Customer experience is the most important factor that determines the success of any ecommerce business. There has been a rapid change in customer behavior as they are on multiple purchasing channels and are constantly interacting with your brand with multiple touchpoints. Hence brands have also adopted customer-centric omnichannel marketing strategies to cater to the evolved customer behavior and offer a seamless shopping experience.
Let’s dissect what omnichannel marketing is, how it is changing the marketing landscape, and how it can be used to reap the maximum benefits.
What is Omnichannel Marketing?
Customers are increasingly fragmented, hopping from channel-to-channel, and from device-to-device. They are everywhere expecting a seamless and consistent experience across all the channels. The customer journeys have also got complicated because they are more empowered than ever before and interact with your brands at multiple touchpoints before making a purchasing decision. To make this clearer, let’s look into an example.
a. Let’s say your friend posted a picture on Facebook and either the shoes or handbag of your friend caught your attention. You immediately search for that product on the web and go to a particular ecommerce website to get more information about the product - description, prices, brand details, ratings, and reviews.
b. While you are checking out the details, you might get a phone call or someone in your family may disturb you. You attend on to them and you may tend to forget about your last browsing.
c. The next day while you are browsing something on your phone, a popup might show the same product you were browsing the previous night. This may trigger you to explore the product once again. Now, you also look into similar products but you may still be unsure of the quality and look-and-feel of the products.
d. So, the next day you visit a nearby physical store that has the same products. Your in-store experience would instill confidence about the product. Depending on the best price, you might either buy from the physical store or get back home and order it online.
If you keenly look into the whole process, the customer didn’t buy the product at the first touchpoint. Before he made a purchase, there were multiple touchpoints on varied channels - social media, ecommerce store, search engines, physical stores, etc. The customer engages consistently with your product on all the channels
In short, Omnichannel provides the freedom to find and buy products from anywhere and at any time. The customers would have total control over their product preferences, schedules, and their experiences.
Why are Omnichannel Marketing Strategies important?
1. Higher engagement and Conversion rate - Omnichannel buyers’ engagement with the buyers is higher and the conversion rate is also higher. Those who engage with brands on multiple channels are more likely to make a purchase compared to those who engage on a single or fewer channel. The customers also have full freedom on which channel to choose for their purchase.
2. Personalized experience with Mobile commerce - With many orders stemming from the mobile, desktop times are dwindling and the customers are connecting from everywhere. Mobile commerce is on the rise and a personalized experience is offered to the consumers.
3. Improve Brand Loyalty - Omnichannel marketing is a smart combination of physical and online stores. Customers enjoy a personalized experience and effective guided selling while purchasing and this increases their loyalty to the brand.
4. Customer retention - Customer retention is 90% for omnichannel marketing as it prioritizes retention over one-time purchases. Nurturing repeat buyers is the main element in this strategy. You get a loyal audience base who don’t abandon after making a single purchase.
Omnichannel Marketing Strategies
1. Customers are your priority!
Customers are the gears of your business - if they don’t drive down your sales funnel, your well-oiled ecommerce business isn’t going to reap any profits. Understanding your customers’ preferences, needs, and pain points help you in determining any disruptions to your business. To know your customers, understand their journey, collect feedback, and see at what stage they are in the sales funnel. Understanding these things help avoid any fruitless exchanges and bring back focus to only prospective customers. Emails, social media ads, mobile notifications should be brand-focused and capture the customers’ attention. They should be captivating and rewarding across all the channels.
2. Personalization
Personalization is one of the most important elements in your omnichannel marketing strategy to deliver a more consistent and engaging experience across all channels. To meet this, you need to create a landing page with engaging and exceptional content that will resonate with the customers. Personalized emails, social media ads are some ways to connect with the customers.
Segmentation - Segmentation of your customers makes you deliver tailor-made content to each customer based on their demographics, preferences, and needs. By capturing the customer preferences during their subscription, you will be able to create accurate customer profiles to personalize and optimize the content.
Content - The content should be appealing and enticing so that the click-through and conversion rate of your campaigns is high. The opening content can deliver impressive triggers and lead them to a call-to-action. Many thriving businesses share personalized content instead of a generic one. With exceptional content, you can make the most out of your business without letting your ad spend to go in vain. A personalized landing page is a massive conversion tool that is tailor-made as per customer preferences.
3.Map your customers’ journey
Understand your customer journey and their touchpoints in the journey. Based on this one can craft their marketing strategies to move a step down the sales funnel. You can deliver personalized and customizable experiences to them.
For instance, let’s say a customer visits your ecommerce store while browsing for a pair of shoes. The customer looks around the webstore and before leaving, we manage to collect the email address through a lead capture form. A nice and captivating welcome email is sent to the customer id and chances are that the customer may visit your store once again. Even if the customer is indecisive, customized ads would be seen on her social media channel or any other place where she is actively engaged with. These may make her determined this time and she visits your store once again. But for some distractions, she abandons the cart without completing the purchase. Here, we would be sending automated cart abandonment notifications with some incentives that would tempt her to make the purchase.
This is a detailed customer journey showcasing multiple customer touchpoints before making a purchase.
4. Choose the right channels
Omnichannel marketing incorporates multiple channels like physical stores, online websites, emails, mobile push notifications, social media channels, and many more ways to reach out to customers. There are multiple communication channels and you need to pick the apt ones for your business. You need to first understand where your customers are and what channels they are on. Pay close attention to the channels to determine the customers’ behavior on them. Understand your customers’ pain points and promptly address them on the respective channels that could create a brand first impression and improve your lead generation efforts.
5. Team Collaboration
Omnichannel marketing requires collective efforts and collaboration of all your teams. They need to coordinate as a single unit and build a rock-solid omnichannel marketing strategy. An omnichannel strategist may help structure the whole team and steer through efficiently. The teams should be strengthened and they need to make both customers and brands as their focus areas. Unifying email marketing team, social media marketing teams, and customer service representatives might serve the purpose. Bring the best teams together, guide them, and streamline the marketing efforts to deliver the best customer experiences.
6. A/B test your messages
Till now, we have been focusing on delivering incredible customer experiences but we need to check through A/B testing if it’s working or not. This is the simplest way to find out if our efforts are having any impact on the customers. Create targeted marketing campaigns and messages to your customers and see if it converts any. A successful marketing campaign will drive them down the sales funnel and even turn them into strong advocates of your brand.
Wind-up
Omnichannel marketing may seem exhausting but it provides incredible conversions as your sole focus is on the customers. We have provided some of the most important tactics to build a perfect customer journey but if you find it overwhelming, Skynet Technologies is the right place for you. You can hunker down while we create the perfect omnichannel strategies to help you reach your goals.
We provide digital marketing services to fuel your business with enterprise level capabilities and keep your customer coming back! If you want omnichannel ecommerce marketing, multichannel ecommerce solution, ecommerce website development, shopping cart development, online store development and more, feel free to get in touch with us. Let’s redefine the Internet Marketing Strategy by adding our creativity!
