Are you investing your money to promote products and create brand awareness on multiple channels? 

Kudos!  

You are ahead of your competition as you realize the importance of omnichannel marketing. 

But you must know that not every channel gives the desired outcome. 

While not getting results is bad, the worst-case scenario is a lack of action. 

What if your prospects are browsing through channels you don’t pay attention to? 

Nowadays, customers conduct extensive research to understand a brand better. They look for brands offering a consistent experience over varied channels. It’s high time to recognize the importance of centralized monitoring—omnichannel analytics. 

This article will walk you through everything you need to know about omnichannel analytics to improve your revenue generation and customer retention. 

What is omnichannel analytics? 

Customers interact with businesses through social media, mobile app, website, email, calls, store visits, and many other platforms. All the platforms collectively shape a customer experience. Now imagine coming across inconsistencies during these interactions. 

Also, businesses promoting their products and services on multiple channels often have difficulty identifying the content that initiates action. They have a wide range of data and insights spread across different platforms. Manually collecting and analyzing this data is time-consuming and comes with questionable accuracy. 

Omnichannel analytics solves many such problems by gathering and analyzing data from multiple sources to improve campaign performance. You can devise strategies for varied target segments with detailed reports and insights. It helps you work all your channels together to provide the consistency your audience desires. 

Furthermore, your customers will likely take action when they encounter content they are already searching for. 

Why should you invest in omnichannel analytics?

Omnichannel analytics demands investment to provide an enhanced customer experience. Many industries, especially retail and eCommerce, benefit highly from this investment.  It will help you achieve the following: 

• Provides a seamless experience 

Customers expect a seamless experience while navigating through different channels. Omnichannel marketing comes with personalization and relevance across channels, helping reduce disappointed customers. 

• Caters to current and future needs

The right omnichannel solution will help you expand your future reach. It allows seamless integration with platforms you are yet to explore. The investment ensures you are tackling your customers’ current and future needs. 

• Help retain and expand your customer base.

Consistency in communication across sales, marketing, and customer support channels helps build brand loyalty and increase sales. It also enables you to expand your current customer base with an improved understanding of insights and behavioral patterns.

Top 5 benefits of omnichannel analytics

Omnichannel analytics help brands in increasing revenue, retaining and expanding their current customer base. Let’s get into the details of these benefits to understand the importance of omnichannel analytics. 

Improves customer retention 

Do you know that 32% of customers switch brands after one bad customer experience? 

Customer experience never remains limited to one platform or interaction. Focusing on just providing excellent customer support service isn’t enough to retain customers. The entire brand perception is built over social media interactions, calls, emails, in-person interactions, and more. 

Understanding the current experience requires extracting varied customer insights from internal and external sources. A great customer experience helps develop brand loyalty and increase customer lifetime value. Furthermore, it remains a core factor in overtaking your competitors. 

It helps to provide a personalized experience 

One Salesforce Survey revealed that 52% of customers are likely to switch brands not focusing on personalized communication. Your audience expects you to address their concerns or requirements with every interaction. 

Imagine coming across the products you prefer during extensive product research. You are more likely to purchase a product with instant and relevant recommendations. Brands need to focus on showcasing products, and content people are searching for. A personalized experience based on user behavior or purchases influences future buying decisions. 

With omnichannel analytics, you can gather insights on customer purchases, past searches, interactions, etc. Developing a strategy revolving around this information help drive better engagement. Furthermore, the integrations of different channels to provide a seamless customer journey leads to consistent sales. 

Provide a consistent experience across all channels

Customers expect a consistent experience from brands across multiple channels. They hate it when the journey hinders navigation. With omnichannel analytics, you integrate your customers’ preferred communication channels and offer a seamless experience. 

For example, a prospect in the awareness stage must face no difficulty continuing the understanding process over different channels like websites, social media, or mobile apps. Users will likely switch channels for completing specific tasks. Ensure that all independent interactions accumulate into one consistent experience. 

Remember that customers these days keep switching to different channels for extensive research. The final buying decision comes after hours of scrolling. Some elements influencing this experience include visuals, content tone, functionality, etc. 

With omnichannel analytics, you can achieve the following: 

• Ensure the core features and workflows remain consistent across various channels. 
• Provide real-time data to customers across every channel. A lack of data continuity across channels often makes customers question the organization’s efficiency. Keeping all areas updated helps prevent that. 
• Conveys the same visual story over different platforms. 

Assists in demand forecasting 

In the earlier sections, we discussed that one bad customer experience is enough for them to switch brands. 

Now imagine an out-of-stock sign, whether online or in-store. With customers’ increasing options, maintaining a sufficient inventory plays a crucial role.

Forecasting systems generally focus on past buying patterns or environmental and social factors for predictions. 

Omni-demand forecasting aims at understanding your customers’ preferences or patterns of buying, returning, and exchanging items. It uses probabilistic forecasting techniques for effective demand forecasting. 

Increases revenue and declines cost per contact.

Research has shown that companies with a well-functioning omnichannel customer engagement observe a 9.5% increase in revenue and a 7.5% decrease in cost per contact (year-by-year). 

Here is how omnichannel analytics help increases revenue and decrease costs: 

• Valuable insights like email open rate, time spent on the website, social shares, product reviews, etc. help better understand your audience. Improving your product or marketing strategies based on the collected data helps drive sales. 
• Predictive analytics help understand the impact of each channel on interactions and conversions. 
• Sending out personalized discount coupons through email campaigns will likely generate sales. 
• It keeps you updated with the latest trends and patterns to identify opportunities driving revenue growth. 

How to set up your omnichannel analytics

Now that we are aware of the benefits of omnichannel analytics, let’s initiate the set up process. 

Focus on effective data visualization

Are you tired of switching between multiple excel sheets during data analysis? 

Analyzing raw data spread across thousands of sheets becomes difficult. Now imagine going through graphs with a clear textual and visual breakdown. You will reduce a handful of time and understand your audience better. 

Data visualization provides a clear picture of all your marketing efforts in charts, tables, and other graphical representations. Collectively monitoring different platforms and accumulating insights initiates actions when required. It also helps in identifying the areas your data failed to cover. Being aware of these gaps helps you create different strategies accordingly. 

Browse through tools like Tableau, GoodData, Plotly, etc., that help you create compelling graphical representations for practical analysis. 

Invest in a marketing-oriented ETL software 

Companies are loaded with raw data that needs structuring for practical analysis. ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load) software helps companies store and transfer tons of data between different sources. It extracts data from multiple sources, classifies it into time-bound categories, and sends it to data warehouses for further analysis.

Marketing-oriented ETL platforms like Growth Nirvana help improve your omnichannel marketing efforts. The platform has helped many companies reduce over 50% of their time spent collecting insights and generating reports. 

It eliminates the requirement of a tech team for collecting and analyzing marketing and sales data. Your marketing team can handle most tasks, reducing the dependency on hiring tech experts. 

Let’s say you manually created a data warehouse. But generating reports from the acquired data is a time-consuming process. The platform not only makes a data warehouse but provides reports required by clients in their decision-making process.

Eliminate the problems associated with data centralization 

Research has shown that over 65% of marketers struggle with data centralization, affecting their entire omnichannel marketing strategy. 

Organizations searching for a centralized approach to receive insights into the core decision-making must invest in it. Furthermore, it reduces the amount spent by your team on manual extraction and classification of omnichannel data. 

Takeaway tip: organizations with a limited budget must invest in third-party ETL software. They are less costly than custom build software and allow seamless integration. 

Explore new sources based on current results 

An ETL system gives you access to a detailed understanding of your prospects. Expanding your data reach by experimenting with varied channels is a great idea. Give your potential customers different platforms to better understand your product. The system will help you track your efforts and invest your time wisely. 

For example, if you put aside the idea of Instagram ads, then this is the time to implement it. Similarly, creating engaging content on platforms like LinkedIn, Reddit, or Quora is time. Your centralized data storage system will keep track of your performance. 

The Future Of Omnichannel Analytics 

Gone are the days when conducting customer surveys every few months was enough. Brands are going out of their way to understand customer behavioral patterns and collect insights to enhance their strategies. It effectively measures the results of online and offline efforts in driving customers down the funnel. 

Optimizing campaigns with the latest trends 

Marketers understand the importance of omnichannel analytics in current and future times. Optimizing campaigns become difficult without an improved understanding of trends and patterns. They get stuck with big sets of scattered data without an omnichannel solution. 

Therefore, classifying the data to target the right insights and user behaviors becomes crucial. 

Omnichannel analytics help automate the process by generating insights and reports assisting brands in decision-making. Automating data collection reduces the time spent analyzing it for devising campaign strategies. 

However, the future of omnichannel analytics goes beyond using insights to devise strategic marketing approaches. Brands can also use it for the following purposes: 

• Demand forecasting helps in effective inventory management. 
• Creation of optimized sales processes for consistent revenue generation. 
• Assists in product development by having a complete understanding of current performance and reviews. 
• Depiction of detailed insights and reports helps in negotiation with channel partners. 

Conclusion 

Invest in an omnichannel solution that helps you keep track of relevant audience insights. A centralized data structure will help you align all your strategies. You will have an enhanced understanding of your current channels while you expand your reach. 

Platforms like GrowthNirvana helps you reduce the manual efforts required in data collection and analysis. Your marketing team can easily connect data sources with no coding knowledge. With 60+ expert built dashboard templates, it helps you save time by automating the tedious data extraction tasks. 

Related Guide Resources:

• 101 Guide to Quantitative Data Analysis [Methods + Techniques]
• Connect Google Analytics with Google Data Studio: 101 [New Guide]
• An Ultimate Guide To Omnichannel Analytics: Meaning, Benefits, Setup Process
• An Ultimate Guide To Omnichannel Analytics: Meaning, Benefits, Setup Process
• What is Marketing Analytics? Examples and Its Importance