Multichannel vs omnichannel: Which strategy fits your business?

Highlights

You'll learn about multichannel vs omnichannel marketing:

Focus

• Multichannel: Independent channels like email and social media focus on reaching a broad audience
• Omnichannel: Integrates all platforms to provide a customer-centric experience

Customer experience

• Multichannel: Isolated experiences per channel with inconsistent messaging
• Omnichannel: Consistent and personalized interactions across all touchpoints

Approach

• Multichannel: Product-centric, customized per platform
• Omnichannel: Customer-centric, following their complete journey

Your customers do not engage with your brand on a single platform. They are at your doorstep through social media, mobile applications, websites, voice-activated devices, smartwatches and wearable devices. Then, how does one create and deliver a consistent brand image and customer experience?

Do you treat every channel as an independent entity, focus on one channel at a time or go to any length to coordinate your efforts across every channel? 

You cannot rely on a single marketing channel to grow your business and reach customers. 

Enter omnichannel and multichannel marketing. Clarity on omnichannel vs multichannel helps you decide which strategy works best for your business. 

What is omnichannel marketing?

Omnichannel marketing is a strategy that integrates online and offline channels into a holistic customer experience. It includes all parts of the customer experience, beginning at the top of the funnel and running through post-purchase activities. In fact, because it's customer-focused, companies use an omnichannel approach. This method lets you naturally place your products and services in the customer's journey.

With omnichannel strategies driving an 80% higher rate of incremental store visits, offering consistent experiences on all channels is necessary. 

In an omnichannel approach, customers can interact with your brand in various ways. They can start and stop their journey at different points while enjoying a consistent experience. This increases customer satisfaction and brand cohesion.

When you nail omnichannel marketing, your business earns better brand recognition through consistent, similar and personalized experiences. Customers like to interact and buy from brands that understand their preferences. They want brands to help them continue their journey from where they stopped. 

Key characteristics

Customer-centric approach

Omnichannel marketing is customer-centric. This helps you know your customers' preferences, behaviors and needs. The approach personalizes experiences that create trust and loyalty. 

Seamless integration across the channel

Every channel, whether online or offline, interconnects to create a consistent experience. From websites and mobile apps to social media and physical stores, customers encounter the same messaging, design and functionality no matter where they go.

Real-engagement

Omnichannel marketing emphasizes real-time customer engagement, ensuring customers receive personalized information, offers and responses. This keeps interactions relevant and aligned with their needs.

Flexibility across channels

Customers can move effortlessly between channels during their shopping journey. Whether your customers use a mobile app, visit a store or shop online, the experience stays smooth and consistent.

Examples of omnichannel

Imagine a clothing brand that uses an omnichannel strategy. Customers might browse jackets on the website and add one to their cart but leave without purchasing. Later, they receive an email reminder about the jacket, along with a personalized discount code. When they visit the store, the sales associate knows about the jacket. They use the customer's account history to let them try the jacket in their size. 

Customers can pay in-store and still have the jacket shipped to their home if they purchase. The messaging is consistent and personalized to the customer's preferences throughout this journey, including website, email and in-store. 

With an omnichannel approach, you develop higher customer engagement by making advanced integration between your channels.

What is multichannel marketing?

Multichannel marketing is a strategy of using more than one media channel to interact with prospects and customers. This marketing uses the following independent channels:

• Marketplaces
• Email
• Social media
• Websites
• E-commerce sites

These channels connect with your audience wherever they're most active. By operating independently, each channel allows you to reach more people and personalize your approach. Multichannel marketing ensures messages land across different platforms. It's a channel-focused strategy.

However, since these channels are not usually linked, the experience feels different from one touchpoint to the next. Your customers cannot move between different channels and moving from one channel to another means they have to restart their journey. 

While this method offers flexibility and scalability, it doesn't focus on creating the smooth, unified journey that omnichannel marketing provides.

Key characteristics

Multiple independent channels 

Multichannel marketing connects customers through social media, email and websites. Each channel is independent. As a result, you create strategies personalized to each platform's unique strengths and audiences.

Broader audience reach

Using several platforms allows you to reach different audience segments. This approach ensures you meet customers where they are, increasing the chances of engagement on the platforms they prefer most.

Channel-specific strategies

Multichannel strategies ensure you get the most out of each platform. Instead of aiming for a connected experience, you can create a campaign that works for a specific channel's audience and metrics.

Examples of multichannel marketing

A clothing store sends promo emails with special discounts. It also runs targeted ads on social media for seasonal styles and showcases a new arrivals collection on its website. 

The store also put up posters to encourage loyalty sign-ups. Each channel drives engagement and adds value, but the messaging can feel inconsistent because it's not integrated. This shows that multichannel retail aims to reach many people and focuses less on creating a smooth, customer-centered experience.

Multichannel vs omnichannel marketing

The key differences between the two are:

Which marketing strategy is right for your business?

When to opt for multichannel marketing?

Multichannel marketing is an excellent choice if you have a tight budget. It reduces your spending on a complete omnichannel approach. Since you have a lot to do in omnichannel marketing, a multichannel approach might seem better. It can also bring good results. This doesn't necessarily mean that the approach comes cheap. Only with the right tech infrastructure and tools can you achieve desirable results. Why? You build one channel at a time.

When to opt for omnichannel marketing?

If executed right, an omnichannel strategy is the best option for businesses of all sizes. Initially, the approach is resource, time and money-intensive, but it eventually pays off in the long term. Apart from providing a smooth and superior experience, it increases customer retention, ensures better sales and improves brand loyalty. 

This strategy is ideal for companies where cross-channel engagement and personalization are the key. 

Benefits of omnichannel approach over multichannel

Enhances customer loyalty

54% of customer-obsessed companies focusing on omnichannel marketing efforts witness higher customer loyalty and retention. That's the power of going omnichannel. Digital customers interact with brands that offer personalized and consistent experiences on all channels. Consistent messaging and personalized communication build trust. They make customers feel valued and make it easy to switch between channels. This way, customers do not have to restart the conversation. Such customers are more likely to remain loyal and drive long-term growth.

Data integration and insights

Combining data from different channels lets you understand how customers behave across each channel and what triggers their purchase decisions. You can then understand what they need, decode their pain points and alter their customer journey to provide a solution that solves their issues. 

Better customer engagement

Through personalized and consistent experiences, you successfully create meaningful customer interactions. Customers love doing business with brands that offer personalized product recommendations and messages, which increases customer engagement. However, the multichannel approach lacks this element because the offers your customers see on a website might differ from what they see on your mobile app or social media platforms. Omnichannel unifies all touchpoints, providing personalized recommendations, consistent messaging and smooth transitions between channels.

Higher brand recognition 

When you nail omnichannel marketing, your business witnesses increased brand recognition because of personalization and consistent messaging. A more efficient buying process encourages more purchases, leading to higher conversion rates. Favorable reviews build strong relationships and recurring sales make this strategy worthwhile. On the other hand, a multichannel approach results in a fragmented customer experience, making it harder to build strong connections or drive brand recognition.

How does Contenstack provide omnichannel content delivery

Omnichannel's complexity and resource-intensive nature are a few reasons why many businesses hesitate to adopt this marketing strategy. That's where Contenstack comes in. Contentstack's headless CMS enables omnichannel content delivery in the following ways:

Centralized content management

With Contentstack, managing and delivering consistent experiences across all your channels is easy—no more juggling tools or platforms. Your messaging will be consistent and perfectly aligned with your brand, regardless of the channel it appears on.

Personalized customer engagement

Contentstack helps you understand how your content performs. It uses advanced analytics that offers clear, actionable insights. You know which content works and decode improvement areas to keep your customers engaged. Using localization tools, you create personalized content that connects with different customers. You no longer have to worry about omnichannel content management. The platform turns it into a smooth, efficient process that helps your business make a bigger impact.

Scalability and flexibility

Contentstack can adapt your omnichannel strategy to meet your scaling efforts, launch new products and fulfill market expansion requirements. The headless CMS architecture separates the backend content management from the frontend presentation. Because of this, Contentstack is scalable and flexible to support your business growth, ensuring content delivery across all channels.

Case study: How did Generali Austria optimize omnichannel content delivery with Contentstack?

Generali Austria used Contentstack's headless CMS to deliver an omnichannel experience for engaging with customers and employees. By unifying their content within a single architecture, they optimized omnichannel publishing. Contentstack delivered consistent messaging across the web, mobile platforms and a new intranet to support 5,000 employees. 

Marketing teams gained the flexibility to update content autonomously, reducing IT reliance and improving efficiency. This approach enhanced website engagement by 15%, delivered faster load times and improved employee satisfaction. The company continues to explore personalization tools to elevate its omnichannel strategy.

After using Contentstack, Bettina Divos, Content Manager at Generali Austria, said:

"Before Contentstack, marketing couldn't build a campaign landing page without involving the IT department. Every change required a request to IT. Now, we can do it on our own — just build what we need and publish it. Developers can concentrate on building new functionality, and we can take responsibility for deploying content. It's added a lot more trust and collaboration to the relationship."

Read the complete case study here. 

FAQs

What's the difference between omnichannel and multichannel strategies?

Multichannel marketing is a silo-driven approach. But, omnichannel marketing runs every channel simultaneously to provide a unified and consistent flow. 

What is an example of multichannel marketing?

A retailer who wants to target customers sets up a Facebook ad campaign, sends text messages about the special offers and organizes a special event in-store. While the marketing campaigns might deliver results, all the channels operate separately. 

What is an example of omnichannel marketing?

Omnichannel marketing unifies all customer touchpoints, from online platforms to physical stores, into a cohesive experience.

Learn more

Do you want to provide an omnichannel experience? You need to switch to a customer-centric approach. When you unify your customer data across every channel, you can personalize the customer journey individually rather than relying on larger customer segmentation. While you can start with multichannel marketing, omnichannel marketing offers superior customer experience, grows brand recognition, enhances customer engagement and builds loyalty. 

To know how Contentstack can help businesses bring their omnichannel visions to life, talk to us today.