OMNICHANNEL RETAILING: HOW AND WHY IT WORKS FOR YOU
As we continue to drive our clients toward an enhanced online experience for their customers, we are greeted with the necessity of creating an omnichannel experience. Not a multi-channel experience, but a single experience transferred across channels.
From Hubspot: “an Omni-channel experience is a multi-channel approach to marketing, selling, and serving customers in a way that creates an integrated and cohesive customer experience no matter how or where a customer reaches out.” It’s also been referred to by Square as “meeting people where they are already shopping or exploring on social media.” The purpose of omnichannel marketing and operations is to keep users within your brand longer.
The purpose behind marketing is to not only communicate the brand but engage and inspire customers as well.
Status Check
Before we begin, it’s important to review the current status of the following aspects of your business:
Product inventory
For your inventory, it’s important to have all products or services itemized with correlating SKUs, multiple photos of each product, and descriptions of each and how to use them, if applicable. If you’re not already operating a virtual marketplace, this is a great starting point for that as well. We recommend taking a trip over to our blog that discusses how to set up a virtual store of your own.
Marketing
How does your marketing communicate your brand? Are you focused on the customer experience, brand awareness, or promotion of your products? In actuality, the answer is yes to all three. The purpose behind marketing is to not only communicate the brand but engage and inspire customers as well. Take time with your team, or if the team is you, some knowledgeable colleagues over dinner (on you) and review these aforementioned questions. In each of these questions lies even more questions that might better illuminate your brand’s position. Though strenuous it may seem, this practice will better inform decisions both short and long term.
Sales
Are you measuring sales performance? Which products perform better than others? How often are you offering discounts, referral rewards, incentives that keep customers in your store? Your sales are a reflection of your customer base and effectiveness in your marketing. Use these questions and more to determine what stays, what goes, and what you’d like to try out on this new journey.
Customer support
An integral aspect of omnichannel retailing, the overall customer experience thrives on sufficient customer support. This includes operating with a knowledgeable team, providing substantial information on your website about your store and products, and, of course, a highly involved and positively engaging experience on refunds and returns.
Customer Success
What is Customer Success? Defined by the Customer Success Association, “Customer Success is a long-term, scientifically engineered, and professionally directed strategy for maximizing customer and company sustainable proven value.” In short, it’s how you as a brand manage your relationship with your customers. This includes both inside and outside of the store. From offering relatable products that are similar to their interests, to a smooth and speedy checkout, all aspects of your customer’s experience from the doorway to register, or from a few clicks to the shopping cart, are integral to customer success. Think about what the customer experience is like when shopping with your brand, and ask yourself what could be done differently, or better.
Once reviewed, you’ll want to set goals and objectives for each category that aligns with the mission to migrate your business to the omnichannel model. Ultimately, you’ll want to have a plan that’s detailed and easily understood so that all members of your organization can follow it and easily adhere to it.
DON’T Forget About the Buyer’s Journey
As you create your plan of attack for the great migration to omnichannel operations, of course, you are planning with the customer in mind. However, though planning with the customer in mind does serve the benefit of your business, it’s important to not cut corners, but rather expand them. Consider each point in the buyer’s journey and how you can enhance it, on top of what we’ve already covered.
Acquisition
Acquisition is a process that must be tackled from all corners of the buyer experience, including past the point of purchase. Here are a few ways to make sure your bases are covered.
E-receipts - Engage the Environmental Way
At GSATi, we take pride in being a Certified Green IT Services company, focusing on initiatives that reduce the amount of paper waste we produce. As a retailer, you can also practice this method, while actively participating in customer acquisition. Instead of, or in addition to, a paper receipt, offer your customers an e-receipt that can be delivered to an email address of their choice. Then, your customer can review their purchase, as well as potentially engage with any supplementary content you choose to include within the email, such as a “subscribe to our newsletter” or fill out our survey with a featured incentive such as a percentage discount. Customers may not always engage, but the ones who do will be enticed by the reward and will happily provide their personal information in exchange.
Minimize “Negative” Cost Factors
Additional cost factors inevitably tacked onto a purchase can be deterrents to complete a purchase. Use these tactics to defeat the case of the abandoned cart, but only when you can sustainably fulfill it.
Free delivery
Though free delivery can eat into your fulfillment costs, the occasional free delivery can entice customers to purchase and encourage their friends to purchase as well. Based on a consumer survey conducted by Boston Consulting Group, nearly 75% of consumers agreed that free delivery would be their top improvement to their online experience.
Offer discounts
There are many opportunities to use discounts from different strategic points. No matter how you choose to approach it, a surprise discount or recurring discounts such as a birthday discount are valuable tools that will not only incentivize customers to complete a purchase but will bring them back for future purchases as well.
Remarketing
In your observance of buyer/customer behavior, sometimes a customer will abandon a shopping cart or revisit a particular product page, let’s say a new leather jacket, but don’t make it to the ‘’buy now’’ point. We take these instances as an opportunity to re-engage with that customer by “remarketing” the product. Connect with that customer using emails or text messages, sharing surveys that might shine a light on why they didn’t buy the jacket or even offer a special discount to said customer if it’s within your resources.
Personalization & The Power of Email
It’s no secret that people enjoy personalization or being catered to, especially by their favorite brands. Use personalization both on your website and through your email services to ensnare the new customer, and hold fast to the loyal ones.
Website personalization
Briefly touched on here and in past articles we’ve written, customers enjoy seeing related products or other content catered specifically to them and their interests. Studies have shown that users are more likely to abandon the site if they feel the content is too stagnant, or unrelatable. For starters, try recommending to repeat customers products of the same price point they may have shopped in during past trips, or pair products in your marketing that would normally go together. These popular pairings are great ways for customers to take the first step into testing out a new brand.
Newsletters, vouchers, flash sales, subscriber-only, etc.
Though effective, third-party automation tools do require an investment. If you are unable to do so at this time, individual emails and direct emails with a touch of flair work just as well as placeholders until you’re ready to make that jump. If that’s you now and today, get started by checking out newsletter and discount automation services that allow you to reach out to clients and deliver those personalized goods. No matter what you choose, the proof is in the pudding: consumers love special treatment.
Final Thoughts
These are great additions to your toolbox that amplify both your brand and your customer’s experience.
Focus not on the Price, but the Experience
Users have the power to compare product prices in an instant, from the palm of their hand. Instead of focusing on offering the cheapest price, make sure the customer’s trip to payment is full of an enriching experience worthy of paying that extra few dollars to get the same item.
Convenience
Make it easy for customers to ask questions, search for their current interests, anything they need that will help make their purchases easier throughout your website. This means search bars, access to a chat service if applicable, however, you can manage to add some predetermined copy that informs the customer’s buying decision at any time of day, so your night owls and early birds can each successfully shop with your brand.
Provide Reassurance, Test Your Site
Test your site often, run updates when needed, and ensure that your site is functioning well. This also includes getting rid of broken links, non-updated SEO, a functioning shopping cart - the works.
Be Transparent
As your transition to an omnichannel presence, a customer or two will inevitably encounter an issue. It happened before in-store, and it will certainly happen again in the future. With each passing issue, make sure to remain transparent and responsive, as that personal connection during times of frustration can keep the loyal customer around, and your new customers, too.
Showcase the availability of in-store shopping and vice versa
Ideally, your customer base is interested in browsing your website after they’ve left the store, and vice versa. They also like the availability of shipping your product directly to their home, or the homes of others. Connect your in-store data with your online data, ensuring that users can determine whether or not they can order the Spring line for pickup at their nearby location, or ship home or to the home of a friend or loved one.
Conclusion
Omnichannel retailing and marketing, though daunting, can be your one-way ticket to long-term success. Its requirements are tests of your creativity, your business acumen, and the ability to act with resiliency all at once. In the end, these tests will help formulate what sustainable omnichannel operations mean and look like to your brand, leading to long-term success. If you’re looking for a helping hand, we at GSATi are here to give that to you. Just contact us today to help get started.
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