Omnichannel Experience for Digital Publications
Written by: Rashmi
Digital publishers today have presence on every channel – their website, social media, podcasting apps, and whatnot. At first, it sounds like an option. Publishers may or may not want to be present everywhere. But as it turns out, offering an omnichannel experience to your readers is a necessity.
A reader is more likely to visit your website or buy your subscription if he has interacted with your business through more than one touchpoint. More eyeballs and subscriptions mean more revenue. And this is what the omnichannel experience is all about.
If you are in the digital publishing space, you must know how to give a seamless omnichannel experience to your readers. Find the guide on omnichannel experience for digital publishers below.
Omnichannel Reader Experience – What Is It?
When a publication interacts with its readers on multiple channels, it is called an omnichannel experience. This way, the publication warmly introduces its products like an offline magazine subscription or online newsletter subscription to the readers instead of advertisements.
Let’s take a magazine publishing business as an example. A few years back, this magazine publication could run ads on billboards, television, or radio. But now, instead of buying ads, the same magazine business can create a seamless reader journey.
The magazine can offer educational content on video streaming platforms like YouTube. It can give an insider’s view through a podcast. Once the reader knows the name of the brand, targeted ads on Facebook or Twitter are going to work better. From being completely unaware of the magazine to becoming its loyal reader, a person might come in contact with five to six touch points with the business.
Benefits of Omnichannel Experience
A seamless experience to readers helps digital publishers in the following ways:
Smoother Reader Journey: From not knowing your publication’s name to visiting your website every day, there is a journey that every reader covers. And omnichannel experience is best known to make the reader's journey smooth.
Instant Revenue Growth: When you mark your presence on new channels, you introduce your publishing businesses to people who hitherto didn’t know about it. This means that omnichannel experience also translates to instant revenue growth.
High Reader Retention and Loyalty: If you do not like guerilla marketing tactics, omnichannel is the right match for you. Omnichannel experience is a warm approach that gives the same benefits as that of any marketing campaign. Publications that deploy the omnichannel approach get high reader retention and loyalty from their readers.
How To Implement It?
By now, it is clear that giving a seamless omnichannel experience drives a lot of benefits. So the final question arises: how does one implement it?
Here are four tips that will help create an omnichannel reader experience for your digital publication business:
Map Your Reader’s Journey: We have already talked a little about the reader’s journey. To make the journey seamless, you have to first map it. Find out what type of content your reader likes on social media. What are some of his favourite media forms: text, audio, photos, videos, or games?
Diversify Your Content-Type: Your expertise might be in one type of content, but for an omnichannel experience, you have to scale your content to multiple types. For example, you can use a text-to-speech service or software to convert your text articles into audio episodes.
Mark Your Presence: Reader interaction includes serving content plus solving problems. Once your readers start consuming your content, they will have a lot of questions about your publication like is the subscription refundable or how you do the publication deploy donation money? So, make sure you have an omnichannel reader/customer support strategy in place.
Make The Experience Seamless: To boost your revenue growth, the omnichannel experience has to be seamless. Otherwise, your presence on different channels will be segregated. For example, a reader finding you on a Facebook post should ideally reach your website within two to three clicks. And one way to make the seamless experience happen is by updating your tech stack such as having a headless CMS. A headless CMS can help you use and re-use content on multiple channels. Without it, you might have to go back and forth between different CMSs to publish content across all the channels.
Entering the omnichannel strategy may sound a bit overwhelming at first. But once you have dived into it, the strategy can effectively improve not just the brand’s growth but also give way to a more smooth and personalized user experience.