Beyond omnichannel: why CDP-powered optichannel marketing is your next strategic move

Beyond Presence: The Power of Strategic Selection

Omnichannel, rooted in the Latin word “omni” (“every/all”), has long been the goal of marketing efforts; being able to communicate across all the channels that your prospects and customers use. When the term was introduced to the marketing world, it taught us to think about seamless, integrated customer experience across all touchpoints. Whether customers are browsing online, shopping in-store, or interacting via a mobile app, omnichannel aims for consistency and relevance regardless of channel. But as marketing pioneer Beth Ann Kaminkow points out, being truly "omni" (everywhere, all the time) isn't just impractical; it's impossible. No brand has unlimited resources to maintain a strong, relevant, personalised presence across every channel. The VML report "Tomorrow’s Commerce" delivers a powerful message that resonates deeply with our philosophy at SALESmanago. It's not about being present in every channel and on every possible platform – it's about being exactly where your customers need you when they need you.

Optichannel provides a marketing team with focus; for their marketing investment, on the experiences they create (across fewer channels), of the application of their resources, and in their martech stack selection. Moreover, based on the industry and product, prospects and customers frequently demonstrate similar behaviours, such as using specific channels for comparable purposes in their buying journey. This further reinforces the advantage of an optichannel approach over an omnichannel strategy.

The Optichannel Promise: Hyper-Personalization through Intelligence

It's the difference between using a traditional map and a navigation app—both can show you multiple ways to get to your destination, but the app does it more efficiently by leveraging real-time data from multiple sources. Optichannel builds upon the omnichannel foundation but adds a layer of intelligence and efficiency. It’s about making data-driven decisions to focus on the best channels at the right time, tailored to individual customer preferences and behaviours. In short, it’s optimisation over omnipresence.

Optichannel excels through:

1. Data-Driven Insights: Understanding where and how customers prefer to engage.

2. Personalisation: Delivering highly relevant messages based on customer behaviour.

3. Channel Prioritization: Allocating resources to the channels that matter most.

4. Agility: Adapting strategies in real time to meet evolving customer needs.
   

The Missing Piece: Why CDPs Are Non-Negotiable

Here's the challenge: implementing an optichannel strategy without a Customer Data Platform (CDP) is like having a box of puzzle pieces (data), but not knowing the picture they represent and how they should go together to end up with the completed picture. You can eventually solve the puzzle, but it’s not the best use of your time and you will inevitably try pieces where they don’t belong (like using the wrong channels).

The role of a CDP is to unify customer data from multiple sources, creating a comprehensive, single-customer view for a business to better understand their customers, personalise experiences, and optimise marketing efforts. Having a CDP providing real-time, accessible data helps companies make more informed decisions, improve customer engagement, and drive more effective, targeted marketing campaigns (including across different channels).

A CDP, like the one offered by SALESmanago, transforms collected data into actionable intelligence that powers truly optimised customer experiences, helping you “solve the puzzle” using:

• Unified Profiles: By aggregating data from every touchpoint, SALESmanago’s CDP creates a single source of truth for each customer.

• Advanced Segmentation: You can leverage advanced segmentation to identify high-value opportunities and tailor interactions accordingly.

• Workflow Automation: Orchestrate optichannel strategies with precision, ensuring the right message reaches the right customer on the right channel at the right time.
  
  

Optichannel marketing, powered by an intelligent CDP, strikes the perfect balance between enabling personalised, channel-specific experiences delivering higher engagement rates, respect for customer preferences, and increasing the effectiveness of your marketing resources.

The Optichannel Advantage

Having said all of that that, I’ll propose that the future is a hybrid approach of omnichannel and optichannel. Omnichannel is the correct mindset to have with its holistically approach to understanding the customer journey, but optichannel is the effective and efficient way to focus and execute. As mentioned, data is essential, and a CDP is crucial for unlocking its full potential and enabling action—particularly in driving customer experiences and delivering valuable customer insights.

SALESmanago’s Customer Experience Platform provides a CDP to create unified profiles for your customers, advanced segmentation, workflow engines, and includes multi-channel execution to deliver on an optichannel strategy.  It created enhanced customer relationships by combining data, automation, and personalization to create seamless and impactful customer experiences. 

Adopting a hybrid approach of omnichannel plus optichannel, represents an actionable, focused, effective strategy. While channels will continue to evolve, and likely increase, it’s more important than ever to meet your customers where they are. This approach, with the correct martech stack to support it, will enable you to drive maximum ROI and business value.