A Salesforce survey from 2017 indicated that "64% of marketing leaders said that their company has become more focused on providing a consistent experience across every channel as a result of changing customer expectations". The employee experience is the cornerstone. Human interaction matters now-a PWC survey states that 82% of U.S. and 74% of non-U.S. consumers want more of it in the future. The technology supporting human interaction must be seamless and unobtrusive across platforms.This is evidence that an experience-driven economy is blooming in a post digital world.

The customer experience journey is not just a roadmap of user touchpoints, but a roadmap for creating a seamless personalized conversation with the customer from your landing page to email newsletters, social media content, and in-person meetings, to check out.

Put data front and center

Marketing teams today are challenged with leveraging data from multiple sources and customer touchpoints, offline and online, in order to create a connected customer experience. Evolving messaging from channel to channel, while keeping it consistent yet personalized is also critical. While trying to stay consistent across channels, it's important that companies focus on maintaining brand relevance and differentiation versus trying to touch every channel.

To maintain brand relevance and personalize experiences for consumers, you have to have a grasp of your data. The benefits to an omnichannel strategy include the elimination of information silos between departments, and encouraging more collaboration and the convergence of data from multiple sources. By centralizing customer data, companies can better personalize the customer experience, simplify marketing workflows and grow long-term customer loyalty. Furthermore, the insights will provide greater visibility into customer behaviors, which leads to better targeting the right content on the right channels.

Increased collaboration also means more room for experimentation with marketing strategies. Exposing ourselves to more customer data not only enables marketing teams to be more agile with their strategies, but that data will also become more meaningful when evaluating mistakes and necessary improvements for upcoming campaigns.

Every company's omnichannel strategy will be different -so experiment, let data steer you in the direction best for your company and onboard the right tech stack to help!

A peek into Cisco's omnichannel journey

Cisco's vision is to implement an always-on customer journey, to enhance partner engagement, and achieve greater campaign scalability and more targeted communications and cross-channel orchestration.

In 2017, Cisco's VP of Global Digital Marketing, Joseph Puthussery, myself and our teams, renovated our campaign strategies with the goal of designing a more compelling and consistent partner experience.

One of our first steps we took to achieve our goal was deploying the Oracle Eloqua marketing automation platform to dive into digital behaviors and engagements across channels, and enhanced the amount of data we could segment and personalize off of. This platform allowed us to standardize templates for email and landing page designs, which enabled us to create a consistent, brand-compliant persona, and scale global campaign execution. Personalizing experiences based on digital behavior across multiple channels, through digital event systems -Cisco.com and others, empowered us to increase brand relevance and engagement.

Within the year, we were able to support more than 500 global and regional campaigns in over 15 languages, and led to a 178% increase in views on Cisco.com partner pages. We doubled email engagement rates from 8% to 16%, improved our Voice of the Partner satisfaction scores (partner survey), and increased partner traffic to Cisco.com from 1.5 million unique visitors in 2016 to 3.8 million in 2017.

While a success story, this journey didn't come without obstacles or learning curves -it took a team of bright minds with a strong will to learn and collaborate, and a powerful tool to implement our omnichannel strategy to deliver a seamless and connected customer experience journey.

Interested in learning more? Register for this upcoming webinar:

Omnichannel Experience Tech Stack: Deliver a Marketing Tech Stack that Accelerates Your Business Outcomes

Wednesday August 8, 2018
8:00 a.m. PT/ 11:00 a.m. ET