Introduction

In this post we explain the key aspects of becoming more Omnichannel, how it is related to 3 concrete areas which, only when connected together, deliver the true potential of omnichannel communication.

In this post, we define Omnichannel communication as the capacity to communicate seamlessly and at scale with your customers throughout different channels, such as E-mail, the E-shop/Web-Site, Push Notification, Print, etc.

We put an important focus on Automation, as while your company might communicate different content to different customers through different channels already today, the true potential of Omnichannel communication relies on the fact that the preferred default and escalation channels should be automatically optimized based on the behaviors of customers without requiring any manual intervention (especially any intervention which would be specific to a channel).

Open

By Omnichannel, we specifically mean the capacity to communicate content seamlessly, without any
channel-specific adjustments throughout these 7 channels interchangeably and automatically

Why becoming Omnichannel?

Many companies are attracted by the potential of being more targeted, more personalized, or more intelligent in their communication.

While we totally agree on the importance of each of these 3 aspects, we believe it is often under-looked how critical it is to be Omnichannel in order to be successful as any of them.

What good is it that you can be targeting specific customer segments if you would need to write much more content to communicate with these segments in your Newsletter system and don’t have enough resources to do so?

What good is it that you can create personalized trigger campaigns if you would need to configure 100 such triggers to have a base coverage and are already struggling to setup and maintain just a few?

What good is it that you create compelling and personalized newsletters (knowing that many subscribers ignore them more and more) if you are not able to switch seamlessly to an online display when they come to visit your e-shop and are much more likely to pay attention.

In other words, becoming Omnichannel is essential because it will empower you to be more targeted, personalized and intelligence efficiently within the resource limitations of your organization.

The 3 pillars of Omnichannel:

In short, becoming Omnichannel is about “Data Science Headless Automation”, as these 3 concepts, put together, are the foundation of your Omnichannel transformation:

Open

Data science

You need intelligent, data-driven algorithms that are tailored to the needs of your business.

Headless

You need to manage all content (for print, newsletter, e-shop, in-store, ...) in one place and not per channel.

Automation

Your communication must be fully automated, with no channel-related manual intervention required.

3 concrete steps to go Omnichannel:

To enact a plan towards “Data Science Headless Automation”, your company needs to develop its capacities in the following areas:

1. Consolidated Data Warehouse

You need to consolidate your data from all sources (E-Shop, ERP/PIM, Newsletter/CRM) in one Data Warehouse like Google BigQuery in order to empower Data Scientists to leverage your data.

This is important in particular for:

E-shop data and tracked behaviors (product data, customer data, transaction history, baskets (wish-lists, user-generated content), Google Analytics (+Boxalino Tracker) and Google Ads Data Transfer)
This is all achieved directly with a standard Boxalino Integration

ERP (and maybe PIM data): while it is not always the case, it is often that the transactions, the customers and the product data are not complete taking the E-shop data alone. It is therefore important to export your ERP data as well
If you also need your ERP data in your omnichannel activities, you can Integrate your Data in Boxalino BigQuery Data Science Eco-System or export them through our REST Data API

History of your communications: in order to automate your omnichannel communication, it is important to also load the entire history of all your communication interactions (when you send an e-mail to a customer, when this customer opens or clicks it, etc.). While the Google Analytics (and Boxalino) tracking will be able to identify what happened when customers visited the web-site, it is important to load all the history of what happened before that in the data warehouse as well.
As this is quite important (and maybe new for you) we go in depth on this in the next section Omnichannel Data Integration

2. Headless Content for all communication

From an operational perspective, this is more likely the biggest change becoming omnichannel will bring in your organization.

It basically means that all content that is to appear in any communication should be created in a headless CMS and exported to Boxalino as dynamic content.

A simple way to understand what it means is that, instead of going in your Newsletter template editor to create a new campaign and adding banners and text, your team will instead enter all this content in an independent Content Management System (CMS) in a headless way.

By headless, we mean that the content should not indicate anything in regard to the way it should be rendered visually. For example, the HTML of your e-mail is most likely different from the HTML of your e-shop (this is always required for technical reasons). But your headless content should be 100% the same and should not include any such HTML aspects. Instead, it should be provided in a rich, structured and well formatted way which can be automatically rendered visually by each channel (into different types of HTML as well as other formats entirely, for print for example).

While we do propose to consider different Headless CMS in particular, it doesn’t really matter if you use any of these CMS or if you create your own, as long as the format in which the content is entered is indeed headless.

You can integrate headless content with the standard Boxalino Winning Interactions Data API in the doc_content format. You can also load the content in BigQuery by yourself and share access to it with Boxalino Accounts as per the following diagram:

3. Start with simple and efficient automation

The first thing to consider is that automation doesn’t mean that you lose control, it means that you shift your control to another place, in a way which is more agile, more efficient and more intelligent.

Therefore, have no fear, if you want 100’000 customers to receive the same newsletter tomorrow at 10:00, you can still do so with an automated system if you want.

But instead of going to your newsletter tool and clicking send (or clicking send at with a time scheduled), you can do so in your Headless CMS (or in other administration interfaces in case your CMS doesn’t support it).

So instead of controlling your sending by an action a user must take in the newsletter system, you will do so by exporting data which have this information inside.

As a result, it becomes possible to automate in a much more personalized way and to easily shift from one channel to another, all of which would be totally impossible in a specific channel system like the newsletter.

We recommend to start simple along the following lines until your operations runs smoothly and well in this new modus operandi (you can become more advanced after-wise):

1. Plan your “weekly-newsletter” in a spreadsheet style (in your CMS or using systems like Google Sheets) in a way which reflects your communication agenda as simply and as directly as possible

2. Create a few columns to control your most important customer segments

3. Create “channels” columns to indicate which channel should be used (by order of preferences) so that a focus on a particular channel or a switch from one channel to another is already part of your planning

4. Define a small set of trigger behaviors (abandon cart, a product from your Wishlist is back in stock, you might be running low on supply of product X, product Y which you often buy is now in discount, …). Probably not too different from what you have (or would have had) in a normal newsletter setup

5. Make sure that each communication is connected to a content which can be used at least in 3 channels (if not more):

   1. Newsletter

   2. Landing Page on the web-site

   3. Communication overlay on the web-site

   4. (print, …)

Newsletter System Requirements for Omnichannel

In order to become Omnichannel, you need to make sure your Newsletter system can support the following requirements (this is important as many newsletter systems do not support such requirements and therefore a change to another system is required):

Retrieve e-mail sending plan with content instructions for sending any e-mail from the DWH
Any e-mail to be sent to anyway should come from an omnichannel communication planning data fee of the Data Warehouse (DWH like Google BigQuery).

Feed continuously History of Communications of any event on any e-mail sent to the DWH
Any event (sent, bounce, open, click) on any e-mail should be fed with all available details to a omnichannel communication history table of the Data Warehouse (DWH like Google BigQuery).