Omnichannel vs multichannel: What does it mean for you?

What is multichannel marketing?

There are lots of ways to get customers to purchase products in today’s complex market. The multichannel approach looks at each channel individually. Brick and mortar stores, e-commerce stores, catalogs, and third-party marketplaces (like Amazon) all appeal to different customers.

When assessing omnichannel vs multichannel marketing, it’s important to know that multichannel marketing treats each of these channels as an independent, distinct avenue to your product or service. Messaging across channels could be very different, which can be effective for retailers with very different audience segments. But multichannel marketing can also lead to inconsistencies in product messaging and create barriers that harm customer conversion.

Multichannel campaigns use a wide range of channels, ranging from catalogs to email campaigns to digital adverts, to share very different messages about your products. Each channel can have unique marketing campaigns and KPIs, allowing you to take a targeted approach. Multichannel marketing can work if you sell a wide range of products to a diverse audience – for example, large department stores that serve everyone from beauty-loving teens to affluent retirees.

The pros and cons of multichannel marketing

To help you assess multichannel marketing vs omnichannel, here are some of the pros and cons of going multichannel:

Advantages of multichannel marketing

Multichannel marketing can help you be more flexible in how you target different audiences. If your in-store customers want vastly different things to e-commerce shoppers, you can tailor your messaging to keep everyone happy. You can also test the effectiveness of certain strategies too, seeing if a daring online campaign works before translating it into real life.

Disadvantages of multichannel marketing

The biggest limitation of multichannel marketing and retail is that channels exist in siloes. They offer a variety of routes to your product but make it hard for customers to use multiple channels throughout the purchase or aftersales journey. Multichannel approaches treat each channel like spokes on a wheel, rather than an interconnected web. Customers may get frustrated due to:

• Inconsistent shopping experiences across different channels
• Different product information across channels, particularly if product data is not managed and distributed from a central source of truth
• The inability to carry shopping carts from one platform to another e.g. social media to your website
• Poor communication between systems, making it hard to access effective customer service outside of the channel you purchased through

A multichannel marketing approach can also make it harder for your team to analyze customer data, making things like big picture digital shelf analytics more labor intensive.

What is omnichannel marketing?

Omnichannel marketing is a strategy that provides a seamless, integrated customer experience across all your online and offline channels, ensuring consistent messaging and branding. It connects platforms like websites, social media, email, and physical stores, enabling personalized and cohesive interactions. Messaging may be tailored to suit channels, but the facts and focus stay much the same everywhere from store to socials. No matter which touchpoint customers encounter first, their experience should feel consistent, allowing them to hop between shopping channels with little interruption.

It uses customer data to provide an aligned, unified experience on and offline. Omnichannel also employs automation to deliver the most accurate and up-to-date product experience, which feels consistent across the board.

But omnichannel marketing doesn’t mean every channel says exactly the same thing. It’s still essential to tailor your messages and product selections accordingly, while helping customers seamlessly continue their purchasing journey even if they move to a different channel.

Crucially, an omnichannel approach makes it easy for customers to use any channel for a purchase. That could mean following a link to your e-commerce store from your social media or using in-store kiosks to shop for a wider range of products.

The pros and cons of omnichannel marketing

As you consider omnichannel marketing vs multichannel, here are some of the pros and cons of going omnichannel:

Advantages of omnichannel marketing

Omnichannel marketing can increase customer satisfaction and loyalty thanks to a smoother overall experience. For businesses, it makes data collection and analysis much easier, as channels don’t operate in siloes. You’re also likely to notice better conversion rates, with fewer barriers to purchase and more data to inform campaigns.

Disadvantages of omnichannel marketing

Consistency is key to making omnichannel marketing effective. Without the right technology, it’s easy for messages to become inconsistent across channels, leading to customer confusion and potentially damaging trust.

The biggest downside to omnichannel is that it must be facilitated by the right tech. Your current systems may not communicate, making it hard to share the message across the board. You’ll likely need to implement new software to support the omnichannel approach. It’s an important investment though. The right tech aligns all your platforms, delivering a unified message that strengthens your brand and enhances the customer experience.

Omnichannel vs multichannel: Choosing the right technology

The differences between omnichannel and multichannel marketing are clear, but the two strategies are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, many companies will pursue elements of both an omnichannel and multichannel experience for their potential customers. For example, if you sell a diverse range of products you may want to implement a multichannel strategy to ensure your message gets out to the right people. However, within that multichannel strategy, you may wish to embed omnichannel elements. If you sell lawn mowers and clothing, these will clearly be two separate strategies. That said, within these strategies, it’s likely that an omnichannel approach will help you deliver a consistent brand and product story to the right audience at the right time.

Whichever marketing strategy you choose for your business, it’s essential that you have the right technological foundation to ensure you can get the most out of your chosen path. To help meet the ever-evolving demands of today’s channels, Product Information Management software is a must. With the right PIM software in place, you can be sure you have a single source of market-ready product information for the entire organization. This means that whatever strategy you pursue for your products, you have the right foundation of complete, compelling, and consistent information you need to deliver a crisp product experience to every channel.

inriver: The PIM for a seamless marketing strategy

To help you meet the demands of modern marketing strategies, inriver offers the most flexible PIM platform on the market. Built on a foundation of a fully elastic data model, the inriver PIM offers complete agility across your entire go-to-market strategy. Offering AI-powered product content enrichment, API-based data syndication, and Digital Shelf Analytics technology, the inriver PIM gives you complete control over how you sell your products. With a comprehensive range of ready-made adapters with all adjacent software, you also have the confidence to customize your tech stack to meet the unique needs of your marketing strategy.