How To Improve Your Omnichannel Customer Service

Omnichannel, the buzzword that seems more confusing the more it's used. We know that as marketers our goal is to expand the number of channels that we have permission to communicate on but just how do we connect all those channels for our customers?

Join us as Rytis Lauris demystifies omnichannel marketing and illustrates how our marketing efforts can be more effective by enhancing our omnichannel strategy through SMS, MMS and web push notifications.

Rytis Lauris is the co-founder and CEO of Omnisend, an ecommerce-tailored email & SMS marketing automation platform built to help nimble teams drive more revenue without increasing their workload. Rytis is a successful entrepreneur who has spent more than 10 years building and bootstrapping startups and working in the digital marketing and ecommerce field.

Omnichannel Marketing

Omnichannel marketing is about communicating with your customers in a channel (or channels) that they prefer - be it email, SMS, web push notifications. The customers should always be given the freedom to choose what channels they prefer for a brand to communicate with them.

Email Channel

Contrary to popular belief, email is not dead. It is still a very powerful tool to reach prospects and customers and to create repeat customers.

[Looking back at 2020] we kind of really saw a huge uptick in conversion rates coming from promotional email campaigns. It grew by 111%.

— Rytis Lauris

Email automation is a growing trend which is proving to generate more and more revenue. Rytis believes that this trend will continue and become increasingly more effective as marketers set up more automations to generate revenue.

We throw a lot of money into customer acquisition but retention marketing matters equally and sometimes even more. COVID demonstrated that in times of crisis customers are more likely to buy from the brands and stores they already know and have experienced. People tend to be more aware of where their hard earned money is going and they aren’t eager to risk purchasing from brands they don’t know.

The first time purchases have decreased … and the repeated purchases have increased. And so when we talk about retention marketing, there is no other better channel than email. This is why email is not dead.

— Rytis Lauris

Rytis strongly suggests that all eCommerce businesses that do email marketing should absolutely consider utilising automations as they are very very effective:

Whatever you sell, there are different automations, which you can utilise, and really increase the volume of revenue, which emails generate for you.

— Rytis Lauris

Automation are trigger based campaigns where content and the time of sending and the audience is being selected by a set of rules. When a customer triggers a set they begin to receive a predefined sequence of emails based on their behaviour and interaction with the brand.

SMS Channel

SMS marketing is a very effective medium but still under utilised across the market in general. People don't receive as many text messages as they do emails. The great thing about SMS marketing is that the messages are immediate and it's almost impossible for the customer to to avoid opening or seeing its content.

SMS marketing used to be very spammy and intrusive but customers are more likely to now allow brands to communicate with them via SMS because they are given the opportunity to unsubscribe at any time.

Rytis strongly suggests that marketers make a shift in their understanding of their subscribers and request multiple permissions form the same customer:

… usually once we named a subscriber, we have in mind ‘email subscribers’, the one which subscribed for our email communication. This is not the case anymore. Subscribers could be subscribed to any channel, or multiple channels. So that the person who's subscribed for your text messages communication is equally a subscriber for push notification or email campaigns.

— Rytis Lauris

Omnichannel is all about the customers ability to choose which is the best channel for the brand to communicate with them.

Rytis recommends that marketers use SMS for automations too as they can prove effective when running campaigns with limited time offers. It’s a great way to incentivise customers and it is immediate in comparison to emails which are much easier to ignore.

Further, SMS offers an extremely high return on investment, especially right now as it is an under utilised channel.

Web Push Notifications Channel

Web push notifications are pop ups that we request permission to send push notifications to your desktop browsers as well as in your mobile browsers.

Push notifications are more or less for free and so have the ability to create an extremely good return on your investment.

How to Source Subscribers for Omnichannel Marketing

Just ask for permission.

Be creative - use pop ups that are less disruptive and intrusive. You could consider using them after a user has been on a particular page for 10-20 seconds or when they click through to a third page. Waiting to use pop-ups shows the customers level of engagement and so their likelihood of interacting with the pop up. You can use specific pop ups for specific pages on your site or take a one-size-fits-all approach.

The main thing to remember is that the pop ups need to be contextual. The more contextualised they are the more willing users will be to exchange their information.

Incentives also work as long as they are related to what you sell. Rytis gives the example, if you sell shoes you can incentivise with a discount on a product, or a free pair of shoes or a free consultation.

Conclusion

Email is highly effective and even more so when augmented with SMS, MMS and push notifications. It can massively increase your revenue, which is the main goal of any business.

Show Transcript

The full show transcript is available for download here.

Rytis Lauris 2021 02 04 otter ai edited - 152.625 KB