Swinging for the Fences: Optimizing Omnichannel Strategies for 2025

3/26/2025 Daniel Towers

With the start of the professional baseball season underway, I’m reminded of one of the sport’s best-known sayings: “Baseball is a game of inches.” This truth rings as loudly in marketing as it does in baseball. In baseball, this can refer to a pitch being called a strike even though it might actually be a bit off the plate, or maybe it’s an outfielder's last-minute leaping catch to rob a batter of a home run. In marketing, it’s the email that ends up buried below the fold, the offer that arrives a day too late, or the digital ad that doesn’t quite grab a click.

As we near the close of the first quarter of 2025, the question for marketers is: How can we fine-tune our strategies to close the gap on these near misses?

Here, we’ll explore:

• How to call the right plays by aligning strategy with strategy
• How to read the signs by listening to the customer
• How to adjust your swing by pursuing continuous learning

Calling the right plays

Strategies are typically applied at various levels within a business, ranging from an overall business strategy to technology platforms, data management, and even individual marketing campaigns. When talking about strategy, you have to ensure that all strategies are clear to your stakeholders — and that they align. Too often, omnichannel strategies can lead to friction points because individual strategies are inconsistent. Unfortunately, it’s usually the customer who feels the friction, and in ways the business did not predict. 

This is where marketing can be viewed as a game of inches. Even the best omnichannel marketing plan can fail when it highlights business-wide disconnects like e-commerce platforms that don't support traffic loads (Ticketmaster sales for Beyonce and Taylor Swift, for example) or inventory systems that reflect availability with no product in store (winter 2025 ice melt shortages in the Northeast, for instance). Although these are extreme and unpredictable examples, they highlight the need to coordinate and align strategies across the entire business rather than just focusing on the marketing plan. Top-level business strategies, for example, may fail when acquisition efforts lead to acquiring discount-dependent customers. If the business lacks consistent goals, there will always be unintended friction points that can frustrate the customer, directly impacting attrition. 

Reading the signs

We live in an era of rapid technological change. In the marketing technology space, it seems like each day brings a new headline on innovative ways to collect, interpret, or report on data — with a steady flow of entrepreneurs introducing new strategies to address these industry challenges.

Today’s consumers are using more methods than ever to research, shop, engage, and make purchases. Because of their significant activity online, they’re leaving a multitude of digital trails. I’m a strong advocate for collecting and analyzing as many of these digital trails as possible, although I’ll admit they can be challenging to connect and are sometimes overwhelming to work with. By using large language models (LLMs) and other AI programs, however, it’s now possible to synthesize survey and review data to uncover valuable insights, even in isolation. 

Customers might not be deliberate in providing feedback through online touchpoints or surveys, but their behaviors (or lack thereof) can still foreshadow future behavior. Are they opening emails? Are they visiting e-commerce sites? Are they using your app? Are they making purchases? Are those purchases the same as you might have predicted, or are they branching into other categories? Does the customer have an established pattern or preferred channel?

These signals might be indicative of nothing — or, in a game measured by inches, they could be a game changer. Customer signals and feedback can be used to inform your strategies across offers, content, cadence, and channel. They can be used to orchestrate your omnichannel approach and drive improved engagement, either at scale for all customers or on a 1:1 basis for individuals. 

Adjusting your swing

Just like a pitcher who recognizes how the umpire is calling the strike zone, or an outfielder who anticipates how to play a fly ball hit off the wall, a marketer must always be learning and adapting to controllable and uncontrollable forces. 

You can’t control the competition, the economy, or even the customer. But with the customer, you do have some influence over the game. The key is to piece the puzzle together and know when and where to leverage that influence. The best way to learn is through constant testing. Great pitchers mix up their speeds and pitches, learning how the sun's reflection off the stadium affects how batters see the ball. Similarly, fielders learn how batters are reacting to pitches and adjust accordingly. Sometimes the outfield shifts left because right-handed batters are struggling to read pitches or are swinging late. These small adjustments, measured in inches, can be the difference between an out and an inside-the-park home run.

Swing for the fences: optimize your omnichannel strategy

In baseball, which team wins the game can often come down to strategy — sometimes playing as big a role as team talent. Similarly, omnichannel strategies are crucial, but it's not always about the channels themselves — it's about the strategy, plus the ability to measure and adapt. We all know that customer-centric strategies are most effective when they meet the customer where they are in their journey. 

But there are two critical questions you always need to be able to answer:

• Do you know where the customer is? 
• What’s your strategy for meeting them there? 

As you step up to the plate in 2025, remember that success lies in understanding where the customer is, having the right strategy to meet them there, and continuously adjusting to hit it out of the park.

Daniel Towers is Manager of RRD’s Marketing Technologies and Solutions, and a seasoned martech expert with strong experience in solution sales and product management.