Cultivating a Mindset To Stay Ahead of Omnichannel Communication Trends
Predicting outreach trends isn’t an exact science. Everyone knows audiences love personalized branding that makes them feel appreciated. Unfortunately, what that looks like at the individual level isn’t always obvious.
One customer’s perfect white-glove service experience might feel overbearing to another. An e-commerce journey that earns you a lifelong fan could be a disaster for someone else in the same market segment.
Automation helps you harness the data needed to grasp the nuances and deliver personalized experiences. But how can you cater to everyone without leaving people out? The answer may lie in how marketing channels evolve.
The Future of Omnichannel Communication
If there’s one underlying tenet of omnichannel messaging, it’s that you have to play catch-up. Channels grow and proliferate faster than most brands can follow.
Take popular platforms like Instagram, Line, and Twitch. Instagram started as a place for photos. The line was originally a messaging app. Twitch catered exclusively to gamers with streaming content. Over time, they all became places to interact with consumer audiences.
The factor these sites all share is that they don’t drive the conversation. Although each platform supports a specific range of actions, such as posting images, commenting, or sending direct messages, their primary business is promoting user-generated content. In other words, you don’t know where the next big opportunity will strike — that’s up to the audience — but you’d better be ready to join the conversation when it does.
Staying on Your Toes With Automation Will Become the Norm
What gives an omnichannel messaging system staying power? How can yours survive the next major platform shift, life-changing pandemic, or social movement?
Put yourself on a better footing by evaluating each integration or framework like you’d assess any new business project. In other words, ask yourself whether the costs are worth the returns they generate.
When choosing omnichannel software, upfront costs don’t just mean subscription fees. They also include the time you spend responding, tracking engagement, integrating tools with existing software, and gathering business intelligence.
The little tasks that go into omnichannel communication add up. These outlays are hard to justify since the market will eventually force you to make changes.
Automation is the obvious answer. You no longer have to figure out which department to ping when you get an incoming customer help request — artificial intelligence can do the routing.
Expectations aren’t set in stone. For instance, the type of service most people once associated with premium luxury experiences is now commonplace. Automation will empower smaller teams to punch above their weight alongside more prominent brands.
Omnichannel E-Commerce Integrations Will Grow More Personalized
Does your omnichannel e-commerce system accommodate personalization? If not, it’s time to reassess your strategies for nurturing leads, following up, and self-promoting.
Effective marketers are no longer flooding people’s inboxes with the same copied-and-pasted emails and texts. Those who escaped the dreaded spam folder and blocked contacts lists do so by keeping each conversation seemingly authentically unique. Whether this means remembering people’s birthdays or keeping up with their accounts as they traverse platforms, it’s vital to leverage as much data as possible to reframe your messaging.
Go beyond letting audiences know you care about your customers. Instead, use personalization to subtly make the point that you value people as individuals.
Show, don’t tell: Rethink your outreach strategy to accommodate new platforms and systems modern consumers appreciate, like augmented reality, mobile wallets, and AI assistants. You instantly boost trust by demonstrating your willingness to come to the audience.
It’s up to you to strike the perfect balance. Where will your ideal branding paradigm lie along the personalization-automation spectrum? Ditching the idea that the two are mutually exclusive is the first step in hitting your stride. With Mitto, you can keep one foot in each world and prosper.