You’ve probably heard of many different tools and strategies for successful e-commerce business development, but one, which has really proved to be useful, is omnichannel marketing.
In this article, I am going to explain what this tool is and how to create a strategically planned and executed multichannel approach for your business.
How To Create An Omnichannel Strategy For Ecommerce
What Is Omnichannel Marketing?
These days consumers are constantly exposed to a number of interactions with a great variety of brands through a number of touchpoints, such as;
- Facebook ads
- Google ads
- Instagram ads
- Text messaging
- Emails
- Chatbots, etc.
It is quite a long journey until the customer becomes fully acquainted with your brand and is willing to make their first purchase.
Omnichannel Marketing is a strategically planned and executed multichannel approach, which provides your potential clients with a complete brand experience starting with their first visit to your website and ending with them becoming your loyal customers.
The main purpose of the omnichannel approach is to create a seamless connection between all customer touchpoints, which work together to communicate the brand’s message and encourage the visitor to take a certain action.
3 Key Tips To Create A Successful Omnichannel Strategy
Implementing such a strategy is not an easy task, and a great majority of companies fail to do so due to not following at least a few of the below listed recommendations.
1. All aboard!
Yes, you’ve read it right – all aboard, i.e. the whole company must be on the same page with what is going on with its omnichannel strategy.
To create a well-connected ecosystem and a truly complete customer experience, it is not enough for your marketing team only to be aware of what must be done; your sales team, your customer support team, your upper management team, and even your delivery guys must speak and act in line with the strategy so that your brand’s message is communicated correctly across all touchpoints.
Customer data is at the center of this strategy, which means that every single team of the company can benefit from it and make necessary adjustments to improve customer experience even further.
- Your marketing team must know which color is your customers’ most favorite.
- Your sales team must know exactly how many purchases have been made by people of a certain age and sex.
- Your upper management must know from which location the majority of customers is coming from.
- Your customer support must know which channels of communication people prefer to use the most.
2. Know Your Customer
To successfully implement an omnichannel strategy it is crucial to know your customer and what he/she experiences while on your brand’s journey.
Test the processes
To know your customer and what they experience inside out you need to put yourself in their shoes, i.e. test all of the processes they go through while getting acquainted with your brand. The key areas to look into are below:
- Research for your products
- Make a purchase from your store
- Try returning an item to your store and claim a refund
- Communicate with the brand through every available channel
- Engage with customer support via submitting tickets
Going through each of these processes should help you understand and see what your customer goes through and how they feel. Be honest with yourself.
- Was this experience pleasant?
- Was everything flawless?
- Will you come back again?
- Will you recommend this brand to your friends?
If you answered NO to at least one of these questions, go back to the drawing board and think about how to improve the failing process.
Since trends change rapidly, so do users’ preferences, this only means that you must undertake such test as frequently as possible and on a consistent basis. Your goal is to make your client’s experience as pleasant as it can possibly be.
Collect customer feedback
I cannot stress this much enough – collect as much feedback from your customers as possible! The usual way of how businesses collect customer feedback is during the post-purchase phase, where customers are asked to leave a review of the product or the overall experience.
Omnichannel marketing strategies encourage to collect feedback not only at the post-purchase phase but also during the shopping phase, for example – at the customer support area.
The customer support team should do their best to not only provide the best support possible, but also record and store all the data they receive via clients’ complaints, inquiries, and feedback so that it can be later used to alter the processes accordingly and improve customer experience.
3. Segment your audience
The key to a successful omnichannel marketing strategy is that the right person gets the right message at the right time through the right channel, and this can only be achieved by having your audience segmented in a right way.
There are a few main ways you can segment your audience:
Customers’ behavior
Segmenting your customers according to their shopping behavior can help you identify at which point of their journey they really are and act accordingly. The most common scenario is to track at which point the customer left your website.
Say the customer added items to the basket and abandoned it; using omnichannel strategy it is easy to re-engage the customer again and encourage him/her to purchase the items left behind.
Profile data
What’s also popular is to segment your customers according to their profile data, such as age, gender, personal preferences, location, and customize your brand’s communication with them accordingly.
You wouldn’t want to target men in their 20s while selling Pandora bracelets, right? That’s why segmentation is necessary.
Conclusion
The way to give this strategy the best chance of success is to follow these tips and to test everything. It’s crucial to measure everything you do, test, implement, and observe while undertaking an omnichannel strategy.
Every single step of your brand’s communication with the client is crucial, so each and every step has to be recorded, measured, and acted respectively upon.
Client data must be measured properly so that to avoid excessive expenses, incorrect targeting, and your brand’s misrepresentation. Client data is everything these days, especially in omnichannel marketing.
Otherwise, how else would you know that 86% of customers are willing to pay up to 25% more for products and services simply to experience a better customer journey?
If you keep relevant data on your processes, understand your customer, target appropriately, and keep your entire company on top of your omnichannel strategy, you’re sure to succeed.