Fulfilling customer expectations, improving customer retention rates, and generating higher revenues are some of the primary reasons that make omnichannel marketing a must for every successful brand.
Especially in a country like India, where consumers are inherently omnichannel and combine online and offline touchpoints before making a purchase, offering a unified experience across channels is becoming more important than ever. According to research available on Mint, around 74% of Indian consumers shop across channels, including trade outlets, local retailers, and online.
If you are planning to implement an omnichannel strategy, how will you recognize the channels and customer touchpoints that are working and ones that are not? Will you be able to pinpoint a specific channel that is bringing in maximum conversions? Without an effective omnichannel attribution model, multichannel measurement could be very challenging.
What is Omnichannel Attribution?
Omnichannel attribution can be defined as a measurement model that brands can use to figure out the effectiveness of each element used in a marketing mix. It can help measure the role of every element that ultimately helped or encouraged a customer to make the purchase.
Let’s understand this with an example.
Tanmay, a working executive, is contemplating investing in a life insurance policy. He sees a billboard ad for an insurance product while driving through the highway on his way to work. Later in the day, he sees a TV commercial for the same product. The curiosity encourages him to search for the policy online through his smartphone and land on the same company’s PPC ads and organic search results. The following day, while browsing the web on his laptop and scouting through social media, he then sees a retargeting ad for the product. He then decides to purchase the product offline or online.
With omnichannel attribution, brands can know the effectiveness of each touchpoint that resulted in the sale. Moreover, it can also be used for understanding how individual touchpoints assisted in improving the effectiveness of other channels.
What are the Common Omnichannel Attribution Strategies?
While there are a few common attribution strategies, none of them is perfect and requires customization as per the goals and expectations of a brand. Most brands work with either a digital marketing company or their internal marketing team to help them design a personalized attribution model. Here are two of the most commonly used strategies-
- MTA
The MTA or Multi-Touchpoint Attribution provides personal-level granular data of each touchpoint in real-time. This data can be analyzed by marketers for making changes to the live campaigns to meet customer expectations and needs better.
But a common problem with the MTA model is it does not provide any insight into how important the role of a particular touchpoint was in the customer’s buying journey.
- MMM
Unlike the MTA strategy that focuses on personal-level data in real-time, the MMM or Media Mix Modeling only considers aggregate data that has been collected over a longer duration. This makes it an effective strategy to understand the overall impact of a campaign and historical trends better.
However, this model offers no assistance in helping brands understand the individual preferences of a customer. Also, as MMM requires long-term data, marketers cannot use it for real-time campaign optimization.
Measuring Impact of Each Channel with Omnichannel Attribution
While having a multichannel presence is paramount, it is equally essential to effectively measure the impact of each channel on the customer journey. Only when a brand can measure the impact can they use the data to improve their strategies further.
Omnichannel attribution is an evolving field that brands should make a note of when it is still in a preliminary stage as it can help make their omnichannel strategies more effective and enable them to optimize their media spends.
Marketing experts can help brands build an effective attribution model that is customized as per their objectives so that they can accurately measure the strengths and weaknesses of their omnichannel campaigns and make them more effective.
