With the explosion of new channels, platforms, and sites available to today’s customers, marketers have been forced to step up their game to not only attract the attention of customers, but also engage them with meaningful interactions that lead to conversions.

The emergence of omnichannel marketing — providing a consistent, multichannel, personalized customer experience no matter where or how a customer engages with a brand — has been the binary (from both the customer and brand’s point-of-view) outcome.

While many companies know that they must begin building omnichannel marketing strategies, getting started is much more challenging. The key to unlocking “omnichannel” is to start where the customer starts the majority of their interactions: with email marketing. As one of the go-to stalwarts in a marketer’s arsenal, email is still the best place to start when building a winning omnichannel campaign strategy.

Omnichannel Marketing Begins with Email

Contrary to popular belief, email is not dead.

More and more users continue to sign up for email accounts, and the ROI of email continues to be heads and tails above any other form of marketing communication. Email is the best way to stay top-of-mind with customers, and it’s a quick, cost-effective way to deliver personal messages.

Another plus for email marketing: email addresses now serve as a commonly used online ID, or customer verification. Many individuals now use their email address to sign up for contests, create online shopping accounts, and even to continue reading certain online content. Digital marketers can use the data collected across these online platforms to create holistic customer profiles that contain a myriad of personal information — online shopping trends, frequently viewed items, and even wish lists.

Related Content: The Path to Omnichannel Excellence Begins With a Digital ID

In order to take a step forward with an omnichannel strategy, marketers must be able to take the information gleaned from email and leverage the data across other channels and platforms. This means making the most of email marketing campaigns to gather as much data as possible.

The ROI of #emailmarketing makes it the #1 communication channel — and the key to unlocking #omnichannel CLICK TO TWEET

3 Ways to Improve Your Omnichannel Strategy with Email

Here are some email marketing best practices that can help mine every bit of customer insight possible from online communication. Apply these and take your omnichannel strategy to the next level.

1. Personalization

Personalization is a must for all digital marketing campaigns, and it’s already a given when it comes to email marketing. Marketers are being tasked to move beyond traditional dynamic content to present highly targeted, customized content to customers via email, all based on previous customer profiles or audience segments.

Email personalization can include custom incentive recommendations that are designed to maximize the probability of a purchase, product recommendations that are explicitly tailored to an individual’s shopping trends, and even open-time-content that automatically updates in real time depending on where and when a customer opens an email. If this sounds overwhelming, advancements in marketing technology platforms and Artificial Intelligence are making it easy for marketers to personalize and optimize thousands of customer emails with little to no added manual work or number crunching.

2. Deliverability

It doesn’t matter how you try to explain deliverability issues away — at the end of the day, an undelivered email is a missed revenue opportunity. Amazingly, even in today’s technologically advanced world, many emails never reach their intended destination. For marketers looking to establish successful omnichannel campaigns, ensuring your email channels are running smoothly is an obvious first step.

In order to make sure deliverability issues are under control, make sure you:

  • Only send to a targeted audience segment instead of a huge list.
  • Are up-to-date with ISP spam policies and that you don’t have a high spam score.
  • Spend time creating specific subject lines and preview text snippets.
  • Double check all internal links and URLs for maximum engagement.
Improve #email deliverability by targeting niche audiences & brushing up on ISP spam policies CLICK TO TWEET

3. Targeting

While other channels down the line (like mobile or social media) may ultimately result in a customer conversion, email is still the first touch, and is the best opportunity to gather as much information as possible about a specific customer.

Related Content: Owning Email Success in a Mobile-First World

The best way to offset limited engagement is to create highly targeted emails that appeal to a customer’s values and encourage them to engage. Combine targeted audiences with personal components for maximum conversion.

Final Thoughts

Email is a constantly-churning engine, gathering key customer data, and lending insights that marketers can use to capitalize on other elements of omnichannel campaigns. This means leveraging data to take personalization to the next level, integrating custom elements into online customer experiences, and taking one-to-one customer experiences to new heights with social or mobile interactions.

While email has been around the block a few times, leveraging email marketing to create successful omnichannel campaigns won’t just happen overnight. With powerful marketing technology and innovative data management platforms working alongside human resources, digital marketing teams can successfully traverse the road towards omnichannel excellence.

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