Omnichannel Approach: Why Most Brands Get It Backwards

An omnichannel approach means delivering a consistent, connected customer experience across every channel a customer uses, whether that’s search, email, social, in-store, or support. The goal is not to be everywhere at once. The goal is to make sure that wherever a customer encounters your brand, the experience doesn’t contradict what they found somewhere else.

Most brands treat omnichannel as a distribution problem. Get the message onto more channels, coordinate the timing, call it done. That framing misses the point entirely, and it’s why so many omnichannel programmes produce activity without producing results.

I spent several years running agencies that handled omnichannel briefs for large retail and financial services clients. The briefs were almost always framed the same way: “We want to be present across all the channels our customers use.” Reasonable enough. But when you dug into the actual customer experience, you’d find a loyalty programme that didn’t talk to the email platform, a paid search strategy that sent people to landing pages with no connection to the in-store promotion running that week, and a customer service team operating on a completely different system to the one capturing purchase data. The channels were technically present. The experience was a mess.

If you’re thinking about how omnichannel fits into a broader customer experience strategy, the Customer Experience hub covers the full picture, from measuring CX in ways marketing can actually use, to the structural reasons most brands struggle to align the two functions.

What Does an Omnichannel Approach Actually Mean?

The term gets used interchangeably with multichannel, and that confusion does real damage. Multichannel means being present on multiple channels. Omnichannel means those channels are integrated, so the customer’s experience carries forward from one to the next. The distinction matters because multichannel is relatively easy to execute and produces limited competitive advantage. Omnichannel is structurally harder and, when done well, produces something that’s genuinely difficult to replicate.

A customer who browses a product on mobile, abandons the session, receives a relevant email the following day, clicks through to a desktop site that remembers their preferences, and completes the purchase without having to start again from scratch, that’s omnichannel working. A customer who does the same browsing, receives a generic promotional email, clicks through to a homepage with no connection to what they were looking at, and has to rebuild their cart from memory, that’s multichannel with omnichannel branding applied to it.

According to Semrush’s breakdown of omnichannel marketing, the core principle is continuity: the customer’s context travels with them across channels rather than resetting at each touchpoint. That sounds simple. The execution is not.

Where Most Omnichannel Programmes Break Down

The failure point is almost never the channel strategy. It’s the data infrastructure underneath it. You cannot deliver a connected experience if your customer data lives in disconnected systems. And in most organisations I’ve worked with, it does.

I once worked with a large insurance client that had invested heavily in a new CRM. The brief was to use it to drive omnichannel renewal campaigns. When we audited the data, we found that the CRM held policy data but had no visibility into the customer’s service history. The call centre ran on a separate system. The email platform pulled from a third. The result was that customers who had recently complained about a claims process were receiving renewal emails that led with satisfaction messaging. Not only was the campaign ineffective, it was actively damaging trust at the worst possible moment in the customer relationship.

This is the thing about omnichannel that the vendor decks never quite capture: it exposes the gaps in your customer understanding at scale. A single-channel campaign can paper over those gaps. An omnichannel programme amplifies them.

Mailchimp’s overview of omnichannel customer engagement makes a useful point here: the channels themselves are not the strategy. They’re the delivery mechanism. The strategy is how you use customer data to make each interaction more relevant than the last. Without that data layer working properly, you’re just running parallel campaigns with a shared colour palette.

The Personalisation Problem at Scale

Personalisation is where omnichannel ambitions tend to collide with operational reality. The goal is to make each customer interaction feel relevant to that specific customer’s context. The challenge is doing that across thousands or millions of customers, across channels that each have different data latency, different content formats, and different technical constraints.

There’s a version of personalisation that’s genuinely useful: knowing that a customer recently purchased a product and not sending them an acquisition offer for that same product the following week. Knowing that a customer has contacted support three times in the last month and adjusting the tone of your outreach accordingly. These are not technically complex. They require data discipline and someone in the organisation whose job it is to make sure the signals are being used.

Then there’s the version of personalisation that brands pursue because the technology makes it possible, not because it serves the customer. Dynamic content that changes seventeen variables based on browsing behaviour, producing emails that feel uncanny rather than relevant. Retargeting that follows a customer across every surface they visit for two weeks after a single product view, creating the impression of surveillance rather than service. The technology capability has outrun the judgement about when to use it.

When I was judging the Effie Awards, the omnichannel entries that impressed me most weren’t the ones with the most sophisticated personalisation engines. They were the ones where you could see a clear line between a customer insight and a specific decision about how to use data. The complexity was in service of something. The others were complexity for its own sake, and the results reflected that.

Search personalisation is another dimension worth understanding here. Search Engine Journal’s analysis of search personalisation outlines how personalised results can create filter effects that alter what customers see before they even reach your channels. That’s a factor worth building into any omnichannel model that relies heavily on organic search as an entry point.

Why the Internal Structure Determines the External Experience

The brands that execute omnichannel well tend to share one structural characteristic: the teams responsible for different channels are not operating in complete isolation from each other. That sounds obvious. It’s surprisingly rare.

When I grew the agency from around 20 people to over 100, one of the persistent tensions was between channel specialists who each believed their channel was the primary driver of performance, and the clients who wanted a coherent story about how everything worked together. The paid search team had their metrics. The email team had theirs. The social team had theirs. Each set of numbers looked reasonable in isolation. When you tried to build a customer-level view of what was actually happening, the picture was much less clean, and the attribution assumptions each team was relying on were often contradicting each other.

The same dynamic plays out inside brand-side marketing teams. When the email programme reports to one director, the paid media programme reports to another, and the CX function reports to a third, the omnichannel strategy exists in a deck but not in practice. Each team optimises for its own KPIs. Nobody owns the customer’s experience of moving between those teams’ outputs.

Optimizely’s omnichannel marketing trends research points to organisational structure as one of the primary barriers to omnichannel execution. The technology is largely available. The willingness to reorganise around the customer rather than around channel ownership is much less common.

Measurement That Reflects Reality

Measuring omnichannel effectiveness is genuinely difficult, and I’d rather say that plainly than pretend there’s a clean framework that solves it. The core problem is that most attribution models were designed for a world where channels operated independently. Applying last-click attribution to an omnichannel programme is like judging a relay race by only timing the final leg.

What you’re trying to understand is not how each channel performs in isolation, but how the combination of touchpoints influences customer behaviour over time. That requires customer-level data, not channel-level data. It requires being willing to accept that some of the value created by your omnichannel programme will not show up in any individual channel’s reporting. And it requires being honest with stakeholders about the limits of what the data can tell you.

The practical starting point is cohort analysis: look at customers who experienced a joined-up sequence of touchpoints versus those who didn’t, and compare their outcomes over a meaningful time horizon. Retention rate, lifetime value, support contact rate, net promoter score. These are customer-level metrics that reflect the actual quality of the experience, rather than channel-level metrics that reflect how efficiently you’re spending budget within a given platform.

HubSpot’s customer service benchmarks include data on how customers respond to inconsistent experiences across channels. The pattern is consistent: customers who encounter friction at the transitions between channels are significantly more likely to defect, and significantly less likely to recommend. The cost of a poor handoff is not just the immediate interaction. It’s the downstream customer relationship.

What Good Omnichannel Execution Actually Looks Like

The best omnichannel programmes I’ve seen share a few characteristics that don’t get much attention in the standard vendor playbooks.

First, they start with the customer’s actual behaviour rather than the brand’s preferred channel mix. There’s a tendency to build omnichannel strategies around the channels the marketing team is already invested in, rather than the channels customers are actually using at different stages of their relationship with the brand. The starting point should be a clear map of where customers are going, what they’re trying to do, and where the current experience is failing them. Not a channel inventory.

Second, they treat consistency as a floor, not a ceiling. Consistency means the customer doesn’t encounter contradictory information, pricing, or tone across channels. That’s the minimum. The better programmes use the channel transitions as opportunities to add value, to give the customer something useful at each step rather than just not making things worse.

Third, they have a clear owner for the customer experience across channels. Not a committee. Not a shared responsibility that ends up being nobody’s responsibility. One person or one team whose job it is to look at the customer’s experience as a whole and identify where it’s breaking down. In the agencies I ran, the clients who got the most from their omnichannel investment were almost always the ones who had someone in that role internally, someone who could push back on channel teams when their individual optimisations were creating friction elsewhere in the experience.

Mailchimp’s omnichannel marketing solutions framework emphasises this point around unified customer profiles: the ability to see a single customer’s history across all channels is the technical foundation, but it requires someone to actually use that view to make decisions.

The Uncomfortable Truth About Omnichannel Investment

There’s a version of the omnichannel conversation that’s really a conversation about marketing spend. More channels, more touchpoints, more budget. The technology vendors have a strong interest in that framing. So do agencies, frankly.

But I’ve always believed, and seen enough evidence to feel confident saying, that if a company genuinely delighted customers at every interaction, a lot of the marketing spend needed to acquire and retain customers would be lower. The omnichannel programmes that require the most investment are often the ones compensating for an underlying experience that isn’t good enough. You’re spending on retargeting because the first visit didn’t convert. You’re spending on win-back campaigns because the retention experience failed. You’re spending on brand campaigns because the product experience isn’t generating word of mouth on its own.

That’s not an argument against omnichannel investment. It’s an argument for being honest about what you’re trying to solve. If the goal is to fix a leaky retention funnel, the omnichannel programme needs to be built around the moments where customers are currently leaving, not around adding more channels to the top of the funnel. The investment case looks very different depending on which problem you’re actually solving.

Understanding how omnichannel fits into the broader architecture of customer experience is worth spending time on. The Customer Experience hub covers the structural questions that tend to determine whether omnichannel programmes produce real outcomes or just more activity.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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