CRM and Omnichannel Marketing: A D2C Growth Strategy

CRM and Omnichannel Marketing are like the dynamic duo for D2C brands. 

With Customer Relationship Management (CRM) being the secret weapon for getting to know your customers better, Omnichannel Marketing acts as the toolkit for reaching customers through all their favourite channels, from social media to email. 

This brings us to today’s topic of discussion: How CRM and Omnichannel Marketing Work Hand in Hand

CRM, in simple terms, is your gateway to building personal relationships with your customers. It allows you to truly understand their preferences and needs. Meanwhile, CRM and Omnichannel Marketing, the art of connecting with your audience across various platforms, ensures a seamless and consistent experience.

In this blog, we'll explore how these two components complement each other seamlessly. 

You'll also see how D2C brands can benefit from switching to an Omnichannel Marketing strategy, as it empowers them to connect with their customers on a personal level while delivering a unified brand experience across multiple channels.

What is Omnichannel Marketing

Ever tried ordering at McDonald's?... Pizza Hut, KFC, or Starbucks?

You must have. But did you ever think about how they are able to provide their customer with a similar experience across - Physical stores, websites, mobile applications, etc?

The answer is Omnichannel Marketing.

Whether a customer walks into your physical store, explores your website, receives an email, or engages with your brand on social media, the experience they receive remains consistent across channels.

It may sound like a difficult thing, but this is precisely what an Omnichannel Strategy can help D2C brands with - putting your customers at the centre stage and providing similar experiences across every touch-point.
‍

As this relationship between customers and the brand continues, you can ensure your products not only meet customer expectations but also exceed them. 

This, in turn, builds trust, and brand loyalty, and even encourages customers to become recurring on their orders with your brand, with the omnichannel approach serving as the cornerstone of brand success.

Why are Businesses Adopting an Omnichannel Strategy?

Businesses today are increasingly adopting an omnichannel strategy due to the shift in consumer expectations and buying behaviours. Customers expect seamless and consistent experiences across all touchpoints—whether it's a physical store, an online website, or a social media platform.

This shift has become particularly evident in India, where digital consumption is rising at a rapid pace.

Recent statistics show that over 73% of consumers in India engage with brands through multiple channels before making a purchase decision.

With the rise of e-commerce and UPI transactions surpassing 10 billion monthly transactions, convenience and accessibility are key factors driving this change.

An omnichannel strategy enables businesses to unify these various touchpoints and provide a connected experience to customers. Some of the main reasons why businesses are adopting this strategy include:

1. Improved Customer Engagement: Engaging customers across multiple channels enhances their overall experience. Studies show that omnichannel consumers have a 30% higher lifetime value than those who engage with a brand through a single channel.
2. Data-Driven Personalisation: With an omnichannel approach, businesses can collect and leverage customer data to deliver more personalised experiences. This includes tailored product recommendations, targeted offers, and real-time communication.
3. Higher Conversion Rates: An omnichannel approach can lead to higher conversion rates by ensuring that customers receive consistent information and experiences across all touchpoints. This makes it easier for them to make purchasing decisions.

Increased Customer Loyalty: Providing a seamless experience across channels helps build stronger relationships with customers, which can lead to better retention rates and increased loyalty. In fact, 90% of customers in a recent survey said they expect consistent interactions across all channels.

Omni-Channel vs. Multi-Channel: What’s the Difference?

While both omnichannel and multi-channel strategies involve engaging customers across various platforms, there are some key differences between the two approaches:

Omni-Channel: In an omnichannel strategy, all channels are connected and integrated, offering customers a seamless experience as they move between different touchpoints. Whether a customer interacts with your brand on social media, visits a physical store, or shops online, their experience is consistent and unified. This connected approach ensures that customer data is shared across platforms, allowing for more personalised and contextual interactions.

Multi-Channel: A multi-channel strategy, on the other hand, involves using different platforms to engage with customers, but these channels operate independently. For example, a business may have a website, social media accounts, and a physical store, but the interactions and customer data across these channels are not integrated. This can lead to inconsistent messaging and a disjointed customer experience.

In summary, the omnichannel approach focuses on delivering a cohesive experience by linking all customer touchpoints, while the multi-channel approach may offer convenience but lacks the connected, seamless experience customers expect today.

What is an Omnichannel strategy?

Let us help you with 2 facts:

1. Customers assume that the promo code they saw on Instagram will be valid when used on the website or store. 
2. They believe that if they fill their basket online and then close a window, the basket will transfer if they sign into the app.
   ‍

These outcomes were taken from a recent study by Forbes around Omnichannel. 

The correlation between higher engagement and omnichannel campaigns was found to be “rising customer expectations” - 90% of customers expect their interactions to be consistent across all channels. 

Now with that data, it becomes evident that customers expect a constant engagement with brands across channels. Hence, it becomes an important part of the D2C brand's marketing strategy.
‍

Let’s see some benefits of this approach:

1. Helps you with a customer-centric approach: Omnichannel marketing enables D2C brands to prioritize customer experience by delivering consistent, curated interactions across all channels. By integrating Omnichannel Marketing Campaigns and CRM, businesses can streamline their marketing efforts and ensure a unified approach.
2. Lets you personalise your messaging: It allows brands to collect and utilise customer data like buying history, purchasing power, etc, while ensuring personalised messaging and product recommendations.
3. Brand consistency across channels: By maintaining a uniform brand presence, D2C brands can establish trust and recognition in the minds of their customers.
4. Helps hit those sales targets: Omnichannel strategies boost sales as they cater to customers' diverse preferences and behaviours. Hence an Omnichannel CRM can be the next best thing for you to invest.
5. Improve customer retention: With seamless, individualised interactions, brands can build long-lasting customer relationships and foster loyalty.
6. Data-Driven Decision-Making: Omnichannel marketing provides valuable data insights that help brands refine their strategies and stay competitive.

‍

How does Omnichannel CRM work?

An omnichannel CRM system brings interactions with both existing and potential clients into a single, unified interface. 

This centralisation ensures a consistent conversational tone across various communication channels, such as phone, email, video conferencing, SMS, and emerging methods like WhatsApp.
‍

The primary objective of implementing an omnichannel CRM is to:

1. Elevate customer engagement
2. Enhance service quality
3. Streamline sales 
4. Support procedures
   ‍

This is achieved by organising and unifying customer data and interactions within a single platform.

But, what does an Omnichannel CRM help your brand achieve?

1. It can help you facilitate direct interactions with the final consumer.
2. Enables your brand to easily gather and understand customer concerns.
3. Offers your customers with personalised solutions based on past interactions.
4. Streamlines the overall shopping experience for the viewer.

Other important parameters that Omnichannel CRM can help your brand with are:

• Channel Integration
• Data Collection
• Data Sharing
• Consistency
• Feedback Loop
• Improved Customer Engagement

Challenges in Omnichannel Supply Chain

• Selecting an inappropriate third-party logistics partner
• Ineffective management of return logistics
• Tracking inaccurate key performance indicators
• Failure to incorporate an omnichannel approach
• Absence of automated procedures
• Inadequate order fulfillment methods
• Disrupted supply chain operations
• Lack of visibility into inventory

How to Build an Omni-Channel Marketing Campaign

One shoe doesn’t fit all!

We all know what worked for a brand like Nike might not work for a brand like Lenovo - even though both are e-commerce products.

A simple reason is the price point at which they sell, the channels they utilise, and others.

But as a thought leader in the Omnichannel CRM space, Pragma will help you with the most important points that you should use as the building blocks for your next Omnichannel strategy.

Let’s hear them out below:

1. Build strategies backed on data

• By utilizing CRM data, monitoring social media interactions, and analyzing the online search patterns of your customers, you gain insights into their behavior. Leveraging Data Analytics and Omnichannel CRM, companies can develop strategies to tackle specific challenges and minimize customer attrition.
• This allows you to build solutions to tackle their specific challenges, ultimately minimising customer attrition when the data is harnessed effectively.

2. Segment customers for personalising campaigns

• After data analysis, it becomes simple to categorise customers into distinct groups according to shared behaviour patterns. 
• This segmentation aids in recognising churn-prone, high-risk, high-value, dormant, and other customer types, enabling the creation of personalised journeys for each one.

3. User experience over anything

• By understanding the channels your customers/users are present on, you can target them with specific campaigns on every platform like - a campaign on funky clothes on Instagram, or great deals on electronics on YouTube.
• Post this, your team can create a detailed plan on how you want the experience to flow across all the touchpoints.

4. Analyse your customer requirements

• Misjudging your customers’ requirements can discourage customer interaction. It is important to build the context of your message to each customer, ensuring relevance. 
• In such campaigns, timing is critical - send your message when your customers are most active and receptive, on the channels they prefer the most. 

By respecting the context and needs of your audience, you can make the way forward stronger, more meaningful connections and better customer retention.
‍

Multichannel vs. Omnichannel Marketing

Do you see two synonyms written above?

If yes, then you’re not alone. Brands generally face this issue where multichannel and omnichannel approaches are thought to overlap, but they don’t.

The main idea of both strategies is to build brand awareness across your brand’s media channels. This can include video content on YouTube, new offers on Instagram, and others.

Yet, there are differences.

‍

Omnichannel Marketing

• Omnichannel Marketing creates a seamless experience for customers, where their interactions across various channels are interconnected. 
• What this means is that a customer can start their journey on one channel, such as a website, and then seamlessly transition to another channel, like a mobile app or a physical store, without any disruption. 
• This is possible only because the brand has an overall view of the customer's preferences and behaviour, ensuring that the messaging and experience remain consistent and personalised throughout the journey.
  ‍

Multichannel Marketing

• On the other hand, even though Multichannel Marketing involves using multiple channels but often treats them as separate entities. 
• In this approach, each channel may have its own messaging and strategy, and they might not share data or coordinate efforts effectively. 
• This can lead to a disjointed customer experience, where customers receive different messages or experiences depending on the channel they are using, without the brand recognising their previous interactions.
  ‍

In essence, Omnichannel Marketing aims to provide a customer-centric, interconnected, and unified experience, while Multichannel Marketing, while still using multiple channels, does not prioritise the seamless integration of these channels or the consistency of the customer experience across them.
‍

How to apply the Omnichannel in e-commerce?

Your current CRM system may excel at managing customer service for your D2C brand, but when combined with an omnichannel marketing strategy, it has the potential to elevate your customer communication to new heights. 

There are some key reasons that we will highlight, considering how omnichannel strategy and CRM’s dynamic duo can amplify customer-centric strategies for D2C brands, taking customer engagement and brand loyalty to new heights.

1. Helps send out Drip Campaigns to customers

Drip campaigns are a communication strategy utilised by Sales and Marketing teams to send personalised messages, emails, or materials to prospective clients or current customers over a specific timeframe.

The main purpose of a drip campaign is to cultivate leads, promote additional products or services to existing customers, or encourage engagement through time-sensitive offers, such as holiday sales or clearance events, based on recipients' past actions.

This method empowers companies to deliver promotions, prompt rapid responses, and provide immediate support through automated drip campaigns. Automated drips ensure that no potential customer goes unnoticed.

2. Invite better prospects via Bulk Messaging

Bulk messaging is the practice of dispatching a large volume of messages simultaneously to a designated group of recipients.

This facilitates direct engagement with your target audience, boasting an impressive 99% open rate, and allows you to categorise users by designing campaigns based on fundamental demographics like:

• Geographical location
• Buying patterns
• Age brackets
• Gender
• Average order value, and more
  ‍

Leveraging a broadcasting platform, businesses have reported an overall 11X return on their marketing investments through promotions done via WhatsApp Business Suite.

3. Provides a Seamless Checkout Experience 

We recognise that guiding the customer to the checkout page is a substantial hurdle. However, an even greater challenge emerges when users encounter issues during the payment phase.

This implies that users may abandon their transaction if you fail to offer a preferred payment method like UPI or Net Banking, for instance.

Fortunately, with a solution like Pragma, there's no need to redirect users or subject them to an uncertain checkout process. Pragma seamlessly manages the entire purchasing process, including payments, all within a single app.

4. Access to Catalogues and Collections for viewers

Imagine presenting your entire product catalogue directly to users without the need for redirection. This means users can explore all your product offerings seamlessly within a conversational app like WhatsApp's interface. 

This user-friendly approach streamlines the checkout process, eliminating the need for users to switch apps or download new ones.

The best part is - It enables multi-channel communication, giving businesses the flexibility to engage customers through their preferred channel.
‍

Helping D2C brands choose an Omnichannel CRM

Are you planning to maximise your sales funnel?

Trust us, an Omnichannel CRM is the next thing you should invest in!

While every platform in the market has its own set of capabilities, don’t get carried away by every new feature you see. Instead, analyse your use case, see how other competitor brands in your category are solving that and then start your hunt for an Omnichannel CRM.

With such a technique, you know what is required, and what might be needed 2-3 years down the line, so this helps you filter the best products that can work for your brand.

With features like:

• Improving conversion rate‍
• Reducing cart abandonment rate 
• Lower churn rates
• Higher repeating customers, etc

Experts at Pragma have been helping over 450+ D2C brands across scale with their Omnichannel CRM.

Result?

1. Automating over 75% of support 
2. Providing 3X customer experience 
3. Boosting your support team’s productivity by 2x

This means that by personalising your approach through Pragma's Omnichannel CRM solutions, you can streamline communication and provide a customer experience that users might love at first sight on WhatsApp. Brands with Omnichannel Engagement, retain 89% of their customers.

Seems interesting?

Let the experts at Pragma help you simplify your journey of choosing the right Omnichannel CRM for your D2C brand. 

Examples of Omnichannel CRM Strategy

To better understand how omnichannel CRM strategies are applied, here are a few examples from real-world brands that have successfully integrated these strategies:

Nykaa: One of India’s largest beauty and wellness retailers, Nykaa uses an omnichannel approach by offering both online shopping and physical stores. With the help of a CRM system, Nykaa ensures that customer data is seamlessly integrated across platforms, allowing them to offer personalised recommendations, loyalty programs, and targeted marketing campaigns. This helps customers experience consistent service whether they shop online or in-store.

Reliance Retail: Reliance Retail has adopted an omnichannel strategy to connect its physical stores with its e-commerce platform JioMart. Customers can browse and purchase products online and pick them up in-store, or choose home delivery. Their CRM system allows for seamless data exchange across platforms, ensuring that customer preferences and purchase history are used to provide personalised offers and services.

Tata CLiQ: Tata CLiQ, a prominent e-commerce platform in India, uses an omnichannel CRM strategy to create a unified shopping experience for its customers. By integrating its online store with brick-and-mortar locations, Tata CLiQ offers services like click-and-collect, real-time stock availability, and personalised product suggestions. Their CRM system helps track customer interactions across all channels, ensuring a seamless and customised experience.

Domino’s Pizza: Domino’s India has also embraced an omnichannel strategy by allowing customers to order through multiple platforms—website, app, phone, or physical stores. Their CRM system integrates customer data from all channels, enabling Domino’s to provide personalised offers, real-time order tracking, and a consistent experience regardless of how the customer places their order.

These examples demonstrate the value of an omnichannel CRM strategy in improving customer engagement, loyalty, and sales. By leveraging data and connecting all touchpoints, businesses can provide a seamless experience that meets the modern consumer's expectations.

FAQs

How does CRM enhance omnichannel marketing?

CRM centralises customer data for personalised interactions across channels, ensuring consistent messaging and tailored experiences, vital for effective omnichannel campaigns. 

What role does data play in integrating CRM with omnichannel marketing?

Data integration enables targeted campaigns, personalised recommendations, and timely responses, enhancing engagement and satisfaction across channels.

How do CRM platforms support seamless customer journeys in omnichannel marketing?

CRM platforms capture data from multiple touchpoints, enabling cohesive customer journeys with consistent messaging and personalised experiences across channels.

What are the benefits of aligning CRM and omnichannel marketing strategies?

Aligning CRM with omnichannel marketing enhances customer engagement, loyalty, and retention by delivering relevant content and support at every interaction point.

How can businesses measure the effectiveness of CRM-driven omnichannel marketing efforts?

Metrics like customer lifetime value, conversion rates, and channel attribution help measure effectiveness. Analysing behavior and feedback refines strategies for seamless omnichannel experiences.