To remain competitive in the digital era, businesses must be more open to innovative strategies. It begins with the realization that the physical company no longer serves only as a point of sale for customers. Instead, businesses must meet customers where they are, offering a varied range of services/products both online and in their physical storefronts. They must also make certain that their services are catered to the correct audience. Therefore, this article will discuss 5 tips to build a successful omnichannel retail strategy.
Overview
Why is omnichannel so important?
Omnichannel is a business strategy in which a firm provides consumers and prospects with access to its products, offers, and support services across numerous channels, including offline stores and online platforms (smartphones/tablets/PCs, etc.). The shopping journey can continue from one platform to another without interruptions.
In fact, research has shown that companies that use omnichannel customer engagement techniques maintain 89% of their clients on average. Indeed, omnichannel can bring benefits to retail businesses in different ways.
Retailers can use omnichannel to increase store visibility, promote sales and traffic, and connect different touchpoints. An omnichannel retail strategy also enhances the consumer experience and expands the number of buying channels available to customers – whether on mobile, online spaces, or in stores.
5 tips to build a successful omnichannel retail strategy
Make your site mobile-friendly
As mentioned before, meet your consumers where they are – on online spaces such as smartphones or tablets. In 2021, there will be 6.378 billion smartphone users in the world. And they will not be likely to stay at your website if it is not mobile-friendly. Therefore, our first tip is to increase the convenience factors on your mobile website.
Let’s imagine a busy mom is waiting at a dentist’s office and wants to shop for the upcoming holidays. She instantly goes to your mobile website to find out. By offering a mobile-friendly experience, you can increase the chance that she will shop at your store anywhere anytime. This can help boost your sales effectively.
Use personalization
You can also try offering in-store promotions, mainly via personalized email communications with exclusive coupons or deals. This may help build brand loyalty and encourage current and new consumers to visit your physical location. To improve the personalization of your promos, link the prior purchase information recorded in your system with the email marketing solution. It is also effective to suggest products that have long been on their wishlists, or items that they shop frequently.
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Albert Heijn, the largest supermarket chain in the Netherlands can be a good inspiration in this aspect. This brand offered users a mobile app that automatically provides personalized promotions for the users’ frequently bought products. Interestingly, this promotion is not the same between people. This is because different consumers choose different products during their grocery shopping journey. By using personalization, Albert Heijn has connected with customers on a more personal level, thus stepping up the game, and retaining a lot of consumers.
Make use of click and collect
Buy online pick up in-store (BOPIS), or click and collect, a strategy that allows customers more control and eases when purchasing things, is an excellent example of integrating conventional retail with eCommerce.
Moreover, people were less likely to spend time inside stores and non-essential businesses as the COVID-19 outbreak spread last year. Therefore, click and collect services skyrocketed in popularity during the initial shutdown. When delivery services grew overburdened, click and collect became a more convenient method of getting products.
However, keep in mind that the omnichannel retail strategy you provide must be user-friendly and smooth in order to entice people to return to BOPIS. In reality, many retail businesses nowadays are using a point of sale system, such as ConnectPOS, to help them manage the click and collect process. The system can minimize errors by allowing staff members to choose click and collect right in the process of checking out. Moreover, real-time synchronization also helps staff stay up-to-date about the inventory levels.
Choose a suitable channel
When it comes to choosing a suitable channel, we would recommend starting small if you’re new to omnichannel marketing. Choose up to three channels and concentrate on a single campaign for a certain amount of time. Concentrate your efforts on the channels and touchpoints where your prospects and customers spend the most time.
For example, your clients use Facebook far more than an eCommerce website and prefer mobile purchasing to desktop buying. From that, you can build a strong omnichannel strategy for Facebook first, before extending to other channels.
Another excellent method when choosing platforms is to provide customer service throughout all of your channels, such as email support combined with an online chat widget or an in-app chat.
For a successful omnichannel retail strategy, ensure that your interactions across all touchpoints are consistent. It is important that – your consumers could buy your products and services through various channels without having to go through a different brand experience.
Measure your results
Without measuring the results of your omnichannel marketing strategy, it will be hard to develop and adjust it. As a retail business owner, you should test, iterate, measure your outcomes, seek feedback from your consumers, and then apply what you’ve learned to grow your plan.
Remember to bring together multiple corporate activities, such as product, sales, and customer support, to ensure that they are all linking with one another. It is also important to establish team responsibilities and objectives and key performance indicators with milestones to ensure that everyone is working toward the same goal. Monitoring and speaking about your omnichannel retail strategy regularly can help you see where you’re excelling and where you need to improve.
During this process, consulting sales reports can be a good way to monitor your performance. In addition, you can also send out surveys to customers, asking for their feedback via email marketing. Listening to your employees can also work because they are the ones who directly interact with consumers. Balancing out between these factors can contribute to a better omnichannel retail strategy in the future.
Wrapping up
The combination of digital and physical commerce will soon become the standard in retail. Retailers will have to use new technology and realign procedures to remain ahead of the game in order to provide meaningful and valued shopping experiences. After all, we hope that this blog can give you a better overview of how to develop a successful omnichannel retail strategy
If you are planning to make your business go omnichannel, ConnectPOS can help you to achieve your goal! Being a leading POS provider for companies all over the world, we take pride in the powerful omnichannel features, such as real-time synchronization, click and collect, PWA Consumer App, etc. If you want to know more about us, don’t hesitate to contact our team for more information.