey On Channels

With everything you’ve learned thus far, it’s clear that adopting a customer-centric focus is a crucial part of modern business.

And, as mentioned, data analysis and thorough evaluation are equally as important if you are to understand the customer journey and maximize the impact of an omnichannel marketing focus.

The obvious question, then, is this:

How do you know how each channel is performing?

Let’s learn how to figure out how valuable each channel is in your broader campaign so that you can streamline your omnichannel customer journey marketing and your campaign budget.

Start the Omnichannel Customer Journey By Breaking Down Workplace Silos

When you analyze each channel individually, and also in relation to other channels, you can devise more efficient, effective marketing campaigns. This will optimize your budget and your resources in the long-term.

While many companies are embracing digital transformation and omnichannel marketing, they still have the problem of silos in the workplace. These barriers between departments mean that data and information are not shared freely, and each team is emphasizing their channel alone.

As a result, the attempts at omnichannel marketing are undermined, and the entire business suffers. The whole premise of an omnichannel customer journey is that it is a seamless experience, which is only possible when the workforce operating the strategy is also seamless.

Let Channel Attribution Guide Your Decisions

Studies indicate that the average customer journey involves at least seven interactions between the consumer and a brand. This is known as the Marketing Rule of 7, and it illustrates the fact that one channel alone is not enough to persuade people to make a purchase.

Moreover, when somebody purchases on your website, you can’t assume that the site deserves 100% of the credit for closing that sale.

Instead, you must consider Channel Attribution.

In an omnichannel customer journey, channel attribution is the process of determining which of your channels played a role in the sale. You can give credit to several channels according to their impact.

By doing this, you can gain a better understanding of how effective each channel is in the quest for your goals. For example, you may find that your Instagram page is best for brand awareness, while your Facebook Ads are better for conversion goals.

According to research from Think with Google, as much as 72% of marketers believe marketing attribution facilitates better budget allocations. Therefore, rather than throwing more money into marketing in the hope that you’ll muscle your way to the top, you should focus on budget optimization based on careful analysis of channel attribution.

In taking this data-driven approach, you consider the various stages of the omnichannel customer journey and determine the value that every aspect of your marketing strategy has on driving your goals. The evidence clearly shows that this technique of channel attribution is sure to deliver a better ROI.

Kelsey Robinson is a McKinsey partner who has studied the impact of channel attribution carefully for several years. He asserts that “the purpose of multi-touch attribution is to help marketers invest in those experiences that are proven to drive growth.”

To do that, you must understand the role that “different marketing interventions play along a consumer’s digital journey, everything from a viewed display or paid social ad to an SEM click.”

By focusing on these modern strategies, you will create marketing campaigns that aren’t driven by bias or preference or what you think is the right thing to do. Instead, your campaigns will align with data-driven attribution of what the customers say and need.

Is There Any Variation In Attribution Modeling?

In attribution modeling, there is a popular type of analysis that focuses on conversions, which is called “Last Interaction Attribution.”

By default, Google Analytics uses this last interaction attribution model, so the credit for a conversion is given to whichever channel directed the customer to your site before the conversion. As such, Google Analytics doesn’t give credit to any other channels involved in the customer journey.

Everything that played a role in brand awareness and customer engagement is overlooked in terms of the conversion. Google Analytics also offers other attribution models, including:

• First Interaction
• Linear
• Position based
• Time Decay

 
If you want to use Google Analytics to understand more about the omnichannel customer journey, try using Multi-Channel Funnel (MCF) reports. In these reports, Google Analytics displays multi-channel and attribution-based data, which allows you to see your top conversion paths, path lengths, and assisted conversions.

The Problem in Attribution

While data-driven marketing is a powerful tool to bolster your marketing, the attribution model is not without its flaws. One of the more significant criticisms is that attribution modeling is based on unreliable customer tracking.

Some people believe that as users move from one channel to another, or one device to another, there is a loss in some data, which paves the way for assumptions rather than fact-based decision-making.

However, the channel attribution model offers marketers a holistic view of their audience behaviors, so even with some gaps, there is more information to guide decision-making. Furthermore, advances in technology are beginning to fill these gaps. For example, location-based tracking and customer IDs allow marketers to track their customers closely, even as they move through different channels.

An Example of Attribution Value While Market Planning

 

 
The data visualization above is known as a Sankey chart. This form of visual data analysis allows us to see the impact of each channel in the omnichannel customer journey. After breaking everything down, we can determine the following:
 

 
Let’s say that the marketing team has a goal of increasing conversions, and therefore, they will focus only on the converting channels. These are:

• Paid Search
• Direct
• Referral

 
With this in mind, we can see how the marketing budget and efforts should be distributed to achieve the conversion goal.

• Paid Search should receive 31.67%
• Direct should get 18.33%
• Referral should get 50%

 
In any business, conversion is the ultimate goal. After all, conversions are what drives success, revenue, and profits. So, at this stage, it would be easy to say the distribution is excellent, and the marketing team can ignore the rest of the channels.

Some companies may do this, and move to stop investing in the “Organic Search” and “Display” channels.

However, if you analyze things in more detail, you can see that those two channels were big proponents of brand awareness for converting customers. Ergo, if those channels were closed down, the customer may never have discovered the brand, or its products and services.

Similarly, we can consider the impact of these channels on customer engagement. In this phase, Organic Search is responsible for engaging 50% of customers. If the marketing team stopped investing in this channel, they could lose half of their business!

The nature of the modern customer journey means that we can’t merely attribute conversions to the last touchpoint. There are many channels in play, and some are more potent than others, depending on where the customer is in their journey.

Some customers may discover a brand on social media, then move to organic search to find out more. Others may learn about your products through a paid ad, then engage your brand on your website, build a relationship through email marketing, and finally convert through an organic search.

This complicated omnichannel customer journey demands more of marketers and makes it harder for them to ignore any channel.

Final Thoughts

As you can see, omnichannel marketing is far from easy. It’s tempting to put your efforts into one or two channels as that would be much easier to manage.

However, the rewards would not be significant.

This is a customer-centric age, and brands must develop a presence across multiple channels and devices. Moreover, they must bring it all together to offer a unified, strong brand message, regardless of how or where consumers engage with their brand.

By catering to the omnichannel customer journey, and through the use of data-driven channel attribution, your business can learn much more about customer behaviors and interests at every stage.

You’ll soon learn the impact of your marketing efforts on each channel for each goal. With more data and continued analysis, you can refine your strategies to personalize your marketing on a deeper level. Eventually, your campaigns will become more productive, generating a better ROI at every stage of the customer journey, on every channel.

This is excellent news for your budget, and it also enhances the customer experience, which helps you build a loyal audience of people that come back to your brand, time, and time again.