Let’s suppose you build the best product in the market and are way ahead of your competitors—What’s next? Ideally, it’s time for your sales team to start pitching your product to prospects and let the sales funnel flow in.
It’s essential for your team to keep track of everything, right from...
- Customer Communication.
- What channel works for them?
- The product they enquired about.
- Personalised offers based on previous interactions.
- Tagging the intent of a prospect.
- Product use case.
- Follow-up management.
That’s not all, with so many use cases, it’s essential for you to make sure that your sales team doesn’t waste time on keeping track of these things, rather they work towards building the sales pipeline.
This is where an Omnichannel CRM comes into play that manages all the tracking itself, end-to-end.
What is Omnichannel Marketing?
Imagine your customer seamlessly interacting with your brand across various channels – website, social media, email, even physical stores (if you have them). That's the power of omnichannel marketing! It provides a unified brand experience at every touchpoint.
What is an Omnichannel CRM?
An omnichannel CRM refers to a sales system that consolidates interactions with your clients and potential customers into a unified interface.
By centralising all the communication with customers or prospects within a single platform, you can ensure that the tone of conversation remains constant across chats, whether they occur via phone, email, video conferencing, SMS, or even newer conversational methods like WhatsApp.
The goal of an omnichannel CRM is to enhance customer engagement, improve service quality, and streamline sales and support processes by unifying and organising customer data and interactions.
But, what does an Omnichannel CRM help your brand achieve?
- It can help you facilitate direct interactions with the final consumer.
- Enables your brand to easily gather and understand customer concerns.
- Offers your customers with personalised solutions based on past interactions.
- Streamlines the overall shopping experience for the viewer.
Difference Between Omnichannel and Multichannel CRM
While both omnichannel and multichannel CRM systems are designed to engage customers across multiple platforms, they differ fundamentally in their approach to customer interactions:
Omnichannel CRM focuses on providing a unified and seamless customer experience. It integrates all communication channels—such as email, social media, chat, and phone—into a single platform, ensuring that customer data flows smoothly across channels. This integration allows sales teams to maintain consistent messaging and personalised service, regardless of how a customer interacts with the brand.
For example, if a customer initiates an enquiry via social media but later switches to email, the context and history of the conversation remain intact, enabling a fluid and cohesive customer journey.
Multichannel CRM, in contrast, supports multiple communication channels but operates them independently. Each channel functions as a separate entity, often resulting in fragmented customer data and experiences. A customer might receive different messages or service quality depending on the channel they use.
For instance, a customer might get a promotional email and see a conflicting offer on the company’s website, leading to confusion and a disjointed experience.
Examples of Omnichannel Marketing
Integrated Shopping Experience: A customer discovers a product on a brand’s Instagram page and adds it to their basket via the brand's mobile app. Later, they complete the purchase on the company’s website.
Throughout this process, the customer encounters consistent messaging and personalised recommendations, reflecting their preferences and previous interactions with the brand.
Personalised Discounts Across Channels: A retail store leverages both in-store and online data to offer personalised discounts. For example, a customer who frequently shops online might receive a special discount that can also be redeemed in-store, creating a cohesive and personalised shopping experience, irrespective of the shopping medium.
Top key features of an Omnichannel CRM
With those being the basics of an Omnichannel CRM, let’s now move on to the best features that an Omnichannel CRM has to offer to your brand.
1. Helps send out Drip Campaigns to customers
Drip campaigns represent a communication method employed by both Sales and Marketing teams to send personalised messages, emails or materials to potential clients or existing customers over a duration.
The primary objective of a drip campaign is to nurture leads, upsell to customers, or nudge users with time-bound offers like festive sales, clearance sales, etc, guided by the recipients' previous behaviour.
This approach allows businesses to send promotions, facilitate swift responses, and offer real-time assistance through automated drip campaigns. With a capability for automated drips, no potential customer remains unaddressed
2. Invite better prospects via Bulk Messaging
Bulk messaging involves the action of sending a high number of messages at once to a set group of recipients.
This helps in connecting with your preferred audience and provides an impressive 99% open rate while giving you the ability to categorise users by creating campaigns based on basic demographics like..
- Location
- Purchasing behaviours
- Age group
- Gender
- Average order value, etc.
By utilising a broadcasting platform, companies have experienced an average 11-fold return on their advertising expenditure by means of promotions conducted through WhatsApp Business Suite.
3. Provides a seamless checkout experience
We understand that bringing the client to the checkout page is a significant challenge.
But what’s more of a challenge is - when the user encounters difficulties during the payment process.
This simply means your user can drop off if you don’t provide a checkout method of their interest like - UPI, or Net Banking for example.
But, with a platform like Pragma, there is no need for users to be redirected or provided with a dicey checkout experience for making payments.
Pragma can smoothly handle the entire purchase process, inclusive of payments, within a single app.
4. Access to Catalogs and Collections for Viewers
What if you can showcase all of your products to users directly? That means they don’t have to redirect anywhere.
In this way, you can utilise any conversational app like WhatsApp’s interface for all your products’ offerings in a catalogue in an easy way that reduces the time to check out, and even the requirement for users to switch applications or download a new one is not required.
The best part is - It enables multi-channel communication, giving businesses the flexibility to engage customers through their preferred channel.
How to create an Omnichannel Marketing strategy
- Know Your Customer: Understand their online and offline behavior. What platforms do they use? How do they research products?
- Map the Customer Journey: Identify all touchpoints – website visits, social media interactions, email engagement, etc. Plot the customer's journey from awareness to purchase.
- Content is King: Create high-quality, consistent content across all channels. Use storytelling, product demos, and user-generated content to engage your audience.
- Personalisation is Power: Personalise communication based on customer data and behavior. Offer targeted ads, product recommendations, and loyalty programs.
- Seamless Integration: Ensure a smooth flow between channels. Let customers easily navigate from social media to your website for purchase, or offer in-store pickup for online orders.
Omnichannel or Multichannel CRM: what’s the difference?
Let’s look at a scenario to understand the difference and working between Omnichannel CRM and Multichannel CRM:
Scenario: You run an e-commerce company that sells clothing and accessories. Your customer relationship management system plays a critical role in managing customer interactions across various channels.
5 ways an omnichannel CRM can improve your sales process
We’re now towards the most interesting section of this blog - Improving your sales funnel
Let us say this out loud - Every brand wants to have a solid sales funnel that builds over time and helps you get towards that path of profitability. No doubt!
But what’s the thing that can help you towards your path of profitability?
One of those is having an Omnichannel CRM that is directly related to the productivity of your sales and marketing team.
Method 1: Helps your sales team with streamlined communication
With an omnichannel CRM, all communication with customers or prospects, whether through email, phone, social media, or other channels, is coordinated in one platform.
This streamlines communication, reduces the need for asking similar questions from customers, and ensures that no customer inquiries or issues are overlooked, improving response times and customer satisfaction.
Method 2: Provides a platform for cross-selling and upselling of services
By having a full download of a customer’s history, previous interactions, preferences, etc, your sales team can identify cross-selling and upselling opportunities more effectively.
This can lead to increased revenue per customer and a more tailored approach to offering additional products or services to current customers.
Cross-selling and up-selling are considered to be the best options to increase revenue from a specific customer as the customer already has faith in your brand, and by clearly mentioning the challenges and benefits of your product, you can crack another deal.
Method 3: Let sales executives nurture leads in an automated format
An omnichannel CRM helps you to build automated lead nurturing workflows that deliver relevant content and messages to the prospects at the right time.
This automation simplifies the process of guiding prospects through the initial steps of a sales funnel and keeps them engaged in an automated format until they are ready to make a purchase.
It can also help the sales team identify leads that can be high-ticket-sized so that they can focus better on converting them.
Method 4: Build strategies based on data-driven insights
The CRM system captures and analyses data on customer behaviour, preferences, and engagement across multiple channels. Data Analytics and Omnichannel CRM provide invaluable insights that your sales team can use to make informed decisions and optimize sales strategies.
This data can then be used by your sales team to make informed decisions about a group of specific target customers and optimise sales strategies to improve conversion rates for your brand.
Method 5: Builds collaboration across teams in your brand
Finally, an omnichannel CRM helps in collaboration among various departments, such as sales, marketing, and customer support.
This collaboration streamlines the sharing of customer information and insights, ensuring that everyone is on the same page, which can lead to more cohesive and effective sales efforts.
How to Decide on the Best Omnichannel Sales Platform for Your Team
Choosing the right omnichannel sales platform is crucial for maximising efficiency and enhancing customer engagement. Here are key factors to consider:
- Integration Capabilities: Ensure that the platform can seamlessly integrate with your existing systems, such as your current CRM, marketing automation tools, and customer service platforms. Integration allows for a unified view of the customer and smooth data flow across systems.
- Scalability: Select a platform that can grow with your business. It should handle increased customer data, more complex workflows, and higher interaction volumes as your business expands, without sacrificing performance.
- Ease of Use: The platform should be intuitive and user-friendly to ensure quick adoption by your sales team. A steep learning curve can lead to lower usage rates and reduced productivity.
Cost: Evaluate the total cost of ownership, which includes not just the upfront purchase price, but also implementation costs, training, ongoing maintenance, and potential upgrades. Ensure the platform fits within your budget while delivering the required features and functionality.
Benefits of using an Omnichannel CRM for Sales
By now, we’re really sure you must have realised the importance of an Omnichannel CRM for your sales team - Key features and How to improve your sales funnel. Implementing D2C CRM and Omnichannel Marketing strategies can significantly enhance your customer engagement and sales performance.
Now, we’ll enlighten you on some of the Omnichannel CRM Benefits that can directly benefit your Sales team, and even your marketing and customer support team.
1. Better customer experience
A complete conversation history of the customer is essential. Not just for training and quality purposes, but also to analyse them and to deliver a personalised and consistent experience.
Such an initiative by the brands builds trust and loyalty in users, which ultimately in the longer run drives sales and customer retention that helps them towards the path of profitability.
It’s important to know that better customer retention means you don’t have to spend your marketing budget on acquiring the same customer, hence a better sales funnel.
2. Increased efficiency
How about letting your sales team focus only on closing deal after deal?
We mean - can someone automate tasks like responding to user queries, guiding them to product catalogues, etc.?
You guessed it right, this is what an Omnichannel CRM helps - eliminating manual efforts to streamline processes and achieve better results.
3. Cross-channel coordination
An omnichannel CRM system simplifies the process of bringing every communication across various channels in one place.
This way, sales teams can instantly exchange information, ensuring that everyone is well-informed and can consistently deliver personalised responses to customers through all touch points.
4. Performance tracking and analysis
Utilising an omnichannel CRM enables companies to monitor sales performance across all available channels.
This counts for various metrics like:
- Conversion rates
- Revenue generated from each channel
- In-depth analysis of sales cycles.
This data is crucial for analysing performance, pinpointing areas in need of enhancement, and making well-informed decisions to propel business growth.
6 challenges of Omnichannel Marketing
- Data Integration: Consolidating data from various sources can be complex.
- Content Consistency: Maintaining consistent brand messaging across channels requires planning.
- Technology Investment: Implementing marketing automation tools requires resources.
- Team Alignment: Marketing, sales, and customer service need to work together seamlessly.
Maximising ROI with Omnichannel Retail Management
To maximise your return on investment (ROI) with omnichannel retail management, consider the following strategies:
- Optimise Channel Performance: Continuously monitor and evaluate the performance of each sales channel. Identify underperforming channels and make necessary adjustments, such as refining marketing messages or improving the user interface, to enhance effectiveness.
- Leverage Customer Data: Utilise data analytics to gain deep insights into customer behaviour, preferences, and purchasing patterns. This information can be used to personalise marketing campaigns, improve product recommendations, and create targeted promotions that resonate with different customer segments.
- Invest in Training: Ensure that your sales and marketing teams are fully trained on the omnichannel CRM platform and understand its capabilities. Proper training will enable your teams to use the system effectively, streamline processes, and enhance customer interactions, ultimately driving better results and higher ROI.
By carefully selecting the right platform and implementing these strategies, businesses can effectively leverage omnichannel retail management to improve customer engagement, streamline operations, and boost overall profitability.
8 types of marketing automation, with examples
- Welcome Emails: Personalised emails for new customers, introducing your brand and offering discounts.
- Abandoned Cart Emails: Gentle reminders to customers who leave items in their cart.
- Win-back Campaigns: Re-engage inactive customers with targeted offers and exclusive deals.
- SMS Marketing: Time-sensitive promotions, order updates, and shipping confirmations.
- Social Media Chatbots: 24/7 customer support and personalised product recommendations.
- Triggered Emails: Automated emails based on customer behavior, like post-purchase feedback requests.
- Product Recommendations: Suggesting complementary items based on past purchases or browsing history.
- Loyalty Programs: Automated point tracking, reward notifications, and exclusive member benefits through email or app notifications.
How to decide on the best omnichannel sales platform for your team
Integrating an Omnichannel CRM system can be beneficial for strengthening your Sales Cycle.
This is where a platform like Pragma’s Omnichannel CRM becomes helpful, where businesses can seamlessly connect with millions of users all from a single dashboard, and even automate most of their communications.
With that being said, we have come to the end of this exhaustive guide on how Pragma’s Omnichannel CRM can help your Sales team in literally every aspect:
- Automating over 75% of support
- Providing 3X customer experience
- Boosting your support team’s productivity by 2x
- Providing your customers a focused buying experience
- Improving conversion rate
- Reducing cart abandonment rate
If you are a D2C brand, we highly recommend you learn how you can start doubling-down your sales funnel to hit the quarter target.
Let Pragma help you unlock the true potential of an Omnichannel CRM.
Until Next Time!
FAQs
1. What's omnichannel marketing for D2C brands?
It's creating a unified brand experience across all channels (website, social media, email) for a seamless customer journey.
2. How do I build an omnichannel marketing strategy?
Know your customer, map their journey, create consistent content, personalise communication, and ensure smooth flow between channels.
3. What are the challenges of omnichannel marketing?
Data integration, content consistency, technology investment, and team alignment across marketing, sales, and customer service.
4. Can you give me some marketing automation examples for D2C?
Welcome emails, abandoned cart emails, win-back campaigns, SMS marketing, social media chatbots, triggered emails, product recommendations, and loyalty program automation.
5. What are the benefits of omnichannel marketing for D2C brands?
Increased sales, improved brand loyalty, and a more engaging customer experience through personalised communication across channels.
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