Omnichannel vs Multichannel Marketing: Which One to Choose

Multichannel Marketing: The Pros and Cons

Now that you know what multichannel marketing is, it’s time to get a more detailed look by weighing the advantages and disadvantages that come with this marketing practice.

Let’s start on a positive note by talking about the pros of using multichannel marketing.

1. Multichannel Marketing: Pros

Using more than one channel of communication can make a key difference for your marketing offers, especially 

Here are the benefits of multichannel marketing:

• More converting opportunities – Customers are not ready to purchase your products and services after being exposed to them just once. However, with multiple platforms at your disposal, you give them several opportunities to become paying customers of your business.
• Better audience reach – By using multiple communication channels, you can reach more potential customers. Not all the people from your target audience will use the same platforms. That is why it is so important to diversify the way you share your marketing messages.
• More brand awareness – Through a consistent presence across all communication channels, your brand will become more visible to your target audience. As a result, your potential customers will start recognizing your brand, products, and services.
• Fast results – Multichannel marketing focuses on promoting businesses on as many platforms as possible. And as a result, it reaches a significant amount of people in record time.

2. Multichannel Marketing: Cons 

Before incorporating multichannel marketing into your strategy, you must consider the drawbacks that could affect your business. 

Here are the main disadvantages of the multichannel approach:

• Complex management – With multiple individual channels, you will need to allocate more time and financial resources to create and implement marketing strategies for all the communication platforms.
• More quantity, less quality – Each communication channel has its characteristics and requirements. For your communication strategy to work, your team must be familiar with the specifics of each channel. By constantly increasing the number of communication platforms, the quality of your content will decrease due to the challenge of keeping up with the constant innovations of each platform.
• Lack of personalization – By not considering your customers’ purchasing history, your communication strategy will end up sounding impersonal. Moreover, it will frustrate your customers, and it will make them lose trust in your business.
• Unclear data – Because the communication channels are not integrated, the marketing data quality will suffer. More exactly, brands will have a hard time understanding:

1. 1. The audience and the customer journey
   2. What messages bring better results

Omnichannel Marketing: The Pros and Cons

To get a comprehensive understanding of omnichannel marketing, it’s best to research not only the pros but also the cons of such a practice. After all, you don’t want to invest in a marketing strategy that may not be suitable for your business model.

Let’s start with the advantages.

1. Omnichannel Marketing: Pros

Nowadays, people are used to always being exposed to marketing messages. As a consequence, it has become a challenge to capture their attention and maintain their trust.

To differentiate themselves, brands incorporate omnichannel marketing into their strategy. This level of care and customization helps businesses establish themselves as trustworthy and reliable entities.

Here are the main advantages of a successful omnichannel strategy:

• Quality customer experience – Through omnichannel marketing, you provide your consumer with positive and fulfilling customer experiences that give them a reason to keep purchasing from your business. Having a customer centric approach, you develop a loyal client base while increasing your customer retention rate.
• Positive word of mouth – Your customers are powerful brand ambassadors. Whether they recommend your products and services to friends and family or leave positive reviews, they will significantly improve your brand’s image.
• More sales – Omnichannel marketing encourages customers to make purchases. Through personalized messages, you can make your customers buy more by offering them products/services/promotions that suit their needs.  
• Better customer understanding – Because omnichannel marketing relies so much on customer research, you will get to understand your target audience on a deeper level. Meaning that you will know their personality, buying behavior, pain points, wants, and needs. This information will help you adjust your products and services to make them a perfect fit for your customers, while also fostering your customer relationships.

2. Omnichannel Marketing: Cons

Omnichannel involves more than methods to engage customers, however. Now that you know the benefits, it’s time to look into the disadvantages you need to consider before incorporating omnichannel marketing into your business strategy.

The pain points of an omnichannel strategy are:

1. Complex marketing strategy – Compared to multichannel marketing, omnichannel goes a few steps further. It’s not about separating your audience into specific segments of people. It’s about taking each individual client, following their interaction with your brand, and sharing with them messages customized to their needs. This requires more time and thinking than a multichannel strategy.
2. Software investment – To run a successful omnichannel marketing strategy, you have to invest in new technology to integrate all the communication channels. In addition to the financial resources, you and your team will have to invest time and effort into learning how to use the software.
3. Intense team collaboration – While putting the customer at the center of your business has multiple benefits, it also requires a lot of effort from your team. Moreover, many customer problems can only be solved through team collaboration. For example, let’s say you provide software for social media management. If a customer reaches out on social media asking for help with a platform issue, the social media specialist might need help from the engineering team to provide a solution.

What Is the Best Marketing Practice?

Multichannel and omnichannel marketing use multiple channel marketing, which makes them both effective promotional practices. To demonstrate, Omnisend conducted a study that revealed that businesses that use three or more communication channels have a 287% higher purchase rate than those that use single-channel marketing.

However, there are several reasons why one of them is better than the other. Although multichannel marketing has many benefits, omnichannel marketing goes a step further and provides businesses with outstanding results.  

After all, your source of income is your customers. So any marketing practice that focuses on the customer experience will bring long-lasting and quality results. Research shows that 90% of customers expect consistent interactions across platforms. 

Furthermore, omnichannel marketing can prevent issues that are common in multichannel practices, such as:

• Tone inconsistency between communication platforms
• Lack of integration between channels
• Impersonal customer experience

Besides providing your audience with multiple ways to engage with your brand, you also make the buying process an easier experience for them, as you have access to more customer data.

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For example, let’s say a customer adds an item to their cart but doesn’t make a purchase. Through the omnichannel integration, you can send an email reminder that will allow your customers to continue the purchase with just the link from the message. Thus, encouraging them to buy your product while saving them time.

While an omnichannel marketing strategy requires more work, it also improves customer retention. A study showed that businesses with a strong omnichannel strategy retain 89% of their customers, while companies with weak omnichannel marketing practices keep only 33% of them.

Omnichannel vs Multichannel: The Bottom Line

By using the information from this article, you can make your own decision regarding the best marketing practice for your business. Evaluate the pros and cons of each strategy, and choose the best option for your brand.

However, don’t forget that the customer experience has a significant impact on the success of your business.

With an omnichannel approach, you don’t only expand the channels you use to communicate with your customers, but you also create an effective system that benefits you and your clients.

No matter how you decide to communicate with your clients, rest assured: if you need to schedule any posts on social media, SocialBee is here for you. Start your 14-day trial now!