Customers are omnipresent and discover brands through various touchpoints. And most switch between multiple channels before making a purchase decision.
So how can an eCommerce brand ensure consistency in messaging and experience across all touchpoints to close a sale? It’s through omnichannel marketing.
An omnichannel marketing strategy is where eCommerce businesses offer their customers streamlined, integrated, and consistent shopping experiences across all touchpoints, such as offline stores, mobile shopping sites, social media pages, devices, and more.
This article will show you how to master omnichannel marketing for your eCommerce business and win more sales.
What are the benefits of omnichannel marketing?
Higher purchase rate — Marketers using at least three channels to communicate with their audience saw a 287% higher purchase rate than single-channel campaigns.
Higher engagement — Anticipating customer needs across channels and tailoring their experiences as part of omnichannel marketing leads to an increase in user engagement by 18.5% or higher.
Higher customer retention — Marketers implementing omnichannel marketing strategies noticed a massive 90% rise in customer retention as customers are most loyal to brands personalizing their experience across all communication channels.
Higher spend rate — Studies suggest customers spend 10% more online and 4% more in-store with an omnichannel approach than a single channel.
Examples of omnichannel marketing
Below are the three eCommerce brands running stellar omnichannel marketing strategies that will inspire you:
1. Puma
Puma, the athletic wear giant, is one of the best success stories of omnichannel marketing. Puma has kept up with its online rivals by digitizing its physical stores and popularizing its recent mobile app — which now has over a million downloads.
The brand lets customers have simultaneous access to their in-store and online products while shopping in a physical store. Customers are pulled to stores by offering same-day product pickups from the store and product reservations.
Puma also tied in SMS, WhatsApp, and email channels to send product recommendations based on purchase histories, discounts, sale alerts, and more.
2. Decathlon
Decathlon is globally popular for its sporting goods and has a vast digital and offline presence. Here’s how this eCommerce giant implements the omnichannel marketing strategy to see consistency in sales despite the heavy competition:
Uses communication mediums such as web push notifications, SMS, and emails to notify customers of products back in stock, notify discounts on wishlist products, etc.
Facilitates online ordering through the Decathlon mobile app or website with an in-store contactless pick-up option.
Contactless shopping and payment through QR code scanning on their mobile app.
Offers reward points as part of their loyalty program that can be redeemed at online and physical stores.
In addition, the brand has ensured both its offline and online stores co-exist with undifferentiated shopping experiences so that its customers can shop from whichever medium suits them the best.
How to get started with omnichannel marketing?
1. Learn from customer data
The crux of delivering omnichannel experiences is customer data. Analyzing customer data saves your team from running strategies on assumptions and, instead, lets you experience your brand from the customer’s view.
Therefore, ensure your entire organization is on board with prioritizing customer engagement and experience by having an in-depth look at your customers.
Here are some ways to do this:
Build detailed customer personas of your target audience. These can help you gain valuable insights into your audience’s needs, preferences, demographics, and behaviors.
Test out and engage with all touchpoints/communication channels, such as customer service, mobile app purchases, desktop apps, etc., from a customer perspective.
Gather customer survey results and use analytical tools to derive useful insights that can be used to optimize your omnichannel approach.
Analyzing customer data can help you build streamlined hyper-personalized experiences across all touchpoints and encourage user engagement.
2. Ensure your website is mobile-friendly
Pew Research suggests 76% of U.S. adults shop online only using smartphones. Mobile phone shopping is also preferred across the globe, and over 30% of consumers are said to have discarded shopping due to an unfriendly mobile experience.
Therefore, a mobile-friendly website is a must-have to create a smooth shopping experience for your customers.
Here are some tips to help you optimize for mobile:
Ensure the UI is user-friendly and intuitive. Doing so makes it easy for users to navigate and shop seamlessly.
Optimize website content, such as product descriptions, ads, product titles, images, and overall copy for mobile browsing and purchasing.
Personalize each customer’s shopping experience by analyzing customer data like shopping behavior and purchase history. You can run campaigns to offer customized product recommendations, push notifications, discounts, etc.
Run mobile health checkups to uncover performance issues and gather metrics like website bounce rates. Troubleshoot errors by performing continuous testing.
3. Segment customers for better targeting
The only way to ensure personalization in omnichannel marketing and to deliver the right message to the right audience is through customer segmentation.
Once you have proper customer data, as suggested previously, start segmenting your subscribers/customers into smaller groups. Doing so makes it easy for you to send targeted and relevant communication across all channels.
You could start segmenting your customers using the following:
Shopping behaviors: Understand the journey each customer had with your brand, such as their frequency of shopping, when they engaged last, what’s their past-purchase track record like, etc.
Demographic data: Group your customers into genders, age groups, locations, marital statuses, etc.
Loyalty and engagement: Segment your most loyal customers and offer them more tailored experiences, such as loyalty programs, exclusive deals, etc. Also, determine how often a customer has engaged with your brand through certain channels.
Segmenting lets you run fitting omnichannel marketing campaigns and convert more customers through hyper-targeted messaging.
4. Create thoughtful customer journey maps
A customer journey map consists of every step your customers take, from discovering your brand to becoming a purchasing or returning customer.
Creating a customer journey map lets you understand how your customers interact with your business and can help uncover ways to improve interactions throughout touchpoints - and this includes your offline stores.
Here’s how you can start mapping customer journeys:
Use your created customer personas to understand customers and their interests clearly.
Build a list of all important interactions your customers have to stay connected with your business. For instance, point of sale at offline stores, website visits, social media, emails, in-store visits, and mobile apps.
Connect offline to online. Leverage intelligent technology like POS systems and CRMs to integrate customer interacts - both online and offline.
Refer to customer feedback. Check what customers have to say about what channels work for them and what may need more improvement.
Customer journey mapping lets you tie in channels seamlessly so customers are not left hanging at any point while trying to finish a purchase.
5. Continuously test, measure, and optimize
An omnichannel marketing strategy works best when you regularly measure and test your campaigns.
For example, analyzing what campaigns fetch you the most ROI, testing audience segments that react the best to your messaging, which online and offline channels work the best for specific promotions etc., let you optimize them further to generate even more revenue.
Smart AI-led tools can help you track KPIs and measure overall omnichannel marketing performance, improving your decision-making for finding better ways to connect with customers and, ultimately, boosting sales.
Omnichannel marketing mistakes to avoid + best practices to follow
Let's discuss some common omnichannel marketing mistakes most marketers make:
1. Running in silos
Most teams run in silos by not including their in-store teams in their omnichannel strategy or relying only on marketing teams.
But for a successful omnichannel customer experience, every team member, including in-store staff, must be on-board and share focus.
What can you change?
Break silos by engaging all teams across channels through clear communication and collaboration. Set up a consistent brand equation and ensure every individual prioritizes customer experience.
2. Improper use of customer data
As an eCommerce brand, you deal with massive customer data daily, from customer addresses to browsing histories. Such data can easily get obsolete. Using outdated customer data to run campaigns can lead to disconnected channels and several roadblocks.
What can you change?
Fix your data by identifying duplicate, incomplete, and outdated data. Use an intuitive tool that offers a singular view of data by gathering relevant metrics across sources.
3. Poor marketing strategy
The lack of a customer data-led approach and planning can lead to an ineffective strategy, despite brands recognizing the importance of building an omnichannel experience.
What can you change?
Make your customers the main focus of your omnichannel marketing strategy. Identify every important interaction your customers have with your brand across every touchpoint and channel, and measure and test continuously to run better campaigns.
4. Not measuring the right metrics or KPIs
A typical buyer’s journey consists of various stages, from discovering your products to cart abandonments and purchasing. But most marketers measure the overall campaign performance but fail to measure the right metrics/KPIs at every stage of the buyer’s journey.
What can you change?
Measure your campaign at every stage of the buyer’s journey. For instance, start measuring the number of website visits during the discovery stage, the number of email open rates during a re-engagement stage, etc.
This way, you have extra valuable insights to deliver personalized experiences as part of your omnichannel strategy.
Conclusion
Profitable omnichannel marketing results from measuring and optimizing based on where and how your target audience engages with you the most.
To help you in this quest, Graas lets you gather the right customer data, analyze and measure critical trends, and execute a winning omnichannel marketing strategy using the power of AI.
The Graas Performance marketing and growth solutions can help you scale your eCommerce business and leverage Graas’ exceptional AI capabilities and optimized strategies to multiply your online revenue.