How marketing automation can help your omni-channel strategy

Marketing automation is great for automating website actions, email marketing and of course, social media posts. Omni-channel marketing is when you’re endeavouring to offer your customers a seamless experience, regardless of device or channel.

So you know what an omni-channel strategy is, and you know about marketing automation, but exactly how can marketing automation help your omni-channel strategy?

It can help you understand customer behaviour

Understanding how customers use your site and buy your products, is the ultimate goal for any retailer. Marketing automation can help you analyse your customer’s behaviour, following their journey through your site, which emails they click on and interact with, versus the emails they don’t even touch. All these insights can help your brand inform future product marketing strategies and overall website user experience.

It can help enhance your marketing

Marketing automation can help you automate elements of your marketing based on the action of the user’s individual journey, this can both save you time and help you market your products better. If one user purchases a dress from your new collection, and another user signs up to receive your weekly newsletters, you can build an intricate nurturing pathway for each. Building these specific pathways can help your brand minimise any missed opportunity to market to its customers. Drip nurturing your current customers, potential customers, and disengaged customers, will ensure you’re always at the forefront of their mind with the most relevant content.

It can help you tie all channels together

Delivering a seamless experience for your customers can be a tall order; keeping track of your customers across a variety of channels is tricky. In order to successfully deliver and maintain this seamless customer experience, your brand has to tie each of its channels together and a marketing automation platform is what will help your brand achieve this. Unless you have your channels side by side, it can be difficult to understand where your brand falls short on its customer touchpoints. Understanding the importance of these touchpoints is essential when endeavouring to deliver a successful omni-channel strategy.

Andy Donaldson is director at digital marketing agency Hit Search.