Omnichannel Marketing
If you’ve read a single industry article this year, you know that all the talk in marketing circles right now is about AI. Content creation with AI. Optimizing for AI search engines. Using AI to predict customer behavior. It's exciting, sure. But a lot of it is also theoretical and experimental, and it doesn't solve the tactical problems that most of my clients are dealing with today.
Everyone’s talking about AI, but it’s not solving most marketers’ real problems. Meanwhile, SMS is quietly outperforming with huge open and click rates. The real missed opportunity? Connecting SMS, email, and social into one cohesive strategy.
Meanwhile, SMS has been around for years. We've been building SMS programs for clients for over a decade. It's not grabbing headlines, but it's quietly delivering 98%+ open rates while some of those same clients are struggling with email deliverability. It's driving 70%+ click rates while social media gets more expensive and more competitive. B
But here's what almost no client ever asks about: how SMS, email, and social work together. Clients come to us wanting to fix one channel. They want better email engagement. They want their social posts to perform. They rarely think about connecting all three into one coordinated strategy.
Today, I want to tell you that's the opportunity you’re missing out on. Because no single channel can drive success alone. But when you can align them together, as we do for clients who are willing to trust in our process, we see amazing results. That’s why we recently ran a workshop about it, and why I’m talking to you today about how you can leverage it for yourself.
Why Omnichannel Marketing? Because Customers Are Everywhere
Your customers and prospects are checking email on their phones, scrolling through LinkedIn during lunch, and responding to text messages within minutes. But where most marketing teams miss their biggest opportunities is by treating each channel like a separate island.
Your email team sends one message. Your social media manager posts according to their calendar. Maybe someone remembers to send an SMS, maybe not. The result? Your audience sees fragments of your story, but not the full picture. And fragmented stories don't convert.
The reality is straightforward. 73% of buyers engage across multiple channels before making a purchase decision. The average consumer will see about six touchpoints in a typical purchase journey. If you're only showing up in one place, you're missing most of your audience most of the time.
Why Email Should Be Your Anchor
When I introduce clients to the idea of omnichannel, I’m always very clear about something: email is still the strongest channel. We all know the stat, which has remained unchanged, that tells us that email delivers up to a 36:1 ROI. No other channel comes close to that performance, so it’s the best place to anchor our campaigns.
But it's not just about ROI, it’s also about control. You own your email list. You don't own your social media following. Any social platform can change its algorithm tomorrow and cut your organic reach in half. They can take away your page. They can shift the rules. Your email list? That's yours.
For this reason, your omnichannel strategy should start with email. Use it as your connective tissue. It can carry the full story, the complete offer, and your primary call to action. Every other channel can then be used to amplify what email establishes.
The Cost of Marketing Silos
Before we talk about using channels together, it’s important to understand what happens when they don’t. When your channels don't talk to each other, your marketing program will pay for it in three ways.
First, your messaging is often fragmented. A prospect sees one thing in their inbox, something different on social, and maybe a completely unrelated SMS message. They're not connecting the dots because there are no dots to connect. If they even remember seeing those messages, odds are you've created confusion instead of clarity.
Second, you're wasting effort. Your email marketer creates content. Your social media manager creates different content. Your SMS team (if you have one) does its own thing. Nobody's sharing work. Nobody's repurposing. You're duplicating effort and burning budget on three separate messages when you could tell one story three times.
Third, you're leaving retention on the table. Strong omnichannel brands retain 89% of customers compared to 33% for weak ones. When you coordinate your channels, people see you everywhere. That frequency and recency builds trust. Misaligned channels build nothing and make your brand unremarkable. The data backs this up. Campaigns that use three or more channels see 287% higher purchase rates than single-channel campaigns.
Building Campaigns Around Email
Building an email-anchored omnichannel campaign starts with your email calendar. Not social. Not SMS. Email is first and foremost because it is the channel that will convert and where you can and should tell the complete story. You have space for detail, can include multiple links, and can structure the message exactly how you want your story told. Build that first, and then determine how SMS and social should amplify it.
Here's how you then make the three channels work together:
Build your email creatives to carry your full story, with detail and primary conversion driver. This is where you explain the offer, share the case study, or lay out the promotion terms.
Next, look at SMS as the short, timely nudge that reinforces the emails. It's not a replacement. It's a reminder. "Did you see what we sent yesterday?" or "Only 24 hours left on that offer."
Finally, use social to leverage the visual hook that builds awareness for your campaign and grows your list. Remember that social is where prospects discover you for the first time, or where they're reminded you exist between email sends.
Use the same core message across all three. Adjust the format, not the meaning. If your email says "Download our guide," your SMS says "Get our guide," and your social post drives people to the guide landing page. Same action. Same goal. Different delivery.
A great example of this actually comes from our B2B clients who use SMS to connect with their clients during industry trade shows. Emails prior to the show will talk about booth visits or after-hours gatherings, setting the stage and looking for RSVPs. This helps with headcount and also builds awareness for their brand at the industry event. SMS is then used during the event, when their contacts are too busy to check email, to remind them of the booth invitation or event start time. Social media is layered on post-event to share photos from the booth, gathering, or other activity. This reinforces the brand with those who follow them and builds connections with new contacts.
We see similar use for nonprofit clients who want to build better connections with donors, especially those who run fundraising events and want to reach people in proximity of that. SMS isn’t just for retail and e-commerce, it has a much wider reach.
Platform Choices That Make This Easier
Running omnichannel campaigns gets a lot easier when your email and SMS platforms share data. If your current provider doesn’t offer integrated email and SMS workflows, consider using one that does. Mailchimp, Klaviyo, Attentive, and HubSpot are good options here. The key is that consent management happens in one place, and your segments stay in sync.
If you want to send an SMS nudge to everyone who received your email but didn't open it, you need those two systems talking to each other. Otherwise, you're exporting CSVs and manually building segments, and that's a recipe for error. Ideally, if social post scheduling is also available, it’s a great feature to have.
Need Help Breaking Down the Silos?
Omnichannel marketing works, but it requires coordination. If your team is struggling to connect email, SMS, and social into one coherent strategy, you don't have to figure it out alone. Schedule a discovery call to find out how we help marketing leaders build connected programs that actually perform. We'll help you map your campaigns, fix your tech stack, and create messaging that works across every channel.
One strategy. Every channel. Real results.
Do you have questions about what data points you should measure? As Mailchimp Pro Partners, we can help you set and track the KPIs that will help your organization understand and improve your email program.
