Tips and Tools for Omnichannel Communication
If your users are on a journey, think of yourself as the travel agent, guiding them through step by step — from Boston to Barbados, from shaky prospect to loyal user. Unfortunately, the user journey is no Caribbean vacation. Interest can lag at any point along the way, causing users to churn, so it’s your job to keep their interest peaked with the right messaging across the right channels.
Email blasts, live chat, and in-app messaging each have their place in customer lifecycle marketing, but it’s only when all channels align that you can take full advantage of their power to persuade. Let’s take a look at making the most of your user journey through an omnichannel strategy.
What is omnichannel communication?
Already making use of emails, in-app components, and your frontend to nudge users along to the next step in their journey? Great! That’s a fine start. But unless you’re providing a cohesive experience across channels, you’re only engaged in multichannel communication, not omnichannel.
Omnichannel communication aligns your branding, messaging, and timing across all channels to provide the customer with a truly seamless experience. It may seem like a small distinction, but it has a major payoff: According to Aberdeen, companies with a well-defined omnichannel strategy see a 91% higher year-over-year increase in customer retention rate than businesses without one.
Let’s say a customer is in the midst of onboarding. They’ve already registered with their email address; now you need them to fill out their profile. With a true omnichannel strategy, in-app prompts will nudge the customer along. If those prompts fail, an email will go out to users who have stalled along the way, reminding them to complete the next task. And chat? Those bots know exactly where your customer is in their onboarding so that the conversation is relevant. Of course, all of these elements will perfectly match your UI because — omnichannel.
Tools to align your user journey marketing
So now you get it, but how do you do it? Thankfully, automation tools make it fairly easy to align your marketing across channels throughout the entire user journey.
Marketing emails can be a powerful tool for reaching users outside of your product. Use them during acquisition to reiterate your product’s value, during onboarding to remind users of any steps they’ve forgotten, and as part of retention efforts to keep users engaged with relevant content. To align email automation with your user journey, check out tools like Hubspot, Customer.io, Autopilot, and Klaviyo, which allow you to personalize emails based on where users are in their journey and to automate them to go out at just the right time.
Chat
No one wants to talk to a bot. No one! But what if there were a bot that just gets you? Drift and Intercom both offer chatbots that sync up with your frontend so they can have relevant conversations with users. Even better, if you have the resources to invest in live chat, both platforms offer that too so that your customer service reps always know where users are on their journey and what steps they need to take next.
In-App Messaging
Maybe we’re a little biased, but this one’s our favorite. In-app messaging allows you to communicate with your customers when they’re already engaged with your product, which means they’re most receptive to what you have to say. Candu’s in-app components let you guide users through onboarding step-by-step, keep them in the know with relevant announcements, and engage them with a dashboard full of content that suit their needs. Every Candu component syncs with your brand’s style guide so that the whole thing is omnichannel-style seamless.
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