Omnichannel vs Multichannel Marketing: What's Best For Enterprise Companies?

Expanding your reach and increasing sales while catering to diverse customer preferences and buying habits is no mean feat.

As consumer preferences and behaviors change rapidly, targeting and engaging audiences means identifying the best marketing solution for your business.

Considering convenience has become the most influential decision-making factor, choosing a marketing approach to meet customer needs has never been more important.

But with omnichannel and multi-channel marketing strategies available, which approach is best for your brand? And what tools are available to help manage the thousands of digital assets businesses have?

Understand which is the right strategy for your business. Learn the pros and cons of each strategy and discover how digital asset management (DAM) technology can help you apply the right approach for your unique business needs.

The key differences between omnichannel and multichannel

Although omnichannel and multichannel have similarities, they also have distinct differences.

Multichannel means using multiple channels or touchpoints to interact with customers, such as email, phone, website, social media, and physical stores.

On the other hand, omnichannel takes a more integrated approach, focusing on creating a seamless and consistent experience across all channels. It aims to unify the customer journey, allowing customers to transition between channels seamlessly.

On average, companies with omnichannel customer engagement strategies retain 89% of their customers.

As multichannel typically involves optimizing each channel separately, with little to no integration between them, customers may have different experiences and encounter inconsistencies when transitioning from one channel to another.

Omnichannel emphasizes channel integration. It uses a customer-centric approach by considering the entire journey, creating a unified view of the customer across channels.

Secondly, the customer experience may vary across channels. There may be limited coordination or continuity between them with multichannel.

By contrast, omnichannel delivers a seamless and personalized customer experience throughout the entire journey by prioritizing consistent global messaging, branding, and interactions across channels.

Finally, omnichannel leverages data integration and centralized systems to gather comprehensive customer data across channels. This gives a more accurate understanding of customer behavior and gives brands real insights from the entire customer journey.

That said, developing a marketing strategy driven by accurate data and insights is one of the top priorities among marketing leaders.

The pros and cons of multichannel marketing

As you can see, each marketing strategy has benefits and pitfalls.

• Let’s take a look at the pros of multichannel:

  • Some 73% of consumers use multiple channels throughout their buying journey. Multichannel focuses on providing various channels for customers to choose from, allowing them to engage through their preferred channel

  • Multichannel can prioritize efficiency within each channel but lacks a holistic approach to customer engagement

  • Targeted messaging to specific audience segments can help capture attention and resonate with customers, driving engagement and conversion rates
    
    

• That said, multichannel does come with significant disadvantages:

  • Data collection and insights are gained from each channel separately–resulting in fragmented customer information

  • Multichannel often involves separate teams or departments responsible for each channel, leading to a lack of coordination

  • Almost two-thirds of customers switch brands due to a poor omnichannel experience. Channel saturation may leave customers feeling overwhelmed with messages. Message fatigue or customer annoyance can negatively impact marketing efforts. Cutting through the noise in a crowded multichannel environment is challenging.

The pros and cons of omnichannel marketing

Brands experience intense competition.

Today’s marketers must consider a cross-channel strategy to stay competitive and meet customers where they are at.

Being omnipresent doesn't mean being omni-generic. Posting content across multiple channels will likely need slight but essential modifications to be relevant for that platform and to connect with the culture of the audience that the platform attracts.

Why do customers prefer omnichannel?

Well, on average, consumers now use six touchpoints per purchase.  

Omnichannel marketing gives customers a smooth transition and a positive customer experience. Customers can start an interaction on one channel and continue it on another without interruption. Customers can browse products on your website, easily purchase through a mobile app, and collect from a physical store.

Considering the benefits of omnichannel, just 7% of marketers believe they have a highly integrated omnichannel strategy.

Omnichannel strategies improve customer service and support by providing consistent and integrated assistance across channels.

Customers can access help through various channels, such as phone, email, chat, or social media, and receive the same level of service regardless of the channel used. This comprehensive support approach increases customer satisfaction rates by 10% on average and helps resolve issues more efficiently.

Nonetheless, there are some aspects of omnichannel marketing to be mindful of.

Adopting an omnichannel approach takes effort and a commitment to driving a customer-centric culture. Team members may resist change to existing marketing practices. Brands must break down departmental silos and encourage collaboration among teams responsible for different channels.

DAM software can help break down silos and improve team collaboration. Get everyone working together with pre-designed workflows for asset approval, publishing to channels, usage approval, and end-of-life.

As your business workflows are unique, Digizuite DAM is a fully customizable solution that can be modified to fit the way your organization works.

How DAM technology supports multichannel and omnichannel marketing

Working out how to quickly get your product or solution in front of a customer can maintain interest in your brand and keep customers returning.

Whether you choose omnichannel or multi-channel marketing, tools such as Digizuite DAM have comprehensive features to make your life easier.

Find the digital assets you need fast

Picture this.

Your customer service team needs a list of email addresses to send a monthly newsletter. The most up-to-date email list is stored on a personal computer, and the individual is on vacation for the rest of the week.

The impact? Apart from feeling frustrated with being unable to complete the task, your newsletter will miss the deadline–negatively impacting sales figures the following month.

Cue DAM.

Delivering an omnichannel experience can only start if you have all the content in one central location. DAM provides a centralized platform for storing and organizing digital assets, including images, customer email lists, videos, documents, and multimedia content.

Get omnipresence with DAM’s centralized access.

Eliminate frustration and reduce the potential for users to store essential assets on personal computers and shared drives. Make sure digital assets are easily located, accessible, and shareable across different channels and marketing campaigns–regardless of where users are located.

Make better decisions

How do you know which digital assets perform well and which need extra attention?

Content analytics give real-time insights into understanding the value of your assets. Make future marketing decisions based on fact, not intuition.

Only 17% of businesses use a customer data platform for tracking and analyzing data across channels.

Use Digizuite’s DAM platform to extract data from different marketing channels. Identify the best-performing asset or channel and understand which has the best impact–allowing you to make improvements for the next time.

Let’s put that into practice and say you are comparing two versions of an omnichannel marketing element (also known as A/B testing), such as an email subject line and call-to-action, to find out which performs better. DAM software can analyze the data and measure the impact on key metrics like click-through and conversion rates.

Build targeted engagement with better control over your spending. Get leadership buy-in with adapted strategies driven by solid data.

Reduce time to market

Let's look at M/I Homes, the US-based home builder. The team struggled to establish processes for delivering compelling content to existing customers throughout the months-long building process. The team wanted to simplify their marketing and digital content processes and have a tool to get all their digital assets in one place.

“We wanted to combine our website assets with our design asset library – to have one place to source everything so we don’t have ten different versions and ten different crops of the same asset,” says Dan Piotrowski, Marketing Project Manager at M/I Homes.

By sourcing images from the DAM, M/I Homes reduced time to market. By cataloging, retrieving, and distributing images to audiences across multiple channels to deliver omnichannel experiences, the team had faster publishing times to their website and new buyer portal.

“Content groups upload between 1,200 to 2,000 photos every week, so the DAM saves them hours and hours every week. This gets photos online so much sooner and frees up time for content authors to do so much more.”

– Dan Piotrowski

Identify vulnerabilities

Did you know that over six million data records were exposed worldwide through data breaches during the first quarter of 2023?

What’s more, the threat of cyber incidents is now one of the most critical global risks to businesses.

DAM solutions can help protect your digital assets for omnichannel or multichannel marketing.

With broader cybersecurity practices, businesses can minimize the risk of unauthorized access or data breaches by combining DAM software security measures, such as setting asset access controls and defining user roles to restrict access to sensitive assets.

In addition to added security features, DAM software can maintain detailed audit trails and activity logs that capture user actions, asset modifications, and system events. These logs help IT teams monitor and identify suspicious or unauthorized activities, helping detect potential cyber threats.

But, with the best will in the world, mistakes happen. Users can use an outdated company logo or unintentionally delete a wrong document. DAM software supports the user in identifying and reversing mistakes.

Find out who has access to which assets in the DAM and which team members can make changes–enhancing quality control and reducing human error.

Offer a better customer experience

Customers want an experience that makes them feel valued and understands their preferences.

A consistent brand presentation increases revenue by up to a third and is expected by approximately 68% of customers across all channels.

The centralization of digital content helps to maintain consistent brand guidelines–enhancing brand recognition and unifying a brand image, leading to a consistent and memorable customer experience.

Since almost 7 billion people have access to a smartphone, making up 91.21% of the world’s population, DAM software lets customers access product information, pricing, features, and reviews from their mobile devices.

Give customers the information they need immediately, prevent waiting times, and offer a better experience.

Conclusion

Whichever marketing strategy suits your goals and needs, omnichannel or multichannel marketing can help you reach new customers and target existing ones.

By reviewing and refining your marketing efforts to optimize performance and capitalize on new opportunities, you can stay agile, adapt to changing trends and navigate challenges effectively.

Discover how Digizuite can enhance your omnichannel marketing.

Book a demo today.