Omnichannel Digital Strategy: Why Most Brands Get It Wrong

An omnichannel digital strategy connects every customer touchpoint, online and offline, so that each interaction builds on the last rather than starting from scratch. Done well, it means a customer who clicks an ad, browses your site, abandons a basket, and walks into a store is treated as one continuous relationship, not four separate events. Done poorly, which is most of the time, it is a slide deck with a Venn diagram and a lot of wishful thinking about data integration.

The gap between the concept and the execution is where most brands lose money and customers.

What Does Omnichannel Actually Mean in Practice?

The word gets used so loosely that it has almost lost its meaning. I have sat in agency pitches where “omnichannel” meant running ads on Facebook, Google, and occasionally sending an email. That is not omnichannel. That is just multi-channel with a more impressive name.

The distinction matters. Multi-channel means being present across several channels. Omnichannel means those channels share data, inform each other, and create a coherent experience regardless of where the customer is. The customer is the constant. The channel is just the interface.

In practical terms, that means your paid search campaign knows whether someone is already a customer. Your email programme knows whether someone has visited the site in the last 48 hours. Your in-store staff can see what a customer browsed online. Your retargeting suppresses people who have already converted. None of this is complicated in theory. All of it is hard to execute at scale without the right infrastructure.

For a broader look at how this connects to the full customer relationship, the Customer Experience hub covers the adjacent disciplines worth understanding alongside channel strategy.

Why Most Omnichannel Strategies Fail Before They Start

The failure mode I see most consistently is organisational, not technical. Brands structure their teams around channels, not around customers. The paid search team optimises for paid search metrics. The email team optimises for email metrics. The social team optimises for social metrics. Nobody is optimising for the customer’s experience of moving between all of them.

When I was running an agency and we grew from around 20 people to over 100, one of the hardest cultural shifts was getting channel specialists to think beyond their own discipline. A paid search manager who has spent years being measured on cost-per-click does not naturally think about what happens to the customer after the click. That is not a criticism of the person. It is a design flaw in how the function is structured and measured.

The second failure mode is data fragmentation. Most brands have customer data scattered across a CRM, an e-commerce platform, an email service provider, a paid media stack, and sometimes a loyalty programme that was built ten years ago and nobody fully understands. Getting those systems to talk to each other is unglamorous, expensive, and takes longer than anyone budgets for. So brands skip it and try to build the omnichannel experience on top of disconnected data. It does not work.

Semrush’s overview of omnichannel marketing covers the foundational mechanics well if you want a grounding in the channel architecture itself. What it cannot cover, because no external resource can, is the internal politics of getting your teams aligned around a shared customer view. That part you have to solve yourself.

The Data Layer Is the Strategy

I want to be direct about something that gets glossed over in most omnichannel content: the strategy is not the channel mix. The strategy is the data architecture that makes the channel mix coherent.

If you cannot answer these questions, you do not have an omnichannel strategy yet. You have a channel plan:

• Do you have a single customer identifier that persists across all channels?
• Can you suppress existing customers from acquisition campaigns in real time?
• Can you trigger a channel-specific communication based on behaviour in a different channel?
• Do you have a unified view of customer lifetime value that informs channel investment decisions?

Most brands can answer yes to one or two of those. Very few can answer yes to all four. The ones that can tend to significantly outperform their competitors on retention, not just acquisition.

Early in my career, I taught myself to code because the budget for a proper website did not exist. The lesson I took from that was not about coding. It was about understanding the infrastructure beneath the surface. The brands that win at omnichannel are the ones where senior marketers understand the data plumbing well enough to ask the right questions of their technical teams, even if they are not building it themselves.

Personalisation: Where the Promise Meets the Reality

Personalisation is the word that appears most often in omnichannel strategy documents, and the concept that is most frequently misunderstood in execution.

Real personalisation is contextual. It means showing a returning customer different content than a first-time visitor. It means adjusting the message based on where someone is in the purchase cycle. It means not sending a discount to someone who was already going to buy at full price. Mailchimp’s examples of omnichannel marketing in action illustrate some of the practical ways this plays out across different business types.

What passes for personalisation in most campaigns is cosmetic. A first name in an email subject line. A retargeting ad showing the exact product someone viewed three days ago, regardless of whether they already bought it. Dynamic content that changes a hero image based on a demographic segment. These things are not wrong, but they are not personalisation in any meaningful sense. They are the appearance of relevance.

The gap matters because customers notice the difference. They do not necessarily articulate it, but they feel it. There is a difference between a brand that seems to understand you and a brand that seems to be tracking you. The first builds trust. The second erodes it.

BCG’s research on what actually shapes customer experience makes a point worth sitting with: the factors customers value most in an experience are often not the ones brands invest most heavily in optimising. Brands optimise for what they can measure easily. Customers respond to what they feel consistently.

SMS, Email, and the Channels That Actually Retain Customers

There is a tendency in omnichannel strategy to focus on the newest or most visible channels: social commerce, connected TV, in-app experiences. These are worth understanding. They are rarely where retention is actually built.

Email and SMS remain the highest-ROI channels for most brands when used correctly, precisely because they are direct, owned, and not subject to algorithmic reach. The case for SMS as part of an omnichannel mix is stronger than most brands give it credit for, particularly for time-sensitive communications where open rates on email are unreliable.

The mistake I see consistently is treating email and SMS as broadcast channels rather than dialogue channels. A well-structured triggered email programme, based on actual customer behaviour rather than calendar-driven sends, will outperform a weekly newsletter almost every time. The logic is simple: a message triggered by something the customer just did is inherently more relevant than a message triggered by the fact that it is Tuesday.

When I was at lastminute.com, we ran a paid search campaign for a music festival and generated six figures of revenue within roughly a day. The campaign itself was not complicated. What made it work was the alignment between the message, the moment, and the audience. Someone searching for that festival at that moment was already in market. We just had to be there with the right offer. That principle, being relevant at the right moment, is the same one that makes triggered email and SMS so effective in an omnichannel context.

Search, Personalisation, and the Omnichannel Signal

Search behaviour is one of the most underused signals in omnichannel strategy. What someone searches for tells you a great deal about where they are in the purchase cycle, what problem they are trying to solve, and what language they use to describe it. Most brands collect this data passively through their analytics and do very little with it.

The relationship between search personalisation and customer experience is more complex than it first appears. The debate around search personalisation raises legitimate questions about whether personalised results serve the user or simply reinforce existing behaviour. For brands, the equivalent question is whether personalised experiences are genuinely serving the customer or just optimising for short-term conversion at the expense of long-term trust.

The brands that use search signals well tend to feed them back into their broader customer data picture. Someone who has been searching for a specific product category but has not yet converted is a different prospect than someone who has never shown interest. Treating them identically across other channels is a missed opportunity.

Video and the Experience Layer

Video sits in an interesting position in the omnichannel mix. It is primarily an awareness and engagement tool, but it can do real work at the consideration and retention stages when used thoughtfully. The role of video in customer experience is broader than most brands recognise, extending well beyond brand advertising into onboarding, support, and post-purchase communication.

Where I see video underperform in omnichannel strategies is when it is treated as a production exercise rather than a communication exercise. Brands invest in high-quality video assets and then distribute them indiscriminately across every channel without adapting the format, length, or message to the context. A 90-second brand film that works on YouTube does not work as a mid-scroll Instagram ad. The asset is not the strategy.

The smarter approach is to think about what role video plays at each stage of the customer relationship and build assets accordingly. Short, functional video for consideration and comparison. Longer, more emotional content for brand building. Practical, instructional video for onboarding and retention. Each serves a different purpose and should be measured differently.

How to Build an Omnichannel Strategy That Actually Works

I am going to resist the urge to give you a ten-step framework here, because the honest answer is that the right approach depends heavily on your current state: your data maturity, your team structure, your technology stack, and your customer base. What I can give you is the sequencing that I have seen work consistently.

Start with the customer, not the channel. Map the actual journeys your customers take, not the idealised ones in your strategy deck. Where do they first encounter you? What prompts them to buy? What brings them back? What causes them to leave? The answers to these questions should drive the channel decisions, not the other way around.

Fix the data before you add channels. Every new channel you add without a unified data layer makes the problem harder to solve later. The temptation to launch on TikTok or test connected TV before you have sorted out your customer identity resolution is understandable but counterproductive. Do the unglamorous work first.

Measure the customer, not the channel. If your measurement framework only captures channel-level metrics, you will optimise channels in isolation and miss what is happening at the customer level. Lifetime value, retention rate, and cross-channel attribution are harder to measure than click-through rate, but they are the metrics that tell you whether the strategy is working. The Customer Experience hub has more on the measurement frameworks that connect channel activity to business outcomes.

Build fewer channels better. The brands that execute omnichannel well are rarely the ones with the most channels. They are the ones with the tightest integration between a smaller set of channels. Coverage is not the same as coherence.

Align incentives across teams. If your paid search team is measured on cost-per-acquisition and your email team is measured on open rate, neither of them has an incentive to think about what happens when a customer moves between channels. Shared metrics, even imperfect ones, create shared accountability.

The Commercial Case for Getting This Right

I have managed hundreds of millions in ad spend across more than 30 industries. The pattern I see most clearly when I look back across that work is this: brands that invest in the connective tissue between channels consistently outperform brands that invest in individual channel optimisation. Not dramatically, not overnight, but sustainably.

The reason is straightforward. Acquisition costs money. Retention generates it. A customer who has a coherent, consistent experience across every touchpoint is more likely to come back, more likely to spend more, and more likely to refer others. The omnichannel infrastructure that makes that experience possible is not a marketing cost. It is a commercial investment with a measurable return.

The brands that treat omnichannel as a technology project or a channel expansion project tend to underdeliver. The ones that treat it as a customer relationship project, and build the technology and channel mix to serve that relationship, tend to get somewhere worth going.

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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