Let's understand what these channels are and how B2B businesses can benefit from them.

If you think making inroads into delivering a connected customer experience requires simple automation, think again.

Omnichannel marketing brings together the customers, the employees, and the marketing channels to offer a seamless and customized experience for all the stakeholders involved.

In this article, we will look at how B2B companies can make the most out of the omnichannel strategy, one channel at a time.

The Secrets To A Sustainable & Successful Omnichannel Strategy 📝

  • 1. Identify, Segment, & Target 🕵🏽
  • 2. Seamless Experience, Real-Time Support: Live Chat 💬
  • 3. Personalization To The Next Level: Co-Browsing 💻
  • 4. Email Marketing For Creating Long-Term Value 💌
  • 5. Mobile-Friendly Communication Is Key 📲
  • Closing Thoughts: Bringing It All Together 💁🏽‍♂️
  • Important disclosure: we're proud affiliates of some tools mentioned in this guide. If you click an affiliate link and subsequently make a purchase, we will earn a small commission at no additional cost to you (you pay nothing extra). For more information, read our affiliate disclosure.

    1. Identify, Segment, & Target 🕵🏽

    First things first, it is imperative for businesses to understand where their active customers lie - across both offline and online channels.

    Next, you need to gather relevant data (extracted from these channels) and use this information to categorize customers so that you can target them right.

    👉🏼 This is where a unified tool that offers a centralized dashboard can come in handy:

    In terms of the benefits, here's how a unified dashboard such as this one can boost your omnichannel marketing strategy:

    • Unified dashboard: You can instantly engage your customers on any channel.
    • Multitasking made easy: You can manage multiple communication channels, including phone, live chat, social media, email, etc.
    • Seamless and consistent service: You can capture every customer interaction and easily view and respond to customer interactions without toggling between multiple tools.

    Handy tip: When it comes to learning about your customers across platforms, geographies, and habits; it is imperative that you take into account elements on the entire customer journey (not just the discovery and buy phases), and build a strategy that includes all customers.

    A disjointed omnichannel approach is no good - much like a half-baked cake if we are to draw parallels.

    The more you know about your customers - the better.

    You can apply this knowledge to your entire digital marketing strategy and use to improve all facets of interaction between you and your customers.

    2. Seamless Experience, Real-Time Support: Live Chat 💬

    With today's increasingly growing "Customer-First" business sentiment, live chat tool occupies a special place. And for good reason. It is, by far, one of the best ways to engage your customers instantly and in real-time. Let's look at what the numbers tell us:

    • Data by EConsultancy indicates that around "79% of consumers favor live chat support as it allows for almost instant responses."
    • According to Zendesk, "Live chat has the highest consumer satisfaction rate at 92%."
    • "63% of consumers who used live chat on a website are likely to return to that site." - BoldChat Report

    That said, let's look at some of the intangible benefits the use of live chat proposes:

    • It allows the business to connect with users in real-time and fosters a data-driven approach to solving customer problems:
    • It frees up time for agents and the Sales team so that they can focus on deepening client relationships instead of answering routine queries from customers.
    • It helps customers (51%) to multi-task while talking to a bot as per research by EConsultancy.
    • It helps businesses to boost sales and conversion rates.
    • It encourages companies to engage in website visitor tracking (45%) and provide support that is convenient for consumers (43%).
    • It enhances a customer's interaction with the brand by making it frictionless and fun!

    Here's what Oracle's live chat feature looks like:

    Image Source: Oracle

    All in all, gone are the days when lazy automation was acceptable or enough by customers and businesses alike. Live chat has morphed into an essential tool for driving user satisfaction and boosting sales.

    Key takeaway: Live chat doubles up as a critical tool in building a "Customer-First" culture as every customer is heard, seen, and appreciated anytime, anywhere - that too, at the click of a button!

    3. Personalization To The Next Level: Co-Browsing 💻

    "66% of consumers say they’re likely to switch brands if they feel treated like a number, not an individual." - Salesforce

    It's no secret that today, we live in a hyper-connected world. This is why garnering rich insights into your customers' intent, behavior, and preferences can translate into a winning strategy.

    In fact, most customers today expect a 360-degree, immersive buying experience in addition to demanding proactive support from businesses.

    Enter: Co-Browsing.

    Say a customer is stuck at the payment gateway page of your website.

    Wouldn't it be great if you could literally guide your customers out of the proverbial rabbit hole?

    Case in point: Softwares that offer the coveted co-browsing feature allow you to offer visual support to customers and point them in the right direction, all thanks to a seamless two-way interaction that takes place.

    Setting up this kind of personalization means higher retention rates since customers that have used your store once are bound to use it again and again - basically coming back to it because they enjoy all aspect of your store's user experience - and this is exactly how you want to keep it.

    Making sure that the UX is seamless across the entire store is a surefire way to customer retention.

    4. Email Marketing For Creating Long-Term Value 💌

    "59 percent of respondents say marketing emails influence their purchase decisions.” - HubSpot

    Think of email marketing as one of the best tools to build quality relationships with your customers as well as your employees.

    In fact, research by the Harvard Business Review suggests that "Companies that invest in employee experience are 4.2x more profitable than those that don’t."

    On the customer's side, data by GetResponse suggests that "The average open rate for a welcome email is 82%."

    Furthermore, it has been seen that "Emails with personalized subject lines generate 50% higher open rates" as per research by Yes Lifecycle Marketing.

    Luckily, there's plenty of room to personalize and interact with customers when it comes to emails.

    Any failure to do so may result in delivering 'transactional' experiences to customers which is one of the biggest turnoffs for your loyal fan base.

    👉🏼 Building up your fan base with customized emails is one way to make sure your customers keep coming back.

    This is how you build brand and customer loyalty - by placing your existing and future customers on a figurative pedestal.

    This should transfer to customer service on your social media accounts and basically applied to your whole customer acquisition and retention strategy. You want your customers to love you and in order for that to happen, you need to love them back.

    Here are examples of B2B companies that are acing email marketing and reaping its all-round benefits:

    https://wp-public-fs.s3.ap-south-1.amazonaws.com/tasks/15eb27cae33a6c29fbad05976b53644479cda799f4c0b8/images/60-off-continues-5eb925a266a2c.png
    Image Source: Really Good Emails
    • Lumi takes content writing up a notch by offering useful, relevant, and practical information in its emails to keep the customers engaged:
    https://wp-public-fs.s3.ap-south-1.amazonaws.com/tasks/15eb27cae33a6c29fbad05976b53644479cda799f4c0b8/images/customize-an-entire-packa-5eb925fab8273.png
    Image Source: Really Good Email
    • Asana's email encourages users to actively engage with the brand using a simple and effective CTA (Call-to-Action) button:
    Image Source: Really Good Emails

    Handy tip: Studies predict that adding videos to your email can boost click rates by 300%.

    5. Mobile-Friendly Communication Is Key 📲

    The ultimate goal of creating a synchronous omnichannel strategy should be to deliver meaningful experiences and true value to the customers.

    To that end, if you're not embracing a mobile-friendly approach, you may be lagging behind by leaps and bounds.

    According to research, "86% of email users access their email accounts via mobile devices."

    Plus, around "50% of B2B queries are made on a smartphone" according to Smart Insights.

    Simply put, your brand's presence on mobile is no longer an option; it has emerged as a prerequisite in order to reach customers where they're the most active and happy!

    There's nothing more frustrating than a website that hasn't been mobile-optimized.

    Your customers might not even get to the checkout page if they're still navigating the menu or having to zoom in to see the tiny menu letters.

    Any website that takes this long to navigate is bound to be abandoned halfway with the user moving on with their search for something better.

    Here are some best practices to follow when it comes to being mobile-friendly:

    • LinkedIn Pulse is a mobile app that's easy-to-use, organized, and highly personalized to cater to the user's interests and needs:
    Image Source: LinkedIn
    • Another example worth noting is Evernote which offers useful and seamless content, and best of all, is not an exact replica of their desktop version:
    Image Source: Evernote

    Note how there's no pinching, zooming, and stressing out your eyes. Clearly, the website/app is expertly designed, keeping in mind the various mobile-friendly requirements in terms of design and content.

    Here's the desktop version for your reference:

    A desktop version of Evernote

    Closing Thoughts: Bringing It All Together 💁🏽‍♂️

    More than 66% of B2B digital marketers say it's very important to:

    • Optimize the customer journey across multiple touchpoints.
    • Ensure messaging consistency cross-channel.
      - 2018 Econsultancy/Adobe Digital Intelligence Report, eMarketer

    Here's The Long And Short Of It:

    1. An aligned B2B omnichannel approach must begin and end with the customer.
    2. Working towards a cohesive and goal-guided omnichannel experience should be on every B2B business' mind (and business plan) today.
    3. B2B businesses should focus on embracing tools and technology that's simple to understand and seamless to execute.
    4. If it seems overwhelming, you can start implementing your omnichannel strategy in a phased manner.

    All things considered, here's the final lesson: Businesses that will be able to align customer expectations with strategic business priorities via multiple meaningful touchpoints (think: live chat, emails, mobile, etc.) will emerge as the underdogs, the dark horse, the outliers....you get the drift.

    Omnichannel is no longer a buzzword, but rather a breadwinner model that can change your business game.