Omnichannel Outreach: What It Is and How It Works

According to recent studies, 28% of customers say omnichannel options are part of a good customer experience. And 27% say needing help to contact customer service with their preferred channel contributed to a bad customer experience.

Since you may not know what communication instruments your prospects are used to, identifying and attracting them may be challenging. But what if there was an “omnipresent tool” that connected all the channels to drive outreach and visibility?

That way, your prospects can see your ads, and you remain at the top of their minds regardless of the platform they frequent.

Let’s see the remarkable omnichannel outreach and how it can help your business.

What Is Omnichannel Outreach

Omnichannel outreach is the strategy of customer approach via all channels, platforms, and devices to keep your clients engaged and encourage sales for your business.

You should address your potential customers’ touchpoints on their journey while keeping your business at the top of their minds and encouraging them to take action.

Let us now see why we should employ the omnichannel strategy.

Why Use Omnichannel Outreach

Every person has his preferences in using various tools and social media networks. Someone regularly checks the mailbox, and another hasn’t opened it for a year but has an app for every possible shop on his mobile. Third sees a push-up notification on his phone and completely forgets about it until he opens an inbox and sees the email from the same company.

Since you may not know exactly where your customers notice your presence, omnichannel outreach covers every ground and meets your customers where they are most comfortable engaging with you. As a result, you extend your audience and maintain relations with clients easily.

Omnichannel outreach allows companies to catch clients’ attention step by step. It prepares customers to purchase decisions and avoids annoying.

Here are other essential benefits of omnichannel outreach:

• Omnipresence: reach your customers where they are: via the website, mobile phone, Instagram, and SMS. And your clients know they may also reach you in the way they prefer.
• Increased profit: since you are everywhere, you become open to a wider audience and get a chance to gain new clients.
• Integrates CRM: to ensure comprehensive prospect knowledge and keep track of all interactions.
• Higher customer satisfaction: people feel more comfortable buying if they have several options on how to do it. For instance, customers with social phobia are not so likely to purchase via phone or social media channels. Chatbot is the best solution for them since it reduces human interaction to a minimum.
• Readiness to changes: customers' communication preferences change with the release of new technology. For instance, previously, marketers widely used SMS to contact people and let them know about sales. After, social media came into place due to free access and wider communication possibilities. Nowadays, people often use chatbots and other automated tools to make an order quicker. So, with an omnichannel approach, changes become for you not as dramatic as they could.

What Is the Difference between Multichannel and Omnichannel Outreach

The multichannel vs. omnichannel debate has been ongoing for some time and for a good reason.

Multichannel outreach employs several communication options that are not synchronized or connected, making it tasking for the salesperson to track and send timely follow-ups. It focuses on converting potentials by sending one across every channel.

However, omnichannel outreach is connected, allowing your sales and marketing team to navigate the channels easily on one dashboard. For example, if you wanted a promo for your business, multichannel outreach will advertise that promo across all of your channels, encouraging users to take action.

But the omnichannel outreach will generate user engagement by providing different types of content for each channel. So, while your newsletter announces your new service or product, your social media followers will see a post about a customer story or testimonial about the product. Then, app users get a notification with a promo code for that product.

Marketing Strategies to Build an Omnichannel Outreach

Successful omnichannel outreach requires attention to two parts of the engine – seamless client experience and relevant, explicit, and consistent content.

To succeed in omnichannel outreach, create personalized messaging that addresses your target audience's pain points, provide relevant and engaging content at every touchpoint, and use data to optimize your outreach efforts. Sometimes the decision may even come to decrease the number of channels for better efficiency.

By utilizing multiple channels such as email, social media, phone calls, and paid advertising, businesses can increase their chances of building stronger relationships that lead to more sales. Omnichannel outreach can help businesses generate more leads, close more deals, and ultimately drive growth, tested by our own experience.

Michael Maximoff, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Belkins Agency

In developing an omnichannel outreach strategy for your business, you have to focus on your customers, their wishes, and communication habits. You can deliver a message directly to a targeted customer. Here are the main rules to follow:

1. Centre the customer journey

You can ensure a smooth experience for your clients by leveraging a customer journey-centric path to keep their attention. Share the information gradually to develop a deep perception and natural interest in your product or service. Learn your audience: what devices they use, when they interact with you the most, what works for them and what doesn’t.

Having an understanding of your target audience gives you a vision of the strategy that perfectly suits it.

2. Segment your audience

With the data about customers and their preferences, you can divide your prospects into different groups depending on the next criteria:

• Firmographics – their company and job title
• Demographics – demography and location
• Technographics – their tech stack and the apps they use
• Behavioral segmentation – how they behave on your website, your social media accounts, the emails you send to them, etc.

Depending on their buying potential, you can also have them in more concentrated hyper-segmentation.

With thorough customer segmentation, your omnichannel outreach can focus on delivering your message precisely to your target audience.

3. Personalize the content

Since people love the attention to their personalities, the general content doesn’t usually work perfectly to make the purchase. Personalization helps to implement an individual approach to each client and creates a sense of significance.

Adding only the name of the client already works, but try to personalize it deeper. For instance, analyze previous interactions with your website, app, or social media channels and reach out to clients according to their specific needs.

You may use a sentence rewriter to create several options for your content personalization and find the one that sounds the most natural and individual.

4. Integrate your channels and tools

An effective omnichannel outreach strategy must integrate between channels and tools smoothly, including CRM and channels (email and social media accounts) integrations.

After syncing your mailbox, app, and social media accounts to its platform, you can implement outreach across channels, regularly follow up, and close more sales. For the social media improvements, consider Hootsuite alternatives that will help track and measure social performance.

Omnichannel Outreach Practical Examples

To figure out how omnichannel outreach works in practice, you should take a look at bright and successful examples of it. Big and well-known companies are the first to invent creative ways to reach out to their customers and increase sales.

Starbucks, Netflix, Apple, Shopify, and others develop their outreach strategies using all available communication platforms. Many of them use marketing messaging frameworks to ensure clear communication and consistency of their messages to customers.

Let’s analyze some of the strategies and see how to implement them for different kinds of businesses.

1. For a store

Stores, especially small ones, usually don’t create mobile apps for a loyalty program. They widely use email for this purpose. However, not every person regularly reads emails, especially the promo letters tab.

Solution: Outreach via social chats, such as Viber, Telegram, Whatsapp, or SMS. People are more likely to pay attention to notifications from these channels. E.g. Ukrainian online bookstore notifies about new book releases via Viber with a link to its website for more information. On the website, marketers use a pop-up window to offer a discount for this product, which can be activated with a promo code sent to email. So, they combine different marketing strategies with email outreach for better results.

2. For a cafe, restaurant, or big stores

Cafes are more likely to use apps for loyalty programs. However, you cannot rely only on the app and wait until the customer returns to gather more points. You should tell a story to become closer and show your care and the ability to offer more.

Solution: Align the data within one account through different devices and platforms. E.g. a person who made an order of 3 pizzas. Having this data connected to the user account, you may offer a discount for the next purchase via email, send a push notification via a mobile app with a question if the client has already used his promo code, and link to the website with an offer to try the pizza, which client hasn’t ordered yet.

One of the top omnichannel experience cafes is Starbucks. Its marketers try to use all benefits omnichannel outreach offers. Their best solution is the ability to edit card details via website, app, or phone, which will be automatically and immediately visible on any other platform. Also, they offer a free drink for app installation and then proceed with a direct presence in the life of a customer.

3. For software or service offers

People usually purchase software for business, so they are more likely to trust such sources as LinkedIn, email, and official websites.

Solution: publish a post on LinkedIn about, e.g., a success story of your customer with a link to your official website. The web page mentions details about what software features helped him to reach the goal. Use a chatbot on the website, email, landline telephone, or send an sms to interact with potential customers and offer a discount for the first month of usage.

Omnichannel Outreach Needs Automation

Remember that people are busy and may not reply or take action immediately. But if you want to be relevant, use automation tools. These tools streamline your operating methods, save time reaching out to dozens or hundreds of prospects, and improve overall efficiency.

Using automation, your customer will receive a push notification in the daytime for his time zone, not in the middle of the night. The email will be sent 12 hours after the notification, not together with it, what client may consider your campaign spam.

The main idea of automation is to make your work easier and more effective. If to reach your goals you need an uncommon tool - use it! Ukrainian business is a great example here. 

The winter of 2022-2023 has been difficult for Ukrainian businesses in terms of executing regular work due to power outages and missing Internet connections caused by russian missile attacks. To ensure consistency of the services and communication with leads, marketers used landline phones, which do not require an Internet connection. Such companies as Community Phone provided services to keep up communication with lots of automated features, e.g., call routing, voicemail, etc.

Fundamentally, automation has two main elements – a trigger and an action. While the trigger is the primary condition that should be completed before an action is set in motion, the action is the result of the completed trigger.

You may also have a trigger to set off many actions in one automation. An example could be tracking a contact’s behavior through their journey and programming automated but human-like and real-time responses to ensure personalized and regular outreach.

“Elaborate automation based on trigger and action sequences often seems laborious and like a chore. But, once you do it the first time and once you see how your conversions grow with every extra step you add, you’ll be hooked for life.

Don’t sleep on automation as it’s powerful, and make sure to target them extensively by covering all possible scenarios. Modern automation tools allow you to set up such complex campaigns easily.”

Nikola Roza from nikolaroza.com

With a reliable automation tool, you can take manual tasks off the shoulders of your marketing and sales teams, allowing them to focus on more productive tasks like – building human relationships with prospects and closing deals.

Final thoughts

Omnichannel outreach means not only gaining a qualified lead on LinkedIn or Facebook and maintaining the same approach via different social media networks. It goes far beyond it and stands for the usage of email, social media, chatbots, SMS, phones, and all other available communication channels to gain customers and reach success.

Your sales and marketing team will require omnichannel outreach to rise above the noise and meet your clients on every channel. With a reliable and effective customer data platform like Yespo that offers seamless marketing campaign strategies for your E-commerce stores across several channels, your team can shed the weight of manual tasks and focus on closing deals and generating revenue.

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