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The Personalization guide

Extend your reach with omnichannel personalization

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Esat Artug

Updated: February 4, 2025

This is chapter 3 of the series, The Personalization guide

Summary

Omnichannel personalization combines the power of personalization with the reach of an omnichannel marketing strategy.

Consumers are shifting their spending to digital channels and demanding seamless, personalized experiences across all customer touchpoints — physical and digital.

In this chapter, we’ll clarify what omnichannel personalization is and show you different ways to implement it into your business.

Omnichannel vs. multichannel vs. cross-channel

Before we dive into omnichannel personalization, it's helpful to clarify commonly confused terms.

Omnichannel multi cross

Omnichannel refers to all the touchpoints a brand has with customers, whether they happen across multiple channels, on different devices, or in a physical store. This includes online, in-person, and mobile interactions. An omnichannel experience is consistent and cohesive across all channels. In an omnichannel marketing campaign, all channels are integrated and work together to provide a seamless customer experience.

Multichannel is the use of two or more channels to reach and engage customers. The key difference between multichannel marketing and omnichannel is that the channels operate independently. For example, a company with a website, social media accounts, and an email list is marketing on multiple channels but not necessarily connecting them with an omnichannel strategy.

Cross-channel marketing uses multiple connected channels to reach customers, such as email, social media, and paid advertising. It's more connected than multichannel marketing but not as holistic as omnichannel. The key difference is that cross-channel connects some channels, while omnichannel connects all of your customer interactions into one cohesive customer journey.

For a deeper understanding of omnichannel and related terms, visit our Omnichannel Guide.

What is omnichannel personalization?

Omnichannel personalization tailors the customer experience to an individual buyer's needs and preferences across all touchpoints in the customer journey. It enables brands to create personalized customer experiences and deliver them seamlessly across every channel.

With omnichannel personalization, businesses use a 360-degree view of their customers to create targeted, individualized experiences for each customer that persist throughout the entire customer journey.

Whether you start with omnichannel marketing or with personalization, combining the two is a natural progression that maximizes the benefits.

Omnichannel personalization maximizes the return on your personalization efforts

Applying an omnichannel strategy to personalization increases the benefits of personalization.

In a survey of ecommerce executives, 51% of respondents who said personalization was best across as many touchpoints as possible earned 300% ROI or more.

In contrast, those who said personalization was best only in shopping channels were 50% less likely to earn 3X ROI.

Other benefits of omnichannel personalization include:

Make personalization seamless across channels

People want a seamless experience as they move from websites to mobile apps to in-store purchases and customer service channels. For them, all those touchpoints are part of one continuous experience with your brand and should take place in the context of previous interactions.

One report found that 70% of customers expect anyone they interact with to have full context.

Omnichannel personalization meets those customer expectations by tailoring touchpoints to the individual while keeping each interaction connected to the rest of the experience. This reduces the distraction of irrelevant content and inconsistencies between channels, improving customer engagement.

Build customer loyalty and lower customer acquisition costs

By creating tailored experiences that meet customers' needs at every touchpoint, brands build loyalty, improve customer retention, and increase customer lifetime value. Consider these statistics:

  • Omnichannel retailers retain 91% more customers than single-channel stores.
  • Personalization leaders were 71% more likely to report improved customer loyalty.
  • Personalization marketing can reduce customer acquisition costs by as much as 50%.

How to get started with an effective omnichannel personalization strategy

To create an effective omnichannel personalization strategy, businesses must understand what channels their customers are using and how they want companies to meet their needs on each channel.

The following steps will help you develop an omnichannel personalization strategy:

1. Map the customer journey

Mapping the customer journey helps identify key touchpoints where you can introduce and test personalization to improve the customer experience.

Start by asking:

  • What channels is the customer using?
  • Where do they discover your brand?
  • How do they interact with your website, app, and other channels?
  • What are their needs and wants?
  • What are their pain points?
  • What triggers them to make a purchase?

As you map the customer journey, consider touchpoints where you can experiment with personalization. For example, you could personalize product offers for returning customers or offer a discount to people who abandon their cart. The goal is to meet the needs of each individual customer within the context of their customer journey.

2. Define your business goals

Journey mapping will reveal many opportunities for personalization. While it’s exciting to think big, it’s best to take an incremental approach. Defining business goals and how you will measure success will help you prioritize personalization experiments and adjust your strategy as you scale.

An omnichannel personalization strategy should include business objectives, target channels, key metrics, and measurement tools.

3. Rethink your data strategy

Customer data fuels personalization efforts, so it’s important to develop a unified customer data strategy that supports omnichannel personalization. There are a few key things to keep in mind when rethinking your data strategy for effective omnichannel personalization:

  • Aim for a single view of the customer. This means having a 360-degree view of the customer journey and being able to track interactions across all channels.

  • Invest in accurate, real-time data. Real-time data enables you to make decisions about which channels to use with each customer, prevents inconsistencies between channels, and enables businesses to provide a more coordinated and cohesive customer experience.

  • Work with your own data. Using your own zero-party and first-party data respects consumer privacy and enables you to be transparent with how you collect and use customer data. It also allows you to create a closed-loop marketing system, which gives you the ability to track and measure results so that you can optimize your efforts in real-time.

  • Clean and organize data for easy segmentation and analysis. Reliable customer data is critical to effective personalization.

  • Make data accessible. This means having a fast and reliable way to collect, access, and analyze customer behavior so you can personalize content in real-time.

  • Put the right tools and technologies in place. Omnichannel personalization requires tight integration between content, data, and personalization tools. Choosing AI-native tools will also help you scale faster once your strategy is in place.

  • Empower teams to constantly test and optimize your personalization strategy so you can continually improve.

4. Align personalization across channels with the right personalization tools

Every personalization strategy is unique because it's based on your specific business needs, goals, and capabilities, and it’s tailored to your customers. The type of personalization you use and the channels you prioritize may differ from that of your competitors and can change over time.

The right personalization tool and tech stack will be flexible enough to meet your unique needs and to change and scale as your personalization strategy evolves. We favor a composable approach that lets you integrate content, data, personalization, and all the channels you use.

See how KFC is serving up personalized experiences across channels with Contentful.

KFC Global quote

5. Start small, test often, and learn

Start small. It's more realistic to make omnichannel personalization a gradual process rather than an overnight success. Trying to personalize everything at once will be overwhelming, and you’ll lose the opportunity to learn as you go.

Instead, start with a few small tests and gradually expand your efforts as you learn what works and what doesn't. This means focusing on a few channels or touchpoints and gradually expanding your efforts. This way, you can perfect your personalization strategy on a smaller scale before expanding it.

It’s also important to keep testing. Every experiment is an opportunity to learn more about your customers, what they want, and how their needs might change. Continuously testing and analyzing your results will allow you to adjust your approach accordingly so you can keep delighting your customers and increasing your ROI.

Omnichannel personalization examples

Omnichannel personalization is an ambitious goal, and sometimes the hardest part is deciding where to start. Here are a few ideas to inspire you:

  • Add text messages, paid ads, or an app experience to your welcome series, win-back campaigns, or cross-selling opportunities.

  • Build on homepage personalization by using the same data to personalize product pages, emails, and ad retargeting.

  • Pilot a small omnichannel campaign around a single promotion, product, or brand. This is a great way to see the impact of omnichannel personalization and build momentum for larger campaigns.

Choose an omnichannel personalization platform that lets you start small and go big

Personalization is no longer a nice-to-have for businesses — it's a necessity. Regardless of what type of personalization strategy you start with, choosing a solution that can orchestrate content across your channels at scale will set up your personalization strategy for success — it's what your customers expect.

With Contentful, you can orchestrate content across channels, create personalized experiences at scale, and deliver them seamlessly to any digital channel.

See how Contentful can help you maximize the ROI on your personalization efforts with omnichannel personalization.

Up next: Ecommerce personalization

Learn how ecommerce personalization enhances shopping experiences. Discover its benefits and how to deliver tailored content to every customer.

Written by

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Esat Artug

Esat is Product Marketing Manager at Contentful and sharing his thoughts about personalization, digital experience, and composable across various channels.

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