What Is the Difference Between Omnichannel and Multichannel Marketing?

Omnichannel marketing and multichannel marketing may sound similar, but they refer to wholly distinct strategies. Omnichannel marketing means that you are delivering seamless, integrated experiences across every medium of customer engagement. Whether a customer visits your website, opens your mobile app, or visits a physical store, they receive consistent branding, messaging, products, and so forth. Essentially, they always know it’s your business.

Multichannel marketing, on other hand, simply refers to the use of multiple direct and indirect channels to engage with customers. It does not by definition imply the delivery of a consistent experience across those channels. This means that multichannel marketing is often a more siloed approach. With this strategy, you’re creating distinct experiences, with distinct goals, across these different touchpoints. While multichannel marketing offers consumers multiple ways to engage with a business—from web to physical stores to mail-order catalogs to third-party sellers—it does not necessarily ensure a unified, consistent customer experience.

Shoppers increasingly expect consistent experiences across different devices types, digital and physical stores, social media, and more. Modern consumers want personalized experiences that “travel” with them as they move across these different channels. They might try out a product in a store, then look it up on a website, while also checking it out on Instagram or Pinterest. Disjointed experiences can lead to confusion and lost sales. The general idea of multichannel marketing—making your products or services available in different ways to appeal to different buyer habits—is sound. But omnichannel marketing is a more advanced “next step” for many marketers that requires martech that can easily handle and unify data from many different sources, to help deliver brand awareness, engagement, and increased brand equity.