Omnichannel Customer Journeys: Challenges, Strategies, and Examples

Omnichannel customer journey mapping helps businesses visualize and link all customer touchpoints together, be it online or offline, as well as identify gaps that need to be bridged. When done right, brands can use it to improve channel selection, deliver seamless experiences, and optimize every customer interaction with the brand.

Despite the numerous benefits of omnichannel customer journey mapping, it has increasingly become challenging to execute since customers have started connecting with brands via a myriad of touchpoints.

To that end, we discuss common challenges for marketers in the early stages of omnichannel customer journey mapping, best practices for building an omnichannel customer journey map, and provide real-life examples of success from brands who have applied mapping to their overall omnichannel strategy.

Challenges of Omnichannel Customer Journey Mapping

Visualizing omnichannel customer journeys by clearly mapping them allows brands to determine which channels customers typically rely on, what product information they are curious about, and their most likely actions at any particular stage in the purchase process. This overview of the journey ensures that brands can identify gaps that could be causing dissatisfaction and negatively impacting conversions. 

Companies can use this refined knowledge of customer pain points to create a more seamless experience across their customer’s preferred channels and increase satisfaction and loyalty. We believe the overhaul is more than worth it for modern marketers, though this process is not without its challenges:

• Dependency on multiple-point solutions: Many brands have multiple-point solutions in their Martech stack to handle different aspects of the customer journey. However, having different tools, such as for email marketing, push notifications, and analytics, results in a disjointed Martech ecosystem. This makes it difficult for brands to unify different touchpoints, automate the customer journey mapping process, and make updates in real time. This ultimately translates into a poor customer experience. 
• Over-reliance on legacy tools and systems: Many brands depend on slow, legacy tools that aren’t as efficient as modern customer engagement platforms (CEPs). These legacy systems are bulky, lack modern features and automation, have fragmented UI, slow and static capabilities, and limited integration options. When marketers are dependent on such outdated technology to map and build customer journeys, they have to do a lot of manual work, which increases chances of errors and leads to inefficiencies.
• Addressing data silos: Without data integration, it can be difficult to understand how each channel or campaign is performing in relation to one another or make predictions for key events, as it’s harder to get accurate, real-time, and actionable insights. In fact, 43.6% of marketers have said this inability to identify gaps in the customer journey is one of their top blind spots when executing customer engagement. 
• Aligning with the goals of all stakeholders: Getting buy-in from different stakeholders is a delicate process. Different departments and teams have different priorities and objectives and approach the situation from their own unique lens. Along with this, marketers often have to deal with communication silos across the organization. Due to these factors, it can be challenging to make sure that all stakeholders are on the same page and working towards the same goals. Eliminating communication silos and fostering productive collaboration is imperative for the success of your omnichannel journeys.

But don’t let these challenges deter you. Despite the difficulty, it’s still possible to make sure that your journeys lead customers where they want to go, as opposed to leading them nowhere. Below we’ve outlined various best practices to help you in your omnichannel customer journey mapping journey.

Best Practices for Building an Omnichannel Customer Journey Map

As reported in our State of Cross-Channel Marketing 2024, B2C marketers are making use of at least five channels to execute their customer engagement strategies. For brands to meet consumer demands, they need to build seamless omnichannel customer journeys that are familiar across all channels, whether that channel is online or offline.

Below, we explore the best practices for creating and executing an omnichannel customer journey map that accurately reflects how your customers interact with your brand, service, and products.

1. Start with — and maintain — a customer-centric approach

When building a customer journey map, it’s imperative that you think critically about how customers engage with your brand in real life. If your customer journey map is a fairy-tale version of engagement, it will fail to work in practice.

Think critically about how customers will actually interact with your service or products, and build your customer journey maps to reflect this reality. What channels will they be able to find your brand on? What will their thought process be? What will their challenges and pain points be? What channels will they continue their engagement with your brand on? This will give you some direction on how to map the customer journey. 

2. Eliminate data silos to unify campaigns across channels

Data is often siloed for ease of access for specific departments– especially when companies are operating at scale. However, for omnichannel experiences to be seamless, various departments and stakeholders need to work in tandem to create a unified experience.

One of the early recommendations for customer journey mapping development is working closely with multiple teams that contribute to and observe the customer experience. When data is no longer siloed, these teams can work better together to reveal customer pain points. For this reason, it’s imperative that brands eliminate data silos and ensure teams are using omnichannel analytics to inform their decision-making.

When teams develop their customer journey maps based on comprehensive, unified data, they build more intuitive maps that more accurately reflect the true pathways of customers, especially when these paths are non-linear and omnichannel.

3. Use robust segmentation data for developing buyer personas

Customer journeys need to guide customers towards the action you want them to take. To do this effectively, the maps you make need to suit the customer segment you’re trying to reach.

For this reason, customer segmentation is essential for building customer journeys that meet the needs and expectations of different buyer personas. By leveraging robust customer segmentation that enables you to dive deep into your buyer personas, you can better understand what motivates and drives them — and you can better meet their needs.

4. Add marketing automation to save your team time and resources

Executing all the elements of a customer journey is no easy task, it requires a lot of pieces to fall into place.

Make sure you consider where (and how) you can automate elements of the omnichannel customer journey. This will help you plan how to integrate marketing automation that helps you maximize engagement at scale, even for enterprise-level companies. 

5. Invest in a customer engagement platform (CEP)

Modern brands can no longer rely on legacy systems or multiple-point solutions that lead to data and communication siloes. Instead, they need to update their Martech stack and opt for an all-in-one customer engagement platform.

When done right, this will allow brands to unify all their customer, campaign, and journey insights in a single place. 

Having consolidated data makes it much easier to accurately segment customers on a deep level, and makes it possible to conduct rigorous A/B testing that helps to test different omnichannel journeys in real time and optimize for the most impactful pathways to increase traction and engagement.

6. Ensure transparency with all stakeholders

Building the most engaging customer journeys you can muster will require input from all stakeholders, as they each have unique insights into how customers engage with your product, service, and overall brand.

Have regular and open communication and collaboration between teams and departments, and make sure that each stakeholder is transparent about their goals and objectives early on. Get buy-in from all stakeholders and align your objectives early to make sure everyone is working towards the same goal. Avoid communication silos between teams, document your processes so they can be replicated, and foster an atmosphere of collaboration and cooperation.

Now that you know the best practices to follow, you’re ready to build intuitive, engaging omnichannel customer journeys that your customers will love. Learn how you can do this by reading our step-by-step customer journey mapping guide.

Real-Life Examples of Successful Omnichannel Customer Journeys

While the goal of omnichannel customer journey mapping remains the same for all brands, how to go about it can be drastically different for different companies, depending on their industry or audience.

To help you understand omnichannel customer journey orchestration in practice, we look at real-life brands that have executed them effectively to drive engagement.

1. Publishers Clearing House creates personalized customer journeys, based on customer segmentation

Publishers Clearing House (PCH) is a digital entertainment site with a wide portfolio of gaming apps that are free-to-play with chance-to-win opportunities. They partnered with MoEngage to boost retention rates and entice new users in anticipation of their Superprize Contest. 

Through A/B testing on segmented customers, PCH was able to analyze and identify the customer journey paths that led to the highest customer engagement. This gave them a fresh opportunity to divert customers on that path as well as re-engage the customers who had already gone dormant in the past.

By enabling MoEngage Predictions, they increased daily active users (DAU) by 23% and reactivated over 30,000 dormant/inactive PCH+ app users: averaging an overall 3.93% conversion rate.

Applying predictions to their mapped journeys ensured that they were accurate and relevant to the improvements that PCH aimed to achieve, driving active engagement with their audience.

2. 1Weather sends personalized and hyper-local alerts in real-time

1Weather is a mobile weather app that provides real-time local weather forecasts and predictions. With 8+ million active users , they were struggling to deeply understand customer behavior and, in turn, to deliver personalized, location-based alerts in real-time that keep them engaged.

1Weather leveraged MoEngage to understand the behavior of different customers on the app and segment them on the basis of their location and active/inactive status. Then using MoEngage’s Push Notifications and Dynamic Product Messaging capabilities, 1Weather dynamically mapped personalized customer communication campaigns to different segments and individuals. This helped them send the right weather notifications to the right customers at the right moment, and with the right messaging.

Overall, through this 1Weather was able to achieve:

• 25 million incremental app opens
• 3X increase in mobile app engagement
• 10% increase in CTRs on push notifications
• 15% higher session duration

3.  Poshmark nudges users towards the path of conversion

Poshmark is a community-driven fashion resale marketplace that leads in its niche. They have a bi-directional business model as they serve both buyers and sellers, known as ‘Poshers.’ The key objectives of the marketing team at Poshmark are getting “buyers in the door” and converting listers into sellers. 

Poshmark switched to MoEngage to manage the complex relationships with its diverse customers. This helped them personalize communication as per the unique messaging needs, while also mapping and executing different customer journeys for each of their consumers. 

Customer journey mapping allowed them to identify common journey points where their customers were stalling and reach them at those exact moments. Poshmark also implemented Flow Versioning to guide “Listers” to become “Sellers,” by providing helpful suggestions at relevant points in the customer journey and nudging them towards conversions. With this strategy, Poshmark was able to achieve:

• Up to 60% email open rates
• Over 30% lift in the conversion of listings to sales 

Orchestrate Omnichannel Customer Journeys Effectively With MoEngage

Consumers no longer connect with brands via a single channel, they engage using a variety of touchpoints depending on what’s most convenient and accessible for them in that particular moment. As modern customer journeys become more and more complex, the seamlessness of an omnichannel strategy ensures a fulfilling customer experience from the top to the bottom of the funnel, no matter what ways the market may evolve.

By mapping and orchestrating omnichannel customer journeys for your customers, you ensure they are able to connect with you however they want, increasing their convenience, satisfaction, and overall engagement. 

Schedule a demo today to learn how MoEngage can help you map seamless omnichannel customer journeys that your customers will love!