Lead generation is the process of attracting prospects to fill the sales pipeline.
An omnichannel lead generation strategy accelerates revenue by improving customer experience through integrated touchpoints.
Omnichannel or Multichannel: What’s the difference?
Multichannel refers to interacting with customers through multiple channels such as email, social media, phone calls, and even physical touchpoints.
Omnichannel refers to a business’ ability to integrate these channels to create a truly seamless buyer experience.
Here are common components of an omnichannel strategy:
- Message Type: Omnichannel provides personalized messages based on customers’ needs and generates more qualified leads through unified messaging.
- Data Flow: Omnichannel lead gen needs a highly reliable flow of data between platforms to create a seamless user experience.
- Customer Experience: Omnichannel provides a seamless customer experience by removing any friction between touchpoints.
Consider your business needs and strengths when choosing which approach to use.
Though omnichannel reinforces your multi-channel approach, it requires more effort, time, and money to implement as your sales, marketing, and customer support teams will need to be fully integrated.
The Benefits of Omnichannel Strategy
Omnichannel provides numerous benefits ranging from improved user experience to increased business growth when implemented correctly.
Successfully implementing an omnichannel lead generation offers many benefits:
- Better User Experience: Omnichannel efforts create better user experiences by removing roadblocks, facilitating user transitions, and simplifying the customer journey.
- Continuous Communication: Omnichannel integration provides consistent communication before, during, and after purchase decision across all channels.
- Personalized Messaging & Customizable Offers: Driving advanced data flow that reveals customer needs and behaviors, omnichannel allows you to offer personalized messaging and deliver customized offers.
- Cohesive Brand Identity: Building a powerful brand identity on integrated channels accelerates sales cycles, increases retention, improves lifetime value, and positive word-of-mouth.
- Better Data: Your omnichannel lead gen metrics provide a more complete picture of the customer journey.
- Customer Retention: Positive user experience, personalized messaging, and continuous communication build customer loyalty.
- Increased Revenue: Omnichannel accelerates leads through the sales funnel from awareness to purchase decision. The increase in Return on Investment (ROI) is the overall outcome of the omnichannel strategy. Establishing an effective omnichannel strategy contributes to maintaining your business growth.
When implementing an omnichannel strategy, common mistakes can result in blockages throughout the sales funnel. Here’s what to avoid:
- Creating a disjointed experience.
- Creating content misaligned with your customers’ needs and pain points.
- Not considering all touchpoints.
- Failing to measure KPIs (Key Performance Indicators)
- Not optimizing your strategy on new findings.
To avoid these mistakes, reimagine your funnel as a non-linear journey where your buyer moves between stages and needs continuous reinforcement through all touchpoints.
Best Omnichannel Practices for Your Business
From the top to the bottom, omnichannel practices create a hub of channels that enable customers to be the focus of your lead generation efforts.
Align omnichannel practices with your lead gen strategies at each stage to drive the best results.
| The Top of the Funnel | Awareness |
| The Middle of the Funnel | Engagement |
| The Bottom of the Funnel | Brand Advocacy |
The Top of the Funnel (TOFU)
The first stage is where you welcome your customers to your funnel.
You can create brand awareness through organic research, paid advertisements, or cold calling.
Omnichannel provides several opportunities to drive leads with data flow and channel integration.
The best practices at the TOFU are:
Collect and analyze customers’ data
Utilize customer behavioral data from all integrated sources to optimize your omnichannel lead gen strategy.
Omnichannel enables you to create and optimize on-point messages for target campaigns.
Sales Experience
Omnichannel lead generation strategies include human-driven touchpoints such as discovery calls. If SDRs engage prospects on an outbound basis, they should use the same language, assets, and data as your other integrated touchpoints.
Select the right channels
Focus on your strongest channels when first implementing an omnichannel strategy. Choosing the best channels to integrate will allow you to focus on integrating fewer platforms and reduces the risk of cross-channel inconsistencies. Some of the platforms to build an effective omnichannel strategy are:
- Social Media Channels
Platforms such as LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook tailor omnichannel integration and monitor customers’ journeys for more effective data flow.
- Website & Apps
Cross-channel experience enables users to switch between devices depending on their needs and expectations.
The Middle of the Funnel
The middle is where you convert your leads into sales opportunities by encouraging them to engage with your business.
Customizing your offers and sharing relevant content will increase customer engagement at MOFU. Here are relevant steps to do it:
Connect sales, marketing, and IT
Connecting IT with sales and marketing teams provides accurate tools to drive personalization. Whether personalized offers are used for email marketing or website, they create unique experiences for customers and increase conversion rates.
Ensure fluidity among platforms
An omnichannel strategy brings fluidity between platforms and enables customers to move easily from one channel to another.
If you offer a web, desktop, and mobile app, each one should drive and sync your customers’ data. This increases the number and frequency of interactions by simplifying the journey.
Share interactive quality content
Delivering interactive quality content improves engagement and conveys your brand’s united messaging across platforms.
You can use QR codes or call-to-action buttons bouncing users to your mobile app or website to complete an action for a reward.
The Bottom of the Funnel
Though having qualified leads at the bottom is the ultimate lead generation goal, it is also the point where you experience retention or churn.
Retention refers to customer loyalty while churn means losing your existing customers.
Your omnichannel strategies for the BOFU must keep your customers loyal to your brand. Valuing their feedback and taking action accordingly increase your chances.
To avoid churn and remove blockages in closing sales:
Strengthen your omnichannel customer support
To round out your omnichannel experience, ensure your customers have several options to connect with you: phone calls, email, text messages, live chat, or social media.
Across all touchpoints, offer a seamless customer service experience before and after the purchase decision happens.
Pro-Tip for All Stages
Apart from the implementation strategies for the sales funnel, your omnichannel lead gen success also depends on four factors: speed, transparency, expertise, and monitoring.
- Speed: Giving customers instant access to information regardless of when, how, and where they demand it. It must involve simplicity and convenience, such as shortcuts and one-clicks.
- Transparency: Helping customers to understand their options, the costs, and the benefits of your solution.
- Expertise: Going beyond online information, giving consultations to answer technical customer queries.
- Monitoring: Ensuring your omnichannel lead gen strategy reaches its highest potential by testing, monitoring, and measuring outputs at all stages.
Bottom Line
Omnichannel integrates digital platforms to provide a streamlined user experience, whereas multichannel creates non-transparent connections.
Though omnichannel integration requires investment in money and workflow, it benefits businesses’ growth, revenue, retention, reputation, and data flow.
Implement the best practices on your sales funnel to maximize your omnichannel lead generation efforts.
