How to Build an Omnichannel Marketing Strategy

Your customers rarely meet your brand in one place. They see an ad, read a review, visit the website, talk to a salesperson or walk into a store, open an email, and come back weeks later on a different device. Inside the company, each of those channels usually has its own team, its own budget and its own report. The customer sees the gaps: the same offer twice, a message that ignores what they already did, a store that cannot see the online order.

An omnichannel marketing strategy is the plan that makes those channels work as one journey. This guide explains what that means in practice, what the evidence for it shows, and how to build one in eight steps, with a worked example for a retail brand and a B2B company. It ends with how to measure the result and a one-page plan you can copy.

DisclosureJake Jorgovan is a partner in Fieldtrip, a group of marketing agencies, which is mentioned in this article.

What omnichannel marketing means

Omnichannel marketing organizes your channels around the customer's journey. Each channel knows what the customer has already done in the others, the offer and message stay consistent, and the customer can move from one channel to the next without starting again.

Multichannel marketing uses several channels too, but each runs on its own plan and its own data. The difference is integration. You can be on a dozen channels and still be multichannel; you can be on three and be omnichannel.

So omnichannel does not mean being everywhere. It means connecting the channels you use, so they behave like one company to the customer.

What the evidence shows

Several omnichannel figures that circulate widely, including the share of shoppers who use more than one channel, trace back to one study published in Harvard Business Review in January 2017 (opens in a new tab). Its authors studied just over 46,000 customers of one large US retailer who made a purchase between June 2015 and August 2016.

• 73% of those customers used more than one channel; 7% shopped only online and 20% only in stores.
• Customers who used several channels spent on average 4% more per store visit and 10% more online than single-channel customers.
• Those who used four or more channels spent 9% more in the store than those who used one.
• Within six months, the omnichannel customers made 23% more repeat trips to the retailer's stores.

The authors add a caveat worth keeping: these are correlations, and the study cannot say whether the omnichannel experience made customers spend and return more, or whether customers who were already loyal and engaged were the ones using more channels. They still conclude that the findings support an omnichannel strategy for retailers with physical stores.

That shapes how to use it. The study supports serving well the customers who already move between your channels. It does not promise that adding channels will raise spending, and it says nothing about B2B buying. Treat your own customer data as the real test.

Start with proven channels, then test the hand-offs

The risk I'd watch for in an omnichannel plan is launching every channel at once: each one gets done halfway, and no one can tell which is working.

I spent a long time jumping from one tactic to the next before I learned this. In a 2021 episode on how to think about marketing, I put it like this: "most companies that are successful have one or two marketing channels that work really, really well for them." The method I described there, which I first learned from Russ Perry and from Alex McClafferty, an adviser I worked with years earlier, is to test two or three channels at a time for about a quarter, build a system around the one that works and scale it, and keep testing the next without neglecting the channels already working.

For an omnichannel program, I'd apply the same discipline. Start with the channels that already show useful results, then test whether connecting them improves the journey. Judge each channel by its role: an event may introduce the buyer, while email and sales follow-up turn that interest into a meeting. Before adding budget, check whether a weak result comes from the channel itself or from a broken hand-off.

The message and the audience come first. In a 2018 post on why marketing fails, I described the Three M's, a framework Dan McDade of PointClear taught me: the message (what you say), the market (who you say it to) and the medium (how you reach them). Channels are only the third M. If the value proposition doesn't land with the right buyer, no amount of channel integration will fix it.

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The approach described in this article, shown as a visual guide.

How to build an omnichannel strategy in eight steps

1. 1

   Start with the customer and the data you already have

   Pick the customer segments that matter most to revenue. For each, gather what you know: how they find you, which channels they use, what they buy and why. Most of this sits in your CRM, analytics, sales notes and customer research. Where the same customer appears in several systems, decide how records will be matched into one profile.

2. 2

   Map the journey and find where it breaks

   List every touchpoint from first contact to repeat purchase or renewal, and who owns each one. Then look for the breaks: a hand-off nobody owns, a message that repeats, a step where people drop out. Checkout is one well-measured example: Baymard Institute's average of 50 studies (opens in a new tab), last updated in September 2025, puts the share of online shopping carts abandoned at 70.22%. Not every abandoned cart is lost to friction, but each break you find is a place to look.

3. 3

   Set one objective and the measures that show it

   Choose one business outcome for the program, such as repeat purchase, pipeline or retention, with a number and a date. Then choose a measure for each stage of the journey that shows whether you are on track. Agree on these before anyone builds campaigns, so each team works toward the same result.

4. 4

   Fix the message and the audience before adding channels

   Check the value proposition and the target buyer against real responses before you spread them across channels (the Three M's above). A consistent message only helps if it is the right one.

5. 5

   Connect the channels that already work

   Start with two or three channels your customers already use, drawing on the results you have. Agree what each channel does in the journey, keep the offer consistent across them, and design the hand-offs: what someone did in one channel should change what they see in the next. Then test new channels two or three at a time against that base, giving each about a quarter.

6. 6

   Personalize where it helps the customer

   Use what customers have told you and done with you to make the next interaction more relevant: a reminder about an item they chose, content for their industry, no promotion for a product they already bought. Follow the consent and privacy rules that apply to your markets, and stop where personalization would feel intrusive.

7. 7

   Choose tools that fit the journey

   Pick technology after the journey is designed. Most programs need a CRM as the customer record, analytics, a way to send messages across channels and, at larger scale, a customer data platform to join records. Ask of each tool what customer data it needs and which hand-off it improves.

8. 8

   Name journey owners and share one report

   Name one owner for each journey and each hand-off, and give the teams involved the same report on the same outcome. Review it on a fixed schedule, move budget toward what works, and retire what doesn't.

A worked example: a retail brand and a B2B company

The table follows two hypothetical companies through the eight steps: Surge, a sportswear brand competing with much larger rivals, and a B2B software company. Seeing them side by side shows how the same steps play out when a business sells to many consumers or to a few large accounts.

In these examples, the retailer has many more purchases to analyze, while the B2B company has far fewer closed deals. Both should combine attribution with CRM outcomes, controlled tests and buyer feedback, and the B2B company will lean on the last three.

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The article’s hypothetical sportswear journey: the selected item and size carry into pickup, and later offers exclude products already purchased.

How to measure an omnichannel journey

Last-click reporting hides the start of a journey. Google's documentation notes that all credit for a conversion is typically given to the last ad the customer clicked, so the earlier touches that brought them in get none in that view. In Google Analytics, all attribution models exclude direct visits (opens in a new tab) from credit unless the whole path was direct.

Data-driven attribution, which shares credit across touchpoints, helps, and it works better with volume. For its own ads, Google recommends at least 200 conversions and 2,000 ad interactions (opens in a new tab) in supported networks within 30 days so the model can assign credit more precisely; it still runs with less data. A high-volume retailer may meet that. A company that closes a few dozen large deals a year cannot, at least not on the deals themselves, so its model would be working from much thinner data.

I made a related point about B2B in a 2024 Leaders of B2B interview (opens in a new tab): many B2B companies close a small number of large deals, and a few interactions nobody can track can move a half-million-dollar decision, so "there's intuition plus data as a guiding light, but it can't be the full piece there."

So plan measurement before launch, and use more than one view:

• Attribution in your analytics and ad platforms, for the share of credit each digital channel earns.
• Your CRM, for the outcome itself: repeat customers, pipeline and revenue by source and segment.
• Tests with a control: hold back a channel or an offer from part of the audience and compare.
• What customers and sales teams report about how buyers actually found you.

A one-page omnichannel plan

Fill this in for one customer segment before the first campaign. Copy it into a document, and keep it to one page.

When to bring in outside help

Most of this work is internal: it depends on your data, your teams and decisions only you can make. Outside help is worth it when the gaps between channels are the problem: when creative, media and measurement sit with different teams or agencies that each report their own numbers, or when no one can say which channels contribute to the outcome. If you are comparing agencies for the execution, this comparison of growth marketing agencies is a place to start.

Which of your channels would you keep if you could only fund two next quarter, and do you have the data to prove it?