For years, it was ecommerce has been trending upwards. But it has seen a surge with the advent of the coronavirus pandemic and all the measures to keep people safe around the globe.
The surge in ecommmerce is evident: As people are staying at home due to the lockdown, they can’t spend their money on holidays, nightlife, dinner, cinema, and so on. So, the people spend less in other parts of their life and are more online with more money. Which almost automatically leads to the conclusion that they’re shopping more online.
For anyone selling online – this is great. It doesn’t matter if you’re selling products or services. You’d want to surf the wave. So, you’re looking to improve all parts of your business, especially digital marketing.
You’d want to connect with your customers across every single touchpoint. You’d also want to identify their preferences, interests so that you can create an engaging customer journey that is tailored to them. The more you reach out to your customers and the more personalised the message is, the more likely it is that you can build a relationship. This again opens up future opportunities.
Queue in marketing automation. Providers like Omnisend simplify the art of connecting with your customers and building a relationship. Omnisend is an all-in-one marketing automation provider with 5 channels to reach your customers through the convenience of a single dashboard.
So far, Omnisend sounds like any other marketing automation provider. It stands out from the crowd in that it focuses on helping ecommerce businesses grow. It gives you tools so that you can send customised communications based on user behaviour analysis. You can send promo codes and personalised product recommendations, birthday discounts, and other features that drive up conversion rates.
Back in 2014, Omnisend launched in Lithuania under the name Soundest. It started as an email marketing service provider. Since then it has added features so that it can now offer a multichannel approach that includes social media and SMS.
Pros and cons of Omnisend
Omnisend focuses solely on helping ecommerce businesses with their marketing automation. It allows you to communicate with your audience via email, SMS, push notifications, and social media. It also provides you with built-in templates you can customise to send personalised emails.
It also comes with different types of lead generation forms and tons of integrations to improve functionality as well as reporting so that you can improve your campaigns.
It’s a hosted solution, so you don’t have to worry about the techy stuff like security or updates.
Pros
- Support team available 24/7 on the paid plans
- Easy to use interface
- Free forever plan includes all features though you can only reach 250 contacts
- Sales tracking
Cons
- You can’t do much before you’ve connected Omnisend to your online store
- Email template gallery is quite small
- It seems a quite high jump from the Standard to the Pro plan
Who is Omnisend for?
You can see how Omnisend focuses on ecommerce since it’s one of the most popular integrations on the Shopify app store. Despite that, you can use Omnisend no matter if you’re an online retailer with tangible goods or if you’re selling digital goods and services. It caters to ecommerce businesses of all sizes, from solopreneurs to multinational companies.
Omnisend user interface
Omnisend asks you a few questions such as what platform you’re using for your online store or what marketing automation tool you’re already using. Hence signing up takes a few minutes.
The user interface is well-thought-out and modern. It presents information in an intuitive way with the tasks organised in the tabs in the top menu. It’s easy to get around, toggle between the tabs, and get the job at hand done quickly.
Omnisend is pretty easy to use. But you can’t get anything done before you’ve connected Omnisend to your store.
Campaigns
The core of Omnisend’s service is its email marketing. The way your emails look can say a lot about your company. Of course, you want your emails to have the branding of your company. Creating an email doesn’t need prior skills, just a bit of dexterity to drag and drop.
To personalise the content, you can add dynamic discount codes, scratch cards, product recommendations, and the fantastic product picker.
You can find a range of email templates, combined with the drag-and-drop editor, it’s a piece of cake to create professional-looking emails.
Omnisend guides you through the process of setting up an email campaign. In just 5 steps you’ve created and sent the campaign.
With Omnisend, you can launch marketing campaigns across different channels, including SMS, email, and social media. You can manage them all within one interface.
Sign up forms and landing pages
It’s convenient that Omnisend also gives you tools for lead generation. You can create different types of forms
- Popups
- Embedded
- Signup bar
- Landing page
- Wheel of fortune
- Promotion
Just like with the emails, Omnisend has a template gallery for the forms. You can find forms designed to collect subscribers, stop product abandonment, or promote special offers.
Customising the forms is easy with the form editor. The forms are GDPR compliant.
List management, segmentation, and personalisation
In order for you to create engaging campaigns that are personalised, you need to segment your list into subdivisions. You can base these segments on demographics, but also on the reader’s behaviour or purchasing habits.
Practical is that you can set up an automation to tag a contact when they did a specific action just as entering a discount code or viewing a specific product.
Automation
Once you’ve got your lead generation forms in place, you want to set up your automation workflows to build a relationship with your audience. Automation goes hand in hand with segmentation and analytics. It will allow you to reach your audience with the right message at the right time.
You can automate your email and SMS messages and even include push notifications in Omnisend. It comes with a range of pre-built workflows. You can use the pre-built workflows just like an email template to speed up the process. With the help of the workflow drag-and-drop editor, you can customise them.
Of course, you can also build your custom workflow from scratch to create your specific customer journey.
Omnisend integrations
Since Omnisend concentrates on ecommerce businesses, it tightly integrates with popular ecommerce platforms such as Bigcommerce or Woocommerce.
It also provides integrations to other third-party services. These can be grouped into
- Signups and forms such as Recart and Pagefly
- Rewards, competition, reviews, wishlists such as Yotpo, Loox, and Smile
- Communication such as Gorgias
- Shipping such as ShipStation and AfterShip
To do more with your data, you can also integrate with Zapier.
Omnisend reporting
In digital marketing, without analytics and reporting, you’re flying blind. Omnisend knows this and gives you different options to make better-informed decisions and optimise your campaigns. This includes tools for split-testing as well as a lifecycle map.
Support
You can contact Omnisend via email and chat 24/7 on the paid plans. The support team is friendly and helpful. If you’re on the free plan, you get email support.
Pricing
Omnisend bases its prices on the number of subscribers you have. It’s a boon that you can try out every feature on all plans, including the free one and you don’t need a credit card at signup. The paid plans include 24/7 live support.
Is Omnisend right for you?
Omnisend is a very interesting option for any digital merchant. This can be anyone who sells products and services. It provides you with tools to reach out to your audience across multiple channels, including
- Workflows for abandoned carts
- Transactional emails
- Customer reactivation
- Cross-selling
- Forms to generate leads
If you don’t run an online store, Omnisend may be overkill. You might be happier with an email marketing tool that also works when not connected to an online store such as MailerLite or Sendinblue.
Original post here: Omnisend review – multichannel marketing automation
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