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What is Multichannel?

Multichannel or multichannel marketing is a strategy in which retailers and service providers endeavour to address and influence potential customers through various communication channels with their advertising. This multichannel strategy involves different sales and communication measures.

  • Potential consumers should be reached via channels of their choice
  • Important strategic approach with on- and offline measures for entrepreneurs
  • Communication with consumers can be direct and indirect

Why Multichannel?

Customers today have a much wider choice than ever before of how to obtain information and purchase products and services. Therefore a strategy is needed that is independent of fixed and inflexible contact channels. A very simple example for multichannel is a single-handed person who creates a shop on the internet in addition to his stationary shop. In practice, multichannel measures can be very diverse and the strategy can be a whole mix, e.g. from search engine advertising, social media marketing, e-mail marketing or display marketing. In addition to such online measures, one or the other offline channel can of course also be used, such as print ads, trade fairs and events or personal contacts. Multichannel thus refers to the flexible practice of companies interacting directly or indirectly with potential or existing customers via several channels in order to sell them goods and services. Direct channels are channels through which the company proactively reaches the customer, such as physical stores, catalogs, or direct mail, while indirect channels are those through which content is delivered via websites or social media. Good ways to reach customers with multichannel marketing include mobile devices, text messaging, email, social networking, corporate websites, search engine optimization, and GPS to measure the distance of customers to products and services. Multichannel marketing always combines the best practices of inbound and outbound marketing and aims to reach consumers through the channel of their choice. In this way, the entire buying process is basically controlled more by the potential customer than by the marketers.

This is how multichannel marketing works

Multichannel marketing is part of a comprehensive strategy that involves many and especially new media and evolves along with constantly changing communication preferences and customer tastes. Companies are striving to develop such analyses to determine which consumers receive which messages based on behavioral and demographic information. In addition to knowing who the customer is and what they want, companies also try to understand what specific channel a particular customer prefers in order to further maximize message visibility. This makes it possible to address the right target group with the right content to make sales much easier. To be successful in multi-channel or other areas of digital marketing, companies strive to develop campaigns that easily span multiple channels. Since the expectation that the customers hoped for will adapt to the companys preferred channel is a rather unrealistic wish, companies therefore prefer to focus on the customers and adapt their campaigns to multiple channels accordingly. Another goal is to know which campaigns lead to the most sales on which channels, so that the effectiveness of the efforts can be determined and the return on investment on each channel measured. Companies can coordinate their online and offline marketing efforts to optimize both. Multichannel has many advantages. By maximizing the marketing effort by promoting a message across as many channels as possible, companies also have the potential to gather valuable feedback from different customer segments. Overall performance can then be determined by this feedback and improvements can be achieved by crowdsourcing information. By using resources effectively, operating costs are also reduced. The more visible a message is, the more potential customers a company can attract. By concentrating efforts on a single channel, the potential to reach potential customers is reduced. Companies can use their presence on multiple channels to create a personalized image that builds and promotes customer loyalty. When companies collect feedback from customers, it is much easier to understand what is expected from customers and how product and service offerings can be improved. Companies can then increase their marketing efforts to identify which channels are best suited to specific customer segments and continue to develop strategies to address the specific needs of that customer group

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