From omnichannel to optichannel, marketing’s return to rationality

Be everything, everywhere, for everyone — this is the omnichannel promise most of us are familiar with. While that may have been a more realistic ask a decade ago, today’s marketing ecosystem churns out new channels and subchannels with little regard to the constraints of a company’s current budget and bandwidth.

This challenge has forced marketers to adapt in a way that stretches resources to the point of ineffectiveness. This means that for most brands, omnichannel marketing isn’t exactly practical — or even realistic due to the expectation that all their channels must be firing from all cylinders, all the time.

According to an April 2019 Evergage report, when it comes to omnichannel personalization, only three percent of U.S. companies “have all channels connected.” So why do we continue to push for what is statistically impossible, not to mention, ineffective?

As most marketer’s struggle to deliver a true omnichannel experience, adopting a more strategic, optichannel mindset will prove to be the solution to these marketing woes.

An optichannel mindset takes stock of individual channel performance and then makes optimizations based on customer expectations, personal preferences, and the anticipated return on investment.

It’s a far more personalized method with a much higher success rate. By optimizing the customer experience through what’s preferred and not just what’s available, brands can effectively refocus their efforts and resources to fully understand how people come to a brand and why they stay engaged.

Optichannel at work

Optichannel is marketing’s return to rationality — something that has evolved from omnichannel frustrations. It replaces the need to be everywhere with a mission to be where it matters most. This is a level of pragmatism that aligns perfectly with the marketer’s key pursuit: to drive relevance.

For starters, it’s critical to not lose sight that all channels are not created equal. Some simply excel in areas others do not.

For example, when it comes to pushing a new product or promotion to a younger demographic, Instagram would be the strongest platform. With customer service issues, nothing beats the traditional method of picking up the phone and giving those customers a call. Or, if brands are in need of an effective tactic for customer engagement and lead nurturing, email is still king.

While third-party research is helpful in identifying benchmarks regarding channel performance and user preference, brands must also activate their own customer data to truly make it work.

However, even this continues to prove troublesome and comes with its own unique challenges. The June 2019 Selligent Marketing Cloud survey showed the struggle isn’t only in connecting channels but tying all behavioral and omnichannel data back to the individual customer. Only 16% of marketers claim to do this successfully. Another 41% strive to do it but are unsatisfied with the results.

This is when marketers need to bring their attention to their centralized database — a foundational piece that captures all there is to know about their customers. This database will play a lead role in reversing these fortunes. From there, marketers should zero-in on the following:

• Preference management. In a perfect world, customers will tell you how they want to be spoken to. Realistically this isn’t typically happening. However, the data in your preference centers is direct and undeniably valuable in uncovering the touchpoints that are most effective with customers.
• Response rates. Analytically speaking, with a big enough sample size, response rates provide marketers a strong indication of how effective one marketing treatment is from the next.
• Customer journey. By identifying key tasks and triggers throughout the customer journey, marketers can establish the times and places most conducive to a brand interaction.

The effort to uncover meaningful correlations in your own data will define tendencies and tastes for customers with the greatest current and future value.

In the Forrester report “Consumer Data: Beyond First And Third Party,” principal analyst Fatemeh Khatibloo explains this type of customer data “… can provide valuable insight, such as how a customer interacts with your brand, and because it’s longitudinal, it can show how behaviors are changing over time.”

A new mindset for 2020

In theory, omnichannel should be something all marketers strive for. Time and time again, marketers dream of their brand’s channels being in sync and working seamlessly as one, however, it continues to fail to be their reality.

In ditching the omnichannel mindset in favor of an optichannel one, brands must recommit to what they should have been doing all along: creating experiences that give customers what they need in the way they want it.

To make this work, marketers must do their due diligence, and that includes prioritizing both where to excel and where to avoid. Gone will be the days of stretching resources thin across every platform, and instead welcoming a new decade of strategic channel selection that will harbor tangible and effective results for years to come.

Todd Thompson joined RRD in 2016, and currently serves as the General Manager of the Data, Insights & Customer Engagement (DICE) business unit, and additionally manages RRD’s Marketing organization. As General Manager, Todd is responsible for providing clients with insight-driven, multi-channel, 1:1 marketing solutions. In his marketing role, Todd manages activities related to branding, content development and lead generation.