16 Jan
Omnichannel is a buzzword that you might have heard and read many times. In your sales meetings, on marketing blogs. But when the word is everywhere, it can get confusing what people actually mean by it.
To make it clear, omnichannel ecommerce is an e-commerce sales approach that uses multiple channels and gives customers a unified experience across all channels, whether it’s from in-store or other digital channels.
Let’s dive into further details of omnichannel ecommerce.
What is Omnichannel Ecommerce?
Omni-channel ecommerce is a multichannel approach to sales that focuses on providing seamless customer experience whether the client is shopping online from a mobile device, a laptop or in a brick-and-mortar store. The idea of omnichannel is to provide a unique and continuous purchasing experience.
Much like any marketing strategy, omnichannel marketing is all about synchronizing your channels with a complete approach. Omnichannel is all about making sure each strategy and channel is connected and shares information.
Moreover, It is a modern approach to commerce that focuses on designing a cohesive user experience for customers at every touchpoint. This differs from traditional marketing, where individual channels were optimized without necessarily taking the whole experience into mind.
Benefits of omnichannel marketing strategy?
Omni-channel retail has many advantages for the businesses and e-commerce in general. When you integrate all of your marketing channels into an omnichannel strategy, you’ll be creating an optimized experience of benefit to both you and your customers. There are obvious customer benefits to omnichannel, as well as financial advantages for your brand. Here are a few:
1. Better customer experience
Omnichannel allows you to create a personalized experience. Customers expect a best-in-class experience across multiple channels. By providing this high-quality customer experience in an omnichannel strategy, you’ll be helping to improve customer loyalty.
Loyal customers will create user-generated content (UGC), write reviews, increase your average order value (AOV) and improve lifetime value (LTV).
2. Improved efficiency
Developing an omni-channel retail strategy enables retailers to provide a consistent experience to their already informed clients across all platforms. It also equips the retailers to respond to their customers’ needs with a common, central database of products, offers, prices, etc.
Thus, the client can experience the brand with merchandise and promotions that are consistent across all the retail channels. Thus, the physical stores become extensions of the main supply chain. So, although the purchase occurs in the store, the customer does the research through several communication channels.
3. Enhanced data collection
When a business becomes visible across multiple channels, the result is a more personalized customer experience. When a company can track its customers using multiple channels while taking note of their preferences, it can give them better service. Thus, omni-channel retail helps companies to generate ideas on how to create offers that will encourage their customers to come out and get engaged while shopping at the physical stores. This increases the possibility of impulsive purchasing.
4. Higher margins
A well-developed online sales structure will reduce the occurrence of several discounting schemes. In the traditional retailing arena, huge discounts are offered only to those items that are not getting sold quickly in particular stores. However, through omni-channel retailing, businesses can sell these products to their customers nationwide at the full price.
5. Integrated data analysis and communication
Multiple communication channels give your business access to several information streams. As a business, you need to understand these data streams to meet your customers’ needs and demands. With analytics, you are capable of comprehending, quantifying and reviewing the communications with your clients.
Challenges with omnichannel e-commerce?
Brick-and-mortar store stock vs online stock
Many businesses also display the stock they have in physical locations online. In-store stock fluctuates, and the products might be sold-out in-store when that same stock was also already sold online. This is not always the best approach as it cannibalizes their online transactions. A good way to fix this problem is to reduce the availability of “best-selling” items on your online stores.
Lack of infrastructure
When a business decides to implement an omnichannel strategy, its existing technology often isn’t up to standards to be able to smoothly run an omnichannel operation.
Teaming up with the right partners
Having the best logistics, shipping and e-commerce partners is crucial to your omnichannel success. Learn more about the different types of e-commerce partners.
Keys to an omnichannel personalization strategy
Knowing the benefits of omni-channel retail is not enough. As a business, you need to know how to personalize the omni-channel retail framework.
1. Email and web personalization
The quickest avenues to generating revenue are email and web personalization since they have clear key performance indicators. These are also easy to implement and should, therefore, be the starting point. The primary focus is to develop product recommendations that are tailored to each customer across the pages of your site while testing strategies for optimal conversion.
Using the email address, loyalty number, or any other customer identifier that you collect through your website, you can tie the web and email channels to generate emails that dynamically offer product recommendations suited to an individual client’s preferences based on information gathered from their web activity.
2. Targeted offers and content
After setting up a personalized product recommendation e-commerce strategy, start looking for other avenues to engage and retain your customers using their personalized channels. Content such as blogs, videos, offers, and hero shots directed towards the individual customer’s interests should follow.
Also, leverage the contextual information to generate experiences based on location, weather, geography, and dayparting patterns to further target offers and content because this adds another layer to your product recommendation personalization strategy.
3. Mobile customization
After building a product, content and offer recommendation scheme on the web, setting up a mobile and tablet-specific personalization strategy that uses geography to enhance the experience for on-the-go shoppers and create geo-targeted offers is the next step. Now, you need to use the same identifiers captured for email and the web to streamline the mobile channel and allow data sharing across and within all the channels to create a seamless experience.
4. Integrated analytics
Analytics, which enables a continual improvement of content personalization, will help you to take a closer look at the one-to-one connection. Unfortunately, most ad targeting solutions and optimization platforms don’t have access to customer behavior on different devices.
However, when you own your first-party data and have developed individual, non-personally identifiable information profiles that include data gained from all the channels, you can, in turn, offer excellent one-to-one marketing through all the online and offline avenues. Also, the ability to share this data with third-party platforms and tools is also crucial for you to interact with your customers in close to real-time, and to channel data generated by third-party systems back to the central data layer.
5. In-store personalization
After creating a mobile strategy, the next step is to develop customization. The quickest way to achieve in-store personalization is introducing kiosks and digital displays and arming your sales personnel with mobile devices such as tablets for client-ling.
Capturing in-store purchase data can be a bit of a challenge since the POS systems are usually not synchronized with the online channels. Thus, you have to use the same customer identifiers implemented in the other channels. Once this interconnection is set up, the result is a seamless omni-channel personalization experience in all the online and offline activity.
6. Personalization of contact center
The final step is the personalization of the contact center. Which means, arming the phone-based and online customer care agents with offers and product recommendations that are relevant to each client.
Omni-channel retail is still evolving owing to shifts in consumer behavior and the desire for tailored and personalized experiences that are consistent across every channel a customer opts to use. Thus, as a business, you should begin delivering on these expectations by understanding the channels most favored by your clients, then commencing a phased approach to achieving omni-channel personalization.
How to create immersive experiences with omnichannel
With new screens and channels emerging, it’s tempting to think that you must be everywhere. Remember, efficiently executing an omnichannel strategy requires only that you’re everywhere your customers are.
Done well, the result is the perception that your brand is omnipresent. Your advertising, public relations, SEO, and commerce offerings overlap to form a branded and blended experience. Do this by focusing on:
- Online “discovery” touchpoints
- Geographic locations
- Devices being used
How can you create an omnichannel experience?
The task of creating an omnichannel experience may seem daunting at first. There are, however, some basic steps you can take to get yours off the ground. As with all marketing strategies, it’s important to plan ahead and make strategic decisions. Without planning, you’ll end up flying in the dark and won’t be able to measure the strategy’s success properly.
Here are 5 high-level steps to start off an omnichannel channel strategy that works for your brand:
1. Get to know your customer: Don’t make assumptions. Research your target audience’s interests, behavior and needs. Ask them questions, invite customer feedback and leverage social media and social listening tools.
2. Select the right channels: Find out where your customers are and what they’re doing.
3. Choose a clear purpose per channel: One channel mainly for interaction, the other for news updates and so on.
4. Connect all channels: This is the hard part and only works if you execute it perfectly (omnichannel only). You’ll need the right technology to follow your customer across all touchpoints: from reading reviews on your website, seeing social ads, window shopping at an online marketplace to finally purchasing at your physical store.
5. Maintain your channels: There’s no time for leaning back, keep on testing and improving your strategy. Document these touchpoints well to serve your customers best. This way, you’ll create a loyal customer who keeps coming back for more.
What’s the difference between omnichannel and multichannel?
Multichannel
This is a strategy where a brand is present on multiple channels, which its customers can use to interact with the brand. These channels can be for example apps, websites, mobile websites, emails, brick-and-mortar stores, social media channels, etc. Of course, customers expect to have a seamless experience with a brand, instead of having a fragmented experience on each channel. This is where omnichannel comes to play.
Omnichannel
An omnichannel ecommerce strategy foresees that customers may start searching on one channel and move to another as a progression of their online purchasing journey. Omnichannel completes a multichannel strategy and optimizes it for today’s online customers.
How does omnichannel differ from multichannel marketing?
Though there are similarities between omnichannel and multichannel marketing. But the main difference is that multichannel marketing places the brand at the center of the strategy, whereas an omnichannel approach gives the customer this central role.
The website’s main goal is to drive as much as possible traffic to their site with omnichannel marketing. While this is unlikely to boost conversion rates, it can be counted on to improve sales. This is common practice throughout the ecommerce world, simply because it is relatively easy to implement.
Moreover, the main motto with omnichannel marketing is to improve the customer experience both online and in store. This ultimately helps to improve brand loyalty, AOVs and the LTVs of customers. While an omnichannel strategy is much more complex to integrate, it can bring much bigger rewards than a multichannel campaign.
Choosing between omnichannel vs multichannel
Omnichannel, which offers a smoother customer experience, seems like a logical choice. It’s not so clear-cut though. Starting your businesses as a physical retail store vs a digitally-native brand makes a difference in which approach you should choose.
Converting a retail business to omnichannel requires significant resources. Worse yet, there’s no stopping halfway. Non-functioning omnichannel technology will create the same experience as absolutely no technology at all.
So while omnichannel is ideal, some businesses might be better served starting off with a multichannel experience before tying them all together.
Consider two key concepts when deciding:
- Resources – Providing an omnichannel experience requires IT investment and prowess, the right infrastructure and tech stack, and the vision necessary to integrate and execute. If you’ve built a headless commerce architecture, you may need a robust content management system to execute. If you have a traditional architecture, a product information management (PIM) system may act as your tech backbone. Without an in-house IT staff, you may need to hire ecommerce technology experts.
- Flexibility – A large part of making the transition to omnichannel is about people and incentives. Resist incentives that reward maximizing sales in each channel regardless of the impact such objectives have on adjacent channels or the overall customer experience. Buy-in is also crucial.
CMOs and CIOs, in particular, must develop a shared vision and ensure it’s adopted throughout the organization. Be sure your executive leadership team has the technical background to implement the components of an omnichannel transition.
Identifying the right approach for your brand starts with clearly understanding the difference between omnichannel and multichannel.
Conclusion
Omnichannel is about using the channels that your customers are on to provide a personalised experience. When you implement omnichannel marketing in your e-commerce marketing efforts, your customers get consistent messaging and buying experience with your brand, no matter what channel they use to find your product.
When you adopt an omnichannel marketing strategy, you’re also creating a consistent brand voice and story that’s told over and over again through all channels. Regardless of whether you invest in multi or omnichannel, developing the flexibility to adapt and integrate new channels will determine whether you’ll be successful tomorrow.