Omnichannel vs. Multichannel: What’s the Difference?

Constantly pushing out obvious promotions for your products and services has never been a good marketing strategy by itself. And nowadays, it’s even more important to provide an exceptional and continuous experience to stay in people’s memories longer.

Digital and non-digital have emerged into a unified hybrid environment where healthcare professionals (HCPs) and patients consume and generate terabytes of diverse data across multiple channels using multiple devices.

The overwhelming success of creating personalized customer experiences in omnichannel e-commerce retail led to the adoption of this practice by pharma businesses of all sizes. Each asked the same question: “What is the difference between omnichannel and multichannel?”

If you want to compare omnichannel vs. multichannel, read this guide until the end.

What Is Omnichannel Marketing?

Omnichannel marketing is a strategy that focuses on providing a seamless customer experience across multiple channels. This approach helps ensure that customers’ experience with the brand will be seamless and personalized, regardless of which channel they use.

How does omnichannel marketing work? 

If multichannel aims to reach as many potential customers as possible, the omnichannel strategy requires a more tactical and on-point approach. A typical modern HCP is usually someone who highly values their time and has no wish to dig into a particular brand’s feed. As the average F2F visit between HCP and medical representative usually does not exceed 4 minutes (whether online or offline), these 4 minutes become a valuable moment to deliver the most important messages directly to the person.

But what is this message, and how do you fit the whole customer journey into a single presentation?

The answer is that you don’t have to.

The omnichannel approach builds communication across various marketing channels and uses highly personalized delivery methods to guide clients through all customer journey stages. This way, the customer gets a customized message required for engagement via various channels (like emails, messengers, F2F, or else) at each stage instead of wading through the flood of posts on Facebook.

According to a customer engagement survey by Axtria:

• Nearly 77% of businesses only take the first steps in implementing an omnichannel strategy.
• Around 66% of businesses are in the early stages of omnichannel data management maturity.
• About 64% of businesses work with a strategic development partner for omnichannel transformation.

Omnichannel pros and cons 

Even though omnichannel marketing is considered the better choice, it still has some drawbacks. Let’s take a look at both pros and cons.

So why is omnichannel marketing so popular? Here are its main benefits:

Relevance and efficiency

The omnichannel strategy helps to achieve business goals most appropriately and efficiently because you always work with your target audience’s current reality. Instead of creating a bunch of materials, deploying them to all the channels, and waiting for the best (this is what basically multichannel is about), your marketing efforts are concentrated on being “here and now,” providing your customers with what is interesting to them currently, and in the most comfortable way for them to engage.

Advanced personalization and deep customer understanding

Personalization is not a destination; it’s an ongoing process of gathering data, analyzing it, and applying it to subsequent marketing campaigns to improve the next communicational iteration. The more you interact with a target audience, the better you know the specifics of their engagement and what works best for them. Next time you design your strategy after analyzing the previous campaign, you may notice an increased number of touchpoints and some new ways to engage HCPs, patients, and other customers.

Detailed customer journey and content management

Because all channels are connected and data is centralized, you can see exactly where a customer is in their journey. For example, whether they’re just discovering the brand, considering a product, or are ready to buy. Knowing the customer’s stage allows marketers to automatically send or display the right content, like educational materials early on, at the moment when it’s most useful. Since content distribution is tied to clear journey stages, marketing teams can plan, create, and allocate content more efficiently. They don’t waste resources on random materials but focus on what’s needed for each stage of the campaign.

Data-driven decision-making

Omnichannel marketing allows companies to gain better insights about their customers and make decisions based on the gathered data. Instead of investing and launching another marketing campaign without knowing whether it will meet demand, pharma marketers can use data analytics to align with customers’ needs and create campaigns that resonate with the target audience.

Even though with pharma omnichannel marketing, it is possible to create an effortless customer experience, it does come with certain challenges that might make this goal a little bit more difficult to achieve. Here are the main cons of omnichannel:

• Technology and implementation costs are very high
• Personalized, connected journeys require a lot of reusable, modular content
• Sales reps may resist change
• Omnichannel KPIs may be difficult to track, attribute, and understand
• ROI is not as straightforward as with single-channel campaigns
• Omnichannel demands collaboration, which can be difficult to establish

An omnichannel approach helps companies unify customer data, offers personalization, and improves engagement, but it’s resource-intensive and often requires cultural change within an organization.

What Is Multichannel Marketing?

Multichannel marketing strategies focus on providing a separate customer experience on each channel used by a brand. Even though multichannel marketing uses multiple channels to engage with a customer, the experiences offered on each are not integrated and can often be very different from each other.

The pharmaceutical multichannel approach has become a tried-and-tested technique for many companies that are still hesitant about adopting the latest customer engagement techniques. Time proved that even being multichannel isn’t enough for a pharma business to create caring and unsuspicious relationships with customers.

How does multichannel marketing work? 

Search engines and social media revolutionized the way pharma customers consume content.

Patients have more data about their healthcare than ever before. According to Clinician of the Future: A 2022 report by Ipsos, 56% of clinicians worldwide agreed that patients have become more empowered to manage their conditions over the last decade.

HCPs can find feedback on any pharma product or a company that produced it in a wink (of course, if the company has a website or active social media profiles).

In addition to search engines and social media, representatives of multiple communities across pharma and life sciences use many other channels for communication with colleagues and businesses.

They receive messages via email, messaging apps, and SMS. They visit websites and download healthcare mobile apps. They attend events, visit websites, participate in webinars, and have face-to-face meetings and video calls.

Multichannel communication has spread marketing boundaries significantly. In the new world where businesses can no longer dictate anything to customers who have more control over their choices, specialists in pharma communications get an unprecedented opportunity to reach target audiences anywhere they want and need.

Multichannel pros and cons 

A multichannel strategy allows pharma companies to upgrade their marketing on all sides: planning, management, analysis, and execution.

Even though multichannel marketing strategies don’t offer a seamless experience, they still have many benefits.

Absolute audience reach and strong brand awareness

When using multiple channels, a pharma business increases the maximum number of customers it can reach, which enhances brand awareness among prospects.

Multichannel distribution of content can improve the level of customer engagement. In other words, the more marketing channels a pharma business uses, the more touchpoints current and potential customers can create. More touchpoints make customers remember your life sciences brand.

And more touchpoints mean more insights which will be useful for future campaigns.

More data & tools for analytics

Just like with other approaches, the success of multichannel pharma marketing is all about data.

Implementing a multichannel approach to pharma marketing is the first step to systematizing customer information and its management. It is the first attempt to focus on the big picture by increasing digital maturity.

Which channels does a target audience like, and which don’t? Which channels are effective, and which benefits do they have? What multichannel content methods and formats do competitors use? The multichannel approach can answer these and many other questions through a customer relationship management (CRM) platform.

As a central multichannel data hub, a CRM platform can help a pharma or life sciences business automate and optimize key marketing activities. Optimization and automation dramatically reduce expenses and resources necessary for continuous growth and campaign performance improvement.

Enhanced performance measurement

Loads of data received across channels give room for maneuver. With new information continuously upgraded in real-time, multichannel marketers can create different experiments based on a closed-loop marketing approach that includes four stages:

1. Campaign launch;
2. Customer engagement;
3. Data collection;
4. Data analysis.

Such a cycle allows marketers to test different channel and content combinations repeatedly, which helps businesses make smarter decisions, generate better ideas, and increase the number of conversions and sales.

More conversions and sales

Let’s end this part of the article with the last and most important thing. The advantages we just recalled — a high level of engagement, more customer data, better data management, real-time analytics, and enhanced performance management of multichannel campaigns — lead to boosting sales force productivity and efficiency.

Even though pharma businesses have access to multiple channels where they can lure HCPs and patients, they often don’t know how to do that accurately and efficiently. In these circumstances, multichannel interactions result in a few drawbacks:

• No integrated experience across channels;
• Channels work separately;
• High cost-per-contact;
• No holistic view of customer data;
• The same message across channels.

Even though multichannel approach is not the best choice for companies that would like to personalize their digital marketing and cater to different customer segments through unique content, it can still be a valid option for organizations that have limited resources and would like to focus on attracting as many leads as possible first.

Difference Between Multichannel and Omnichannel Marketing

The omnichannel approach is a marketing method that unifies different channels companies use to reach out to customers and fosters a consistent brand voice and messaging across all platforms and devices. Omnichannel is a customer-centric approach, meaning that all marketing efforts revolve around ensuring that users have a seamless customer experience every time they interact with a brand.

The multichannel approach also uses various channels to communicate with customers and promote products or services, but it does not necessarily integrate all channels into a unified customer journey. For example, a promotion sent by email might be completely different from an ad a customer sees on Instagram.

Omnichannel vs Multichannel: When and How to Choose

As global digitalization goes on and business needs become more complex, your approach is usually defined by your requirements. When it comes to multichannel vs omnichannel marketing strategies, you must understand the central concept of realizing what is best for your business.

According to the State of the Connected Customer research conducted by Salesforce with the participation of nearly 17.000 people:

• 88% say that customer experiences provided by businesses are as crucial as their products and services;
• 73% anticipate companies to understand their unique needs and expectations;
• 56% always expect offers to be personalized;
• 43% prefer non-digital channels to engage with businesses.

Multichannel works with one channel independently from another, allowing it to target a broad audience at once. It requires stable content flow and works perfectly for newsfeeds, community activities, or crowd marketing. Meanwhile, omnichannel marketing focuses on providing clients with a personalized experience delivered on time by demand or spontaneously, although always personally via various channels. This makes omnichannel work perfectly for pharma and life sciences.

As a rule of thumb, remember this: you can start with multichannel if you need speed and simplicity, and move to omnichannel if you aim for long-term impact.

How Do Omnichannel and Multichannel Shape Customer Experience? 

A multichannel strategy focuses on the product or service by promoting it with the same static message across multiple channels that act separately.

An omnichannel strategy focuses on the healthcare professional who gets a seamless experience with consistent brand messaging across all the channels integrated into a single communication environment.

Another important distinction between the two strategies lies in their levels of personalization. It’s true that for both approaches, personalization plays a significant role. However, when it comes to omnichannel marketing, there are many more opportunities to personalize customer journeys and create a unique experience. Based on the information marketers receive about their target audience, delivering specific content that meets individual customer needs becomes possible.

Key Multichannel and Omnichannel Examples 

One of the key differences between omnichannel and multichannel lies in how well the channels are integrated. Here are some omnichannel and multichannel examples:

Multichannel strategy in pharma

Channels in the multichannel approach often work in parallel, but they are not always connected. Some examples of multichannel marketing strategies are:

A rep visit: A sales rep shares insights during a face-to-face call, but they are not connected to the information available online on the resources offered by the organization the expert represents.

Mass email blast: Marketers reach customers through an email campaign about the product update to all doctor contacts, regardless of their specialty or past interactions.

Webinar invite: A company hosts a webinar on heart diseases and sends invitations to all cardiologists without personalized customer interactions, tailored to their interests.

Omnichannel marketing in pharma

Omnichannel strategy offers a consistent customer experience across all channels, and all interactions are customer-focused.

Personalized experience after a webinar: An HCP attends a webinar on rheumatology, and after the event, they get an email with slides and a link to an educational HCP portal. Next time they log into the portal, they receive content adapted to their webinar questions.

Closed-loop eDetailing: A sales rep during a face-to-face session shows an HCP digital content on a tablet. The system registers which slides the HCP spent the most time on, and in the next email, the company provides additional data on the topic from the slides.

Emails connected to rep visits: A doctor clicks on an email about a new update, product, or service. A CRM tracks this interaction and alerts the sales rep. During the next visit, the rep discusses topics from the email the doctor previously received.

Role of AI in Omnichannel Marketing

One of the primary goals of omnichannel marketing is to create a seamless customer experience by uniting all individual channels into one connected journey. And the main element in all of this is data. Without high-quality data, it’s impossible to understand customer likes and behavior, their preferred communication channels, and the moments when they are most receptive to marketing efforts. This is where artificial intelligence comes into play.

With AI, marketers, content creators, and even sales reps can better understand their customers and how to connect with them. Moreover, AI can help build a successful omnichannel marketing strategy that considers all possible aspects of a customer lifecycle, such as how they think, what they like, and what channels they use. AI can:

• Predict customer behavior and interests
• Identify patterns and trends
• Provide 24/7 assistance as a smart AI agent
• Help optimize content dynamically
• Give recommendations on personalization based on available data
• Generate tailored content in real-time
• Segment customers based on different traits

With AI, companies can achieve greater customer satisfaction without spending more resources on attaining this goal. And even though AI is not a must-have for creating a seamless customer journey, it can help businesses understand their customers better and create content tailored to their interests.

How to Pick the Best Strategy for Your Business

If you’re unsure which strategy is best for your business, use these tips to help you decide:

Consider your limitations

Your business might not be ready to implement a seamless omnichannel experience, and that’s completely fine. If you don’t have enough resources for omnichannel, it’s okay to stick with multichannel marketing strategies for some time and transition to omnichannel whenever you are ready. Remember, it’s better to create high-quality content that your customers truly value, rather than chase trends and waste resources on something that ends up only half-done.

Think about the needs of your audience

Does your customer expect you to provide an omnichannel customer experience? Or maybe they don’t even use more than one channel regularly? Consider your customers’ needs to see if you need an omnichannel strategy. It’s possible that your audience may not require a fully integrated experience, in which case, multichannel marketing is perfectly suitable. While omnichannel is often the more effective approach, if it isn’t necessary now, it’s completely fine to use multichannel — as long as it aligns with your customers’ needs and expectations.

Evaluate your business goals

Are you aiming for a broader, quicker reach or focus on building long-term engagement? Both omnichannel and multichannel marketing can help achieve business goals, but while omnichannel emphasizes brand loyalty and sustained customer relationships, multichannel works best when you need to reach customers quickly across multiple channels.

When choosing omnichannel vs. multichannel, consider your capabilities, resources, and digital maturity. In general, it’s best to choose omnichannel if you aim for consistency and personalization and choose multichannel if speed and simplicity are more critical for you right now.

Final Remarks 

There are different ways to improve your digital communication with HCPs and patients. Regardless of what method you choose, it’s crucial to remain customer-centric and always keep the needs of your audience in mind. What is the point in building and following a strategy if it does not consider the needs of the people your business is created for?