What is Omnichannel Marketing? Approach & FAQs - Klaviyo AU
2026-03-10 21:41 Diff
https://www.klaviyo.com/au/solutions/omnichannel/what-is-omnichannel-marketing

A customer’s journey from discovery to purchase is rarely linear.

For example, someone might visit your website and sign up for your email list. Later, they could see an influencer mention your product on Instagram, browse your physical store, then decide they need to do more research online—all before making a single purchase.

While these actions may seem disconnected, they’re all part of a winding, often unpredictable, customer experience.

As a B2C business, your marketing strategy can benefit a lot from embracing this complexity—which is where omnichannel marketing comes in.

Note that omnichannel isn’t about doing more. It’s about doing it better—with smarter coordination, real-time personalisation, and campaigns that adapt in the moment.

Omnichannel marketing is a strategy that integrates data from multiple channels to create a cohesive customer experience. These channels can include:

  • Physical stores
  • Email
  • SMS
  • Social media
  • Product pages
  • Apps

The most important thing to know about omnichannel marketing is that it’s a data-driven approach that personalises experiences for the customer.

For instance, let’s say a potential customer clicks on a Pinterest ad and browses a product page on your website. They don’t buy anything, but they sign up for exclusive SMS offers.

A few days later, they receive a text with a limited-time offer for the product they were browsing. They decide this is the perfect opportunity to complete the purchase. Within 24 hours of receiving their purchase, they get a follow-up link with care tips for the product they purchased.

This is an example of omnichannel marketing in action.

Keep in mind that omnichannel marketing is different from multi-channel marketing, which can still create cohesive brand experiences through copywriting and design. The difference is that a multi-channel strategy doesn’t integrate data across different channels and therefore can’t personalise experiences.

Omnichannel marketing

Multi-channel marketing

Customer data

Shared across multiple channels

Siloed in each marketing channel

Brand experience

One consistent conversation across all brand channels

Separate conversations with the same customer

Purchase opportunities

Customer can purchase via each channel

Customer may only purchase on some channels

Personalisation mechanism

Every marketing channel contains the same data on the customer

Every channel contains some or no information about the customer

Tech requirements

Requires a centralised source of data with other app integrations

Lower tech requirements, dependent on channels chosen by brand/customers

Revenue attribution

Holistic, considering all channels before sale and last touchpoint

Attributes sale to final touchpoint only, which offers only partial view

While many platforms offer omnichannel marketing in theory, Klaviyo B2C CRM was built for it. Unlike separate tools stitched together through integrations, Klaviyo delivers true omnichannel experiences—across email, SMS, WhatsApp, and push—from one platform powered by real-time customer data.

Why omnichannel marketing is so important

Klaviyo’s state of ecommerce report reveals an interesting trend: while 69% of brands identify their own ecommerce website as their top revenue channel, consumers are more likely to make purchases in branded retail stores compared to other options.

This might seem contradictory, but it actually highlights an important reality: to be successful, brands need to merge their online and offline experiences to create an integrated journey for their customers.

While an omnichannel marketing strategy may require more work up front to pull off, it can lead to significant benefits, including:

Higher revenue

When customers can purchase from your website, app, or physical store with equal ease—or even switch between these channels during their journey—they’re far less likely to abandon their purchase.

Omnichannel marketing also encourages repeat purchases and subscription renewals. When your brand is active across multiple channels, you’re not just making it easier for customers to buy once—you’re making it easier for them to return.

Real-life example: Chukar Cherries uses omnichannel marketing to boost profits

Chukar Cherries had successfully operated brick-and-mortar stores since 1988 and launched an ecommerce presence a decade later. But they needed to shift more fully to online shopping when the pandemic hit in 2020.

To adapt, they connected with customers via email, their website, and SMS. Specifically, the brand added abandoned check-out, cross-sell, and VIP flows, while strengthening their existing welcome flow with incentives to purchase.

As a result of these changes, Chukar Cherries grew their revenue from flows 4x in just two years. It’s a great example of where you can start with omnichannel marketing if you only have resources for 2–3 channels as a smaller brand.

Higher customer satisfaction

Amidst high customer expectations and digital noise, two things can make a brand experience stand out:

  1. Convenience: With so many options available, customers crave—and expect—convenience. This means reaching them via the channels they’re already on, making it easy to find what they’re looking for, and optimising the purchase experience for speed.
  2. Personalisation: Customers want to feel like they’re valued. Whether it’s through personalised product recommendations or a well-timed offer, showing customers you understand their preferences is non-negotiable now that Amazon has set the standard for the ideal B2C experience.

Omnichannel marketing checks both boxes. Brands that provide convenient, personalised experiences will stand out from the ones that don’t.

Real-life example: Jenni Kayne improves customer satisfaction with omnichannel marketing

Jenni Kayne, a luxury clothing and home brand, regularly emails online shoppers discount codes that are only redeemable in stores. It’s a convenient (and cross-channel!) way to offer a benefit to people who prefer to shop in person.

Similarly, if a customer near one of their stores abandons an online cart valued over $5,000, the local store manager receives a notification to personally reach out (only if they have explicit permission to do so first, of course). This gives the brand the opportunity to create a bespoke experience for a customer based on why they may have abandoned their cart.

Strategies like these helped Jenni Kayne increase their email revenue 14.5% YoY.

Higher customer trust via personalisation

People expect your brand to look, feel, and sound the same no matter where they interact with you—whether that’s on your website, social media, email, or in a physical store. This reliability is part of what creates trust between your brand and your customers.

Omnichannel marketing—and the integrated nature of it—is a large part of what drives this kind of trust. When you use integrated data to better understand your customer, you can personalise your interactions based on what you know people expect of you.

Real-life example: Naturopathica creates a personalised brand experience with omnichannel marketing

Naturopathica, a plant-based skincare brand with multiple spa locations, used to send the same promotional email to anyone who had booked an appointment within the past 2 years.

With better customer data, they were able to personalise their messages instead. For example, they started sending post-appointment aftercare tips that were personalised to the treatment someone received. They also started sending discount codes to people on their birthday as a token of appreciation.

Thanks to these personalised interactions and more, Naturopathica grew email revenue from bookings by 43% QoQ.

How to approach omnichannel attribution

A common question about omnichannel marketing is how to track the overall revenue impact of each channel.

This is where multi-channel attribution comes in. Klaviyo, for example, offers cooperative multi-channel attribution for email and SMS, which helps you understand how each message contributes to revenue—not just the last click.

While there are many models to choose from—what works for one brand won’t necessarily work for another—here’s what we recommend as a place to start:

  • Adopt a holistic approach. Omnichannel attribution shouldn’t only account for the final touchpoint before a sale. It should, in some way, account for every interaction along the conversion path, from initial awareness to loyalty. That’s known as a multi-touch attribution model.
  • Understand the nuances of your typical customer journey. For example, some businesses with long buying cycles may benefit from a wider look-back window to capture the influence of early touchpoints. That’s why we recommend tailoring your model to reflect your business’s unique goals and customer behaviour.
  • Invest in a tool that offers flexibility. A marketing automation platform should help you build a custom attribution model that works for your business. You should be able to add or adjust attribution touchpoints, look-back windows, and filters so that your model remains adaptable.

When you understand how your channels are working together to influence purchasing decisions, you can refine your marketing campaigns, deliver more personalised experiences, and maximise ROI.

What you need to launch your omnichannel marketing strategy

Any brand can adopt an omnichannel marketing strategy, but you’ll need the right data and tools before you start. Here are 3 must-have components of an omnichannel strategy:

1. Centralised data

Centralised data is at the heart of every omnichannel marketing strategy because it’s how brands create a cohesive customer experience. Here are a few ways you can start de-siloing your company data:

  • Collect data from diverse sources—such as your customer relationship management system (CRM), website, ad platforms, etc.—in an all-in-one CRM.
  • Centralise this data to form a single view of the customer. This record is your single source of truth about who your customers are, their preferences, and how they interact with your brand online.
  • Automate data management with customer profiles that update automatically based on how people behave online.

2. Segmentation capabilities

Once your data is centralised, you’ll be in a much better position to segment your audience and create a personalised experience for each customer.

For instance, if you’re an outdoor apparel brand, you could segment your audience by sport—such as hikers vs. runners—based on their shopping behaviours.

Your omnichannel strategy might then target hikers with emails and SMS alerts about boots, backpacks, and trekking poles, while runners receive information about upcoming sales for sneakers, shorts, and lightweight water bottles.

3. Omnichannel campaign builder

Omnichannel marketing means juggling a lot of channels—that’s what makes it effective and convenient for the customer. But on your end, more channels can add considerable complexity to your campaign execution, especially if your team is on the larger side.

An omnichannel campaign builder is an easy way for you to visualise the customer journey you’re creating, and understand how each channel is driving revenue. With Klaviyo’s, you can design and launch coordinated campaigns across email, SMS, push, and WhatsApp—all from a single, drag-and-drop interface.

That means less manual work and more conversions, as you guide customers through every stage of their journey with consistent messaging, optimised timing, and cross-channel personalisation.

4. Performance monitoring

Omnichannel marketing is an integration of marketing channels and customer data. This integrated strategy will affect how you compare and contrast the performance of these channels across the entire customer lifecycle.

To gain a comprehensive view, we recommend tracking a combination of marketing performance metrics and customer satisfaction indicators. A few to consider are:

  • Engagement metrics: click rates, open rates, social media engagement, time spent on product pages, etc.
  • Conversion metrics: conversion rates across multiple channels, cost per acquisition (CPA), return on ad spend (ROAS), etc.
  • Customer satisfaction metrics: Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), qualitative data from post-purchase surveys and customer reviews
  • Retention metrics: churn rate, repeat purchase rate, customer lifetime value (CLV), etc.

Analysing these metrics side by side can help you understand not only which channels drive sales, but also how they influence customer loyalty.

For instance, let’s say you find that social ads generate high conversions but low CSAT scores. When you dig in, you learn that customers who purchase from social media expect better customer service via social media channels.

You can start to address the problem by deploying a customer service bot on Instagram messenger, with customer service agents at the ready to answer more complex inquiries.

Now, deliver the kind of omnichannel personalisation consumers expect

At the heart of a successful omnichannel marketing strategy is personalisation, which is the process of tailoring your outreach to a customer’s preferences and behaviours.

A decade ago, personalisation meant making sure every email started off with “Hi [First Name]!” Today, personalisation goes so much deeper. It’s about reaching your customers via the right channels at an optimal time, with content that reflects who they are and what they want.

Think about your experience with Amazon. Any time you log in to your account, you see a list of recommended products that are “similar to your past purchases” or “inspired by your shopping trends.” You’re even prompted to repurchase items you might be running low on.

That’s what customers expect from brands. And now, thanks to AI and the CRM built for B2C businesses, it’s possible to scale that level of personalisation. Here’s how Klaviyo B2C CRM helps brands optimise their personalisation efforts with built-in Klaviyo AI:

  • Customised flows: Flows are automated messages sent after someone has taken an action online. When you use AI to create flows, you can just describe your desired flow—whether it’s a welcome series, post-purchase follow-up, or re-engagement campaign—and AI generates it in seconds.
  • Personalised campaigns: Manual A/B testing used to be a foundation for personalising campaigns. Now, AI can predict which version of your campaign will resonate most with each recipient. Once it identifies the optimal match, it sends the ideal version automatically. This makes it easier to deliver highly relevant messages across channels without the manual trial-and-error process.
  • Customer sentiment: Stay proactive by analysing customer feedback and identifying trends before they become issues. By understanding emerging sentiments, you can adjust your messaging, product offers, or approach to keep your omnichannel strategy aligned with your customers’ evolving needs.
  • Channel affinity: Use Klaviyo’s AI-powered channel affinity to learn where each customer is most likely to engage—email, SMS, WhatsApp, or push—and automatically route messages to the best channels. Combined with native support for conversational messaging formats like WhatsApp and RCS (coming soon), this enables brands to deliver highly personal, two-way experiences at scale—turning static campaigns into dynamic conversations.

Stop chasing transactions. Klaviyo B2C CRM turns customers into diehard fans—obsessed with your products, devoted to your brand, fuelling your growth.