How CPaaS and Omnichannel Marketing Can Help You Achieve Your Marketing Objectives
“Omnichannel” has become a buzzword as of late, particularly around marketing, customer experience and customer service related topics, and naturally so, with 82% of shoppers in APAC shoppers using multiple channels to access products and services in 2020, up from 22% in 2019, and still presently at 79% in 2022. But is it just a buzz word? Or is there something more to omnichannel communications?
In this article, we’ll discuss the benefits of adopting an experiential vs. transactional communication model, what omnichannel communications and experiences are, how they benefit your marketing and customer service and experience, and how CPaaS, Communications Platform as a Service, can help you take your omnichannel game to the next level.
For example, did you know that APAC is home to 60% of the world’s population and the largest number of internet users in any region, with China, Indonesia and South Korea alone, having over 1.2 billion internet users, with 939.8 million from China alone? Against this backdrop, a study of over 2 billion marketing campaigns, carried out globally, found that brands using three or more channels are able to generate 90% higher retention?
Why Experiential Is Better than Transactional
Transactional benefits and communications are well understood. This is about telling your customer the immediate benefits that they will enjoy if they choose your product or service. However, the digital world has changed things and customer tastes have become more sophisticated than quantum physics or choosing your favorite cereal in the morning. More importantly, in industries where it’s easy to compete on transactional terms, such as in hospitality, for example, where anyone can feasibly provide good accommodation and so on, it becomes crucial to differentiate oneself with an experiential dimension.
While transactional benefits are what customers often engage with most directly, it’s the experiential benefits and dimension of your communications and your customer experience that build deeper emotional connects and create sustainable long-term positive impacts for your brand or business. A Malaysia-based bank, for example, has reported a 50% increase in telesales capabilities, coupled with reduced costs and 40% lower call abandonment rate, as a result of its newly integrated omnichannel service delivery mechanism.
In fact, with 95% of purchases driven by emotions and subconscious decisions, the potential that can be unlocked through experiential marketing is clear!
How Can an Omnichannel Experience Help With Experiential Communications?
To put it simply, an omnichannel experience is one where your target group or consumers experience a uniform and consistent “flavour” of marketing and or customer experience, regardless of which channel they use to access your products or services. It even allows your customers to begin their experience with you on one channel and continue it later on another, seamlessly.
This makes even more sense in the context of Google having found that 90% of people who have more than one device, regularly switch between them during the day; underscoring the importance of having your products and services seamlessly accessible across platforms, devices and channels, in a consistent, familiar and user-friendly manner, even allowing users to pick up where they left off on their other device or channel.
The benefits of such an approach are made clear by the fact that marketing campaigns that use three or more channels, in addition to achieving a 90% higher retention rate, also generated purchasing rates of over 12%, which is almost 300% higher than single-channel approaches which usually average around 3%.
Therefore, naturally, if you tailor and build a frictionless experience around a unified omnichannel marketing, sales, customer experience and customer service strategy, your customer will build a deep emotional connection with your brand, and will even opt for your product or service, even if it is more expensive than others, just for the experience. In fact, 94% of customers in the APAC region are generally willing to pay more for brands that personalize the customer service experience.
The Potential Benefits of an Omnichannel, Integrated Approach
In addition to the numerous advantages of an omnichannel communications and overall strategy, brands that creatively employ an omnichannel approach can also enjoy:
Increased Visibility – This is a natural result of being present on more platforms and channels, thus increasing the chances of your messaging being seen by your target group.
Broader Reach and Choice – Having more channels means you can increase your reach, while also having a larger choice of channels, and thus a larger choice of creative approaches. It is even possible to combine online and offline efforts for maximum gain, through an integrated approach.
Increased Competitiveness – If you want to increase market share, going head-to-head with the competition may not be the best idea. Instead, by adopting an omnichannel approach, you can find where the competition has gaps and effectively work to fill those gaps, thus increasing your share of the market.
It Makes You Look Good – Customers and potential customers seeing you across the channels they use will create a good impression and enable you to enjoy greater influence and trust.
The Game Changing Advantage of CPaaS
Communications Platform as a Service or CPaaS is the next step in any omnichannel approach. It is essentially a way to seamlessly bring and integrate all of your communications channels onto one single, seamless platform at the backend, making it so much easier for you to execute, manage, monitor and oversee your omnichannel comms strategy.
CPaaS uses cloud technology, which means it can competitively, economically and accessibly deliver services to businesses of all sizes, empowering them with the ability to develop and integrate communications channels and features, without having to invest in dedicated technology and custom-designed applications, which can be hugely cost prohibitive and needlessly complex.
With CPaaS, businesses can enjoy a complete development framework that integrates real-time communications functionality into their existing systems. Syniverse CPaaS Concierge, for example is a cloud-based, omnichannel messaging platform that uses APIs to connect businesses more meaningfully and in a simpler way, to their customers.
Such CPaaS solutions are able to bring together diverse communications channels, such as SMS, MMS, Voice and Audio, Push Notifications, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, WeChat, RCS and many more popular channels into a seamless, integrated, single platform, making it incredibly easy to maintain a true omnichannel presence. One where your communications may start and end on very different channels, but which can all be controlled and handled in one place.
In a sense, Syniverse CPaaS Concierge, may even be considered an omnichannel approach for comms at the backend, where regardless of the channel your customers choose, your agents enjoy the same seamless and consistent experience throughout, without having to constantly change and adapt to a new channel or platform for each communication.
What To Look for in a Good CPaaS Solution
A truly useful CPaaS solution will ensure that:
No overhaul is needed – Quick deployment will be available
Everything in one place – Provides a unified single view of your customer communication
Easy Integration – Seamlessly integrates into existing applications to create meaningful workflows
Future-Ready – Allows for new technologies to be easily adopted
Ready to Use and Customizable – You shouldn’t have to do much to adopt your new CPaaS. A Modular approach is best
Syniverse CPaaS Concierge ticks all of these boxes and has already proven itself, having enhanced engagement by up to 40%, increased revenue for a single mobile marketing campaign by over USD 1.2 million and helped a specialty retail chain achieve 34X ROI on a single SMS campaign.
CPaaS: The Future of Integrated Communications
As omnichannel has emerged as the future of marketing, customer service and customer experience, CPaaS is emerging as the future of handling and deploying an omnichannel approach. It enables you to fill in gaps, maintain your presence across channels and ease the workload on your own people. CPaas is a win-win solution that benefits your front-facing omnichannel approach for customers, while allowing your backend to enjoy similar benefits of consistency and ease of use, access and tracking, all through a single platform.
To learn more about CPaaS, or just to talk to us about how we can address your individual business needs, feel free contact us anytime.
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