Most customers today are comfortable jumping from channel to channel when interacting with businesses. In a Salesforce study, 74% of respondents had started and ended transactions using multiple channels. Customers want a seamless experience that meets and surpasses their expectations.

74% respondents start and end transactions using multiple channels

With multichannel purchases becoming the norm, it only makes sense to market across platforms, too. But you need to do more than adopt multiple marketing channels. Marketers also need a clear view of customer interactions across channels to gauge how consistent their brand experience is and fine-tune it as needed. 

Omnichannel marketing analytics provides this perspective. Read on to learn how you can use analytics to strengthen your marketing campaigns and attract more customers.

What is omnichannel marketing analytics?

Omnichannel marketing analytics is the process of analyzing marketing data from multiple communication channels, and using it to make tangible improvements to the performance of your marketing campaigns. The data includes click-through rates (CTR), conversion rates, behavioral/demographic information, and first response times (FRT). You'll find this data in your CRM, advertising platforms, email marketing automation platform, and physical store records. 

Omnichannel marketing software collects data from these tools via integrations and analyzes them for your use. You’ll see these analyses visualized on dashboards to help you measure your campaign’s progress.

Why is omnichannel marketing analytics important?

Tracking and monitoring customer interactions with your messaging and content, both offline and online, helps you to refine your omnichannel marketing campaigns. You don’t want to spend a lot of budget only to find out you can’t determine if it moved the needle.

1. Boost customer engagement

Omnichannel marketing analytics leads to insights about the types of content your customers love and the channels they prefer to engage with your brand. The analysis might indicate certain channels working better in certain countries, what media types generate the highest engagement, and what type of interactivity drives the best CTR. Equipped with this information, you'll know what types of messaging & content drive leads to your brand and encourages them to purchase.

2. Highlight the most potent marketing channels 

Setting up your omnichannel analytics will reveal your most profitable channels and the channels that work well together to influence lead signups and purchases. 

Such knowledge helps you understand how much of your marketing budget should go to each channel for optimum results. It also helps you to spot opportunities on emerging channels where extra marketing investments will yield outsized results because there’s little to no competition.

3. Personalize marketing content

Omnichannel analytics lets you send customers personalized messages that go beyond using their names. You'll be able to personalize content in real time based on each individual’s preferences and ongoing interaction with your marketing channels.

For example, if a customer added a pair of shoes to their cart, you can recommend complementary products like a pair of socks or even shoe polish. If you run an international business, showing visitors content relevant to their location is effective personalization. Just because it’s winter in North America doesn’t mean a website visitor from Ghana also needs an overcoat.

4. Improve products and services

Apart from highlighting popular channels, your marketing analytics will indicate which types of product messaging resonate the most with visitors. For example, a campaign that emphasizes how your products can save time and money might outperform those that emphasize the product’s physical appearance.

Pass this information to your company's product teams, so they know which features customers are most excited about and are worth prioritizing. Such feedback loops can inspire innovation, improvements, and even new product ideas.

5. Optimize SMS, email, and WhatsApp deliverability

Omnichannel marketing analytics plays a crucial role in optimizing the deliverability of your messages across various channels, particularly SMS, email, and WhatsApp.

Here's how:

• SMS deliverability: Analytics can help you track delivery rates, open rates, and engagement metrics for your SMS campaigns. By analyzing this data, you can identify issues such as incorrect phone numbers, optimal sending times, and message content that resonates with your audience. This information allows you to refine your SMS strategy, reducing bounce rates and improving overall deliverability.

• Email deliverability: Email analytics provide insights into bounce rates, spam complaints, and engagement metrics like open rates and click-through rates. By monitoring these metrics, you can identify potential deliverability issues, such as poor subject lines, content that triggers spam filters, or inactive email addresses. This data helps you maintain a clean email list, improve your sender reputation, and increase the chances of your emails reaching the intended inboxes.

• WhatsApp deliverability: For businesses using WhatsApp as a communication channel, analytics can help track message delivery status, read receipts, and response rates. By analyzing this data, you can optimize your messaging strategy, ensure compliance with WhatsApp's policies, and improve the overall effectiveness of your WhatsApp communications.

By leveraging omnichannel marketing analytics to optimize deliverability across these channels, you can ensure that your messages reach your audience effectively, leading to higher engagement rates and better overall campaign performance.

How to pull actionable insights from your omnichannel marketing analytics

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of data collection and analysis during omnichannel marketing campaigns. Thankfully, your omnichannel marketing software will do most of the heavy lifting for you by automatically analyzing the data. But more is needed — you also need to act on the insights you get from your analytics to boost your omnichannel marketing campaigns.

1. Define your goals and objectives

To refine your marketing campaigns based on omnichannel analytics, you need to know what you want to achieve with these promotions. Set objectives for your omnichannel campaigns to guide your marketing data analysis. 

Say you’re running a campaign across social channels and email to promote a new product. You’ll use marketing analytics to gauge which channels result in the most sales. If the analysis showes that certain channels lead to few sales, you could investigate whether the messaging on these platforms was consistent. Or you might decide to stop promotions on that channel, and invest the money you save in doubling-down on your best-performing channel.

With a clear omnichannel campaign objective, you’ll know what to look for in your analytics as next steps and use that to guide your decisions.

2. Analyze the relationship between marketing channels and revenue

Your return on investment (ROI) will vary across campaigns and channels. Track how much each channel contributes to revenue relative to your investment in it.

If you’re spending $20,000 monthly on SMS messaging to boost sales to your product, but you’re only making $15,000, your return on ad spend (ROAS) is low and you’re losing money. But that doesn’t mean SMS isn’t a viable channel for your business. You may need to tweak your ad copy, targeting, landing page, or even routing configuration before you call it a failure, even if you need to reduce your budget.

Remember, you’re not trying to pick the most lucrative marketing platform because you’re running an omnichannel campaign, and every channel matters to some extent. You want to get a holistic view of the channels that brought leads to your site and others that may have influenced the purchase by creating brand awareness.

Consider this: a customer sees your SMS but doesn’t click through to make a purchase. Some days pass, and they see an ad on Instagram but don’t buy anything. Several weeks after seeing the first ad on Facebook, they search Google for a solution to a pressing need, and your site appears in the search results. They click through and buy your product or service without hesitation.

Google will get the credit for the sale, but SMS and Instagram played a part, too. So don’t downplay the power of holistically analyzing all your channels during your omnichannel campaigns.

3. Run A/B tests 

An A/B test reduces the margin for error when acting on your omnichannel marketing analytics. It’s a bit like a sanity check for marketers, because it confirms or disproves the hypothesis you get from your omnichannel marketing software.

Let's say you recently redesigned and wrote new copy for your site, and more visitors are signing up for your email list or buying products from your home page. Your first instinct will likely be to conclude that the website redesign is responsible for the rise in conversion rates. But it could also have been a busier period for your business, especially if it's seasonal.

An A/B test is a great way to find out. Expose one portion of your audience to the old home page and another segment to the redesigned one. After two weeks, check for any relationship between the site’s new design and an influx of new leads and customers.

If the number of sales or signups from both segments is similar, your website redesign wasn't responsible for the increase. But if you notice a dip in conversions from the audience visiting the old homepage, the redesign takes credit for the conversion boost. The point is: A/B tests will give you an awareness of what's working in your omnichannel marketing campaigns beyond just looking at numbers or charts.

4. Apply your findings

You can only gain value from the insights you glean from your omnichannel analytics by applying them. Start with insights that will have the most significant impact on your conversions and the metrics you care about. For example, if you find that customers will open and engage with emails when the subject line is a certain number or characters or includes an emoji, implement or at least A/B test it.

Sometimes, it takes more work to make changes because of budget and time constraints. You may need to pay for expensive software, work with established influencers, or even open an offline store — all valid options. In this case, we recommend starting with the easiest and least expensive suggestion because making some changes is more important than none. 

Applying your findings removes the guesswork in your campaigns because you’ll see the results firsthand.

Enhance customer communications and grow revenue with omnichannel data

You’ll keep going back to your omnichannel analytics regularly because the tactics you’ll use for reaching new customers will evolve with the advent of new technology. So you can't use just any tool — you need one that will grow with your company and stay useful long-term.

Bird has all the tools you need to collect and analyze data from your omnichannel marketing campaigns. You'll get data from all the tools you use in one place, whether that's an email, SMS, CRM, or website analytics solution, and you can add or remove them as you wish.

Schedule a demo, and we'll find some time to help you work through your use case.