Think ‘Customer Journey’ first to increase marketing impact with Omnisend’s Rytis Lauris (episode 242)

by April Buencamino-dy

My guest is Rytis Lauris, the CEO and co-founder of Omnisend, an eCommerce marketing automation service trusted by over 50,000 marketers! He was on the show earlier this year (episode 195) to talk about the rebranding process he took Omnisend through in 2018, and he’s back to talk about what he and his team focus on day in day out – omnichannel best practice, based on the customer journey.

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Omnisend’s Explosive Growth

Over the course of the past 12 months, Rytis says that Omnisend’s paying customer base has doubled. That jump has given the company an explosion of data to work with as they fine-tune omnichannel communications.

The data encouraged the Omnisend team to double down on pushing their clients to pay better attention to the customer journey and create the best blend of communications for their unique customer segments.  

Shifting Away from Campaign Thinking

Today, many marketers still think in terms of individual campaigns and a lot of batch and blast marketing continues to prevail. Rytis says that focusing on the customer journey is ultimately better for eCommerce businesses and has a better ROI overall.

Customer segmentation allows companies to speak to the relevant concerns and desires of their individual customers rather than relying on brute force and volume. It also allows companies to be more considerate of the lifetime value of a customer and even make smart investments upfront that data shows will pay off in the long run.

The sheer volume of data that eCommerce produces, including the ability to see an individuals digital footprint, type of transactions, recency of transaction, time spent and so much more enables marketers to drill down into segmented behavioral patterns that occur along a customer’s journey.

Looking at this customer experience allows businesses to really focus their marketing efforts in the right place to the right people at the right time, which is ultimately the holy grail of good digital marketing. 

How You Can Be More Nuanced With Your Marketing

Making this type of marketing really work for your business takes getting your data ducks in a row and paying attention to the details. To get started Rytis shares his top two must-have strategies for success. 

Synchronization—The key to building powerful customer segments that can target shoppers at the right time in the right spot with the right message is synchronization. Finding the right mix of technologies is the only way to properly synchronize your messaging across multiple channels and ensure your customer is receiving a clear, concise and powerfully on-brand message.  

Thinking Beyond Email— Even though email is still the single most effective channel, businesses need to augment it with things like text messaging and web chats to fully optimize their messaging.

Know What Your Customer Sees

It’s surprisingly common for businesses to be completely unaware of what messages are being sent to their customers. With so many helpful apps for every facet of business operations, it’s easy to try and automate everything with the latest app.

The danger is that automatic messages being sent from those seemingly helpful apps are bombarding your customers and the result is usually frustrating and often misses the mark.  Rytis also points out that it’s just plain annoying to visit a website that asks you to sign up for emails every time they click on a button.

When messages are out of synchronization, customers feel bombarded, not helped. Synchronicity helps those messages flow intelligently to the customer based on how they are interacting with your products or services.

Smart, Nuanced Marketing

The fascinating thing about getting a handle on all this data and getting the right mix of tools is that businesses can get more specific with messaging and that development pushes the definition of what marketing can really look like.

Marketing that is less volume based interruption and more intelligent communication is nuanced, personal, and far more desirable. While segmenting several different small campaigns with varying life cycles and outcomes can seem less impactful at the time of launch, the truth is that these kinds of campaigns have a far more valuable ROI. Not only do they speak to customers in a more likable way, but they create room for pulling back at the right time and creating other kinds of content that connect people to a brand over the long term.

Rytis says that some of his favorite marketing campaigns aren’t promotional, but rather storytelling or educational in nature. Inspiring customers can have just as much if not more impact than a coupon code.

Book Top Tip

Traffic Top Tip

  • SMS. Text messages have a really good ROI. Few marketers are communicating with their customers via text and the two main concerns have been largely resolved. 1.) Texts can now link straight to a mobile-friendly version of your website and 2.) text messaging now provides an opt-out option, making people more willing to leave a phone number as a way to communicate

Tool Top Tip

  • Slack
  • G-Suite is an awesome tool for any size organization

Growth Top Tip

  • Pay attention to the customer journey and lifetime value perspective. Don’t ditch campaigns, but change your way of thinking. 
  • Add more channel

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