Omnichannel Marketing: Definition, Strategy, Tools, and Examples

Today, Irish shoppers expect a smooth, connected experience no matter where or how they interact with a brand. For businesses, this means being visible across multiple channels—whether online, in-store, or on social media—and making sure these channels work together seamlessly.

That’s where omnichannel marketing comes in.

It’s all about creating a unified brand experience that lets customers move effortlessly between platforms, making every interaction feel consistent and valuable.

In this guide to omnichannel marketing, we will explore:

• What is Omnichannel Marketing?
• Multichannel vs Omnichannel Marketing
• Integrated vs Omnichannel Marketing
• The benefits of Omnichannel Marketing
• The Challenges of Omnichannel Marketing
• How to Create an Omnichannel Marketing Strategy
• Examples of businesses in Ireland that use Omnichannel Marketing

What is Omnichannel Marketing?

Omnichannel marketing is a strategy that creates a seamless, unified experience across all touchpoints, ensuring that every customer interaction—whether online or in-store—connects back to a cohesive brand presence. Unlike multichannel marketing, which focuses on having multiple touchpoints, omnichannel marketing is about integrating these touchpoints so customers feel part of a single, connected journey.

Multichannel vs. Omnichannel Marketing

Many people use multichannel marketing and omnichannel marketing interchangeably. But they’re actually quite different.

At its most basic level, multichannel marketing is a company’s distribution strategy — it describes the various avenues used to push messages out to customers. One way to think of multichannel marketing is as avenues moving from the inside outward to reach customers. For example, a brand might market its holiday campaign to the world via TV ads, social media posts, email marketing, direct mail and in-store promotions, all in parallel.

Omnichannel marketing is all about connecting the dots between the channels. Think of it as something more like a web — bringing everything together — instead of pushing everything outward. It keeps customers moving around within the brand ecosystem, with each channel working harmoniously to nurture more sales and engagement.

An omnichannel marketing strategy may include in-store pickup, loyalty programmes, smartphone apps to compare prices or download coupons, click and collect, interactive in-store digital lookbooks or price checkers on tablets throughout the store.

Integrated Marketing vs. Omnichannel Marketing

Integrated and omnichannel marketing are often mentioned together but differ in purpose and scope. Integrated marketing is about creating a consistent brand message across all channels, ensuring that every piece of content reflects the brand’s identity. Omnichannel marketing goes a step further, integrating these channels technologically and operationally so every customer interaction is part of a unified, data-driven journey. Integrated marketing may use multiple channels without focusing on real-time connected experiences. These channels can be managed separately but have a unified message. When it comes to omnichannel marketing, all the channels must be interconnected and working together. For example, a customer might start on your website, go on to a mobile app, and finally complete a purchase in-store without friction.

Both approaches are essential, but omnichannel marketing provides a more immersive and personalised experience by connecting each interaction with real-time insights from other channels.

Benefits of Omnichannel Marketing

Irish businesses increasingly embrace omnichannel retail to keep up with connected, convenience-driven consumers. Today’s shoppers move fluidly between online stores, physical shops, social media, apps, and more—expecting a seamless and personalised experience at every step.

In fact, 68% of Irish consumers shop online more than before the COVID-19 pandemic, and 93% say that a company’s ability to resolve issues is crucial to their loyalty.

The good news? Investing in omnichannel retail brings significant rewards:

• Higher sales and ROI: Omnichannel customers are valuable—research from Harvard Business Review found that they spend an average of 4% more per purchase in-store and 10% more online than single-channel customers.

• Personalised customer experience: Businesses can better understand their shopping patterns with insights from customer behaviour across channels. This data enables them to create targeted, relevant promotions and engagement strategies tailored to each channel’s unique needs.

• Enhanced brand loyalty: A seamless, enjoyable experience across platforms builds customer loyalty, increasing the likelihood that customers will return repeatedly.

Challenges of Omnichannel Marketing

While omnichannel marketing has big benefits, it comes with its own set of challenges:

• Bringing data together: Integrating data from different sources isn’t always easy, especially if your systems don’t naturally “talk” to each other. Without smooth data flow, getting the full picture of your customers’ journeys is hard.
• Keeping brand consistency: Making sure your brand message feels the same across all channels can be tricky—especially if different teams are working in silos. When teams aren’t aligned, it’s easy for the brand’s voice to get mixed up.
• Meeting high customer expectations: Today’s shoppers want everything personalised and convenient, which can be time and resource-intensive to keep up with.
• Investing in technology: Setting up a unified platform to support omnichannel marketing is a big investment. It takes time, tech, and a solid budget to get right. The good news is that many automation tools help you streamline your operations and reduce time spent on repetitive tasks.

How to create your Omnichannel Marketing strategy

1. Gather research

To move into omnichannel retail, you need to understand how your customers interact with your business. Your first stop? Your data.

Analyse the data in your e-commerce platform to determine where people engage with your brand and where they might need a little nurturing. Of course, you should look at item sales but don’t forget about other digital metrics. These include traffic numbers (as well as how it’s broken up between desktop and mobile), traffic sources, page views, bounce rate and where the most people drop off from your checkout flow. Also, look at your in-store data. Your Square POS has robust metrics on everything from your busiest time of day to how many repeat versus one-time customers you have and even how your Facebook ads drive in-store sales.

Qualitative research is just as important. Talk to your customers about what they like most and least about their experience with your business. What are the areas where they would like to see improvement? Would they buy more if they could pick up items in the shop? How about if they could browse in person but order online for it to be delivered? Would they be more likely to shop with you if you had a rewards program? What type? Customer surveys can help tremendously with gathering this data.

Once you have all your numbers and feedback, you’ll have a 360-degree view of your customer’s shopping behaviour and preferences. You’ll know which channels they’re engaging with your brand the most and which they would use more if you beefed up the experience.

This is the foundation on which to build your omnichannel retail strategy. It allows you to find ways to connect the dots by inserting strategic re-engagement tactics along all the touchpoints that a consumer has with your brand. This data deep dive can also help you determine which types of customers are your most valuable.

2. Make sure you have the basics in place.

You can’t run before you walk. A successful omnichannel retail strategy requires that you have some building blocks in place first. Make sure you’re implementing the following:

• Search engine optimisation (SEO)- You won’t even make a blip on people’s radars if they can’t find you. That’s why SEO, which consists of optimising a website with keywords to achieve higher rankings in search engines, is critical. According to BrightEdge, organic search channels (including SEO) generate more than half of website traffic, making it a vital part of your marketing strategy.

• Search engine marketing (SEM) - Investing in SEM — that is, purchasing online marketing like keywords through paid ads, PPC, etc. — is also important. The BrightEdge report highlights that combining SEO and SEM accounts for 62% of website traffic.

• Mobile-optimised website - Make sure that any eCommerce platform you choose works just as well on mobile devices as on desktops.

• Targeted email campaigns- Targeted email campaigns are a low-lift, cost-effective way to deliver personalised, actionable content to customers.

• Social media - With its easy-to-use, advanced targeting capabilities, Facebook is especially important as a way to reach customers. It’s also a great way to create buzz.

3. Reorganise your business operations.

Omnichannel retail is all about creating an ecosystem, but many businesses are organised around siloed channels. One department may be responsible for email newsletters, another for customer service, and another for events and content marketing. If these departments aren’t working together closely, it will be impossible for an omnichannel retail strategy to gel.

Ensure you include increased interaction with other channels as a key success metric for each department. You might even consider reorganising your marketing department’s reporting structure so everyone is marching toward the same goal (rather than siloed ones). You want your employees to constantly look for ways to move customers seamlessly through all the company’s engagement channels.

It’s also important to think about your business’s technology environment.

To support omnichannel retail, 85% of retail executives plan to implement a unified commerce platform by 2025 to consolidate key data, business rules and functionality that historically have lived in different systems.

Creating a way for everyone in the company to easily get a holistic view of your business is paramount for success in omnichannel retail. By merging data and insights across channels, companies better understand customer behaviour and preferences, allowing them to produce promotional content, product recommendations and engagement tactics targeted at their immediate needs.

4. Map out the customer journey.

Using data and insights, map out the web of how customers typically traverse all your channels.

Do people browse your products online before visiting your store? Do they visit your store and buy online? Are people more likely to buy a certain type of product online versus in stores? Do customers who read your educational content tend to buy something as a result?

Drawing out how people interact with your brand and then buy your products gives you a picture of what your omnichannel ecosystem looks like right now. If you can anticipate how all of the channels are traversed, you can begin to understand customer preferences. And if you see a key section of the web faltering (or even missing), you can find a way to fill in that line.

5. Start with a few customer paths.

It’s best to start small, especially if you’re new to omnichannel retail. Pick out a few customer paths and determine what might work to nurture them from their starting point to a sale.

Say, for example, that you’ve found a cohort of people who read many online reviews of your products before making a purchase. You might consider adding touchscreens in your brick-and-mortar store so customers can look up product reviews. Another way to engage those information-hungry customers is to serve them in-depth educational content about your products as they’re browsing your website.

Fulfilment options are also a good place to start, especially if you notice customers are abandoning their online carts due to high shipping costs. In fact, PwC found that 71 % of CEOs say that omnichannel fulfilment is a top priority for their business. Consider turning your store into a mini fulfilment centre by offering free in-store pickup for orders online or through your app. It can save your customers shipping fees and increase foot traffic at your brick-and-mortar store. In-store pickup has a great ROI, as someone picking up their online order may buy something additional once they see it at your storefront.

On the other side of the coin, you could save on inventory storage space and just have a physical “showroom” for your products, where customers can buy what they want on tablets in the store and get it shipped.

6. Continuously look at data and adjust your strategy.

It’s not enough to put some omnichannel marketing strategies in place and then leave them on autopilot. You must constantly look at your data analytics to measure the results and tweak things accordingly. As the market evolves, you may notice a new consumer trend that requires a different strategy across new channels.

Examples of Omnichannel Marketing

There are an increasing number of examples of companies that have doubled down on their omnichannel retail experience. Here are a few to draw inspiration from:

Booking.com

Booking sites can be some of the most cumbersome because of the huge amounts of information they have to host. This may be an issue your own website shares, especially if you offer a core service that can vary from job to job, e.g. home improvements. A mobile-optimised site is key to omnichannel success, and when Booking.com discovered half of all user journeys started from mobile, it upped its mobile optimisation game. The result was an accessible site with clear fold-away menus, drop-down hotel descriptions and easy-to-use fields for visitors to input dates.

Schuh

Far from the capabilities of the humble small business, Schuh’s novel take on omnichannel is still worth noting. Working with Ingress, a game that was a forerunner of Pokemon Go, players could harness the power of virtual reality to not only save the planet in their fictional narrative but discover Schuh branches portal in-game as they physically walked around their local area. This effort to engage with their customers in a new way, and entirely on a level that Ingress gamers could get on board with, highlights the importance of adapting your omnichannel efforts to your customer’s habits and expectations.

SOSU Cosmetics

SOSU Cosmetics is a great example of how a brand can make omnichannel marketing work. Starting as an online beauty brand, SOSU expanded into physical stores, including a spot in Dublin’s Dundrum Shopping Centre, and used Square’s hardware and software to make everything run smoothly. This setup made life easier for both customers and staff, cutting admin time by 25% and boosting weekly bookings by 20% as everyone got used to the new system. Their approach to omnichannel marketing keeps the brand experience consistent and seamless across every customer touchpoint, ensuring they connect with customers wherever they are—online or in-store.

An omnichannel strategy isn’t just about reaching customers on every platform; it’s about creating an ecosystem where every interaction adds value. For Irish retailers, this strategy can deepen customer loyalty, drive sales, and future-proof their business in an increasingly digital marketplace.