What is Multichannel Marketing?

 

The concept of Multichannel Marketing gets sometimes mixed up with Omnichannel Marketing concept, and therefore, let us try to explain what Multichannel Marketing is about.

Multichannel Marketing, in its core meaning, means using multiple channels online as well as offline, to contact existing customers as well as potential customers. It ranges from online over offline to mail order catalogues.

The whole purpose of Multichannel Marketing is to make it easy for the customer to buy the product via the channel the customer prefers. In the old days, the used marketing channels were typically printed media such as newspapers and magazines, telemarketing, radio advertising and television advertising. Today, there are so many more options with the digital media with email marketing, social media (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.), paid media (Google Ads, Bing Ads, Facebook, etc.), search media, and there is a great distribution of traffic on across the desktop devices (computer), tablet and mobile.

With the many new marketing opportunities and the ability to push sales into the minds of people, it is important to make a coordinated effort and follow the development and impact of the individual channels no matter if it is online or offline media. However, unlike Omnichannel Marketing, the cross-channel experience is not 100% aligned, so you do not get such a smooth and consistent experience in the Multichannel Marketing strategy as in the Omnichannel Marketing strategy.

The logos of the most popular social media like Facebook, Linked In, Twitter, Pinterest, and Google+ and email and RSS logos representing the concept of multichannel marketing.

In order to achieve the best results with your Multichannel Marketing, you should integrate a Supply Chain Management tool, so that all details about a product as well as prices are identical across the channels.

In order to achieve full transparency about the effect of your efforts, you should look closely at return on investment (ROI – Return on Investment) that the individual channels contribute both in relation to the response and the interaction from the target group but of course also – and primarily – in relation to the direct derived sales.

In the big picture, Multichannel Marketing is also about understanding with which medium or channel one best hits current and potential customers, and with which message one best hits them. Here is segmentation of customer groups a very helpful way to maximize the result, which one can achieve with, among other things, a good email marketing tool.

Moreover, it is very important that you dive even deeper in the data to assess the full effect and look at the value that the individual channels also give. This is explained in more detail in this article, where the starting point is your newsletter, but generally, it could be any other marketing channel.

You can have beneficial effect by using data from online and use them in the offline world, and of course the other way around. For example, you can test with keyword research which keywords and ad types are the ones that customers best respond to online, and based on this, make print advertising in the offline world.

The benefits of using Multichannel Marketing are overall

  • Maximizing sales and reaching to new, potential customers. By having marketing spread across many different channels, you naturally get a much clearer profile and your message spread much better. Customers today are moving a lot across channels and devices. Just take a look at your data analytics tools like Google Analytics and you will be able to see how many different channels a customer typically uses before he or she ends up making the final choice.
  • By using many different channels, broad customer feedback is collected. This large amount of data can generally help reduce operational costs, as analysis of the data from the individual channels and their effectiveness can be transmitted from one channel to another.
  • You get a very comprehensive picture of the customer. By being able to collect as much data from all channels, you can better understand what customers expect and where are weak points that can be improved in order to meet the customers’ wishes. This can then be pushed into the right channels with the right segmentation to achieve optimum results.