Omnichannel is no longer an option, but an essential for retail success. Retailers that embrace an omnichannel marketing strategy experience 91% greater year-over-year customer retention rates compared to businesses that don’t, according to a recent survey by Loyalty360. Understanding the importance of this trend, retailers are investing and coming up with new technologies and strategies to serve their customers better at every touchpoint. In the article today, we will present some actionable tactics business owners can employ to move forward with their omnichannel marketing strategy.
Overview
What Are The Differences Between Omnichannel and Multichannel Marketing?
Omnichannel marketing is not exactly new; however, it is often confused with multichannel marketing. This confusion then leads to incomplete strategy creation and a lack of results.
Multichannel marketing is a tactic that utilizes several different marketing channels. These channels are used as various means of communication between you and your targeted audience. Channels can include:
- Email marketing
- Social media
- SMS text messages
- Search engine marketing and more
In multichannel marketing, these channels are all used independently from one another. This means that these channels are simply there to provide means of communication. It also means they are treated as separate entities together.
Omnichannel marketing utilizes multiple marketing channels. This is where the primary confusion between omnichannel and multichannel lies. What separates omnichannel marketing is that each of the channels used in this strategy is connected to a single holistic user-centric structure, which means each of these channels works with one another to create a unified user experience.
A typical example of omnichannel marketing is the Walgreens Balance Rewards program. Through one platform (the Walgreens app), it allows customers to :
- Access their personal information
- Make purchases
- Check rewards points
- Refill prescriptions
- Virtual meeting with doctors and more
Marketing Strategies For Omnichannel Retail Store
Do What’s Best For Your Customers
The world of digital marketing is all about customer experience. Your omnichannel needs to focus on what consumer needs and what works best for them.
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When having an omnichannel marketing strategy, retailers should know they are spreading themselves very thin. Therefore, they should be careful not to focus too much on one platform and forget about the others. Customers can reach you in various ways, from laptops, mobile phones, or tablets to emails, social media, text messages. No matter what platform you advertise on, it should lead your customers to your landing page, the product info page, or wherever you want them to be.
Omnichannel marketing strategies should effectively collaborate efforts from all the departments within the company. If not, it will decrease the quality of your site and bring inconsistent experience to customers, which is very annoying in this case.
Take Advantage Of Data Analysis
Utilizing your data efficiently is the crux of omnichannel marketing strategy. Organizations should try and compile data from multiple sources including user profile, their buying, and search behavior (online), or demographics. Third-party data analysis tools such as Google Analytics is also a great option to consider. Even though it requires some learning curves, users who are willing to put in the effort to learn will eventually appreciate the customization in Google Analytics.
Most leading organizations use CRM (customer relationship management) software to record their consumer data. It is important to understand your target customers and how they interact with your brand.
Overhauling your consumer experience by interacting with all the channels is important. Asking for customer feedback through their journey to make improvements is highly recommended!
Target And Segment Your Messages
Omnichannel marketing is largely dependent on the right targeting and personalization of messages. Segmenting the subscribers into categories and groups makes it easier to send messages.
Categorization can be done based on the customer profile (demographics, age, gender, location, etc), campaign engagement levels (how much the customers interact with the channels), and shopping behavior.
Automation can be set up to send relevant messages to the right customers at the right time and through the right channels. Modern techniques like location-based advertising (send different messages and advertisements to customers based on different locations) could be applied to get optimum results.
Optimize Customer Care
Within the omnichannel marketing strategy, retailers offer a variety of services through multiple channels. However, platforms that are poorly integrated with your omnichannel approach are a disaster. You will have customers with issues across platforms but your system is not set up properly to help them. Therefore, the first step for retailers in optimizing customer care is to invest in their platforms properly.
The right manner to offer help to a customer doesn’t need to look like a sales pitch. Customer care should always be about convenience and comfort. Here are some important tips to improve your customer experience:
- Shorten your social media response time: all customers want an answer to their problem on the spot. Make sure your teams are set up to acknowledge the problem and resolve it as soon as possible
- Live chat assistance: live interactive chat is preferred by most customers to resolve their issues. These may also be connected with your social media platform to utilize their chat function. Using reliable live chat software is also an effective way to handle such problems if business owners can afford it
- Email automation: emails are an effective customer service tool. They can address the majority of customer queries and are considered an ‘easy to manage’ solution by the users.
Wrapping up
Above are some of the omnichannel marketing strategies that can help boost your online presence, brand awareness, and sales. We hope you will choose wisely which method works best for your store. Please feel free to reach out to us if you have any further questions!