The Covid19 pandemic has brought a huge impact on retail businesses and customer purchasing habits. Some new trends have gained traction, such as buying online and picking up in-store, local shopping, and online shopping. Retailers begin to consider a plan that will enable them to capitalize on all of these trends in order to boost sales and develop during hard times. That is when they start to consider Omnichannel strategy.
What is Omnichannel?
Omnichannel is a marketing strategy with the integration of all offline and online channels including retail stores, E-commerce websites, social media handles, SMS and email marketing, mobile applications. The purpose is to provide a seamless, positive, and unified customer experience. With the Omnichannel strategy, customers can go to any channel, at any place and time to make purchases and all the data is still synchronized and managed in one single omnichannel point of sale system.
Why is Omnichannel important to business?
According to Harvard Business Review, almost 73% of shoppers use multichannel throughout their shopping journey. Customers who utilized more than four channels spent 9% more in the store than those who only used one, following the same survey. Therefore, Omnichannel is no longer an option, it becomes essential for businesses if they want to stand out. There are few advantages that Omnichannel can bring to your business:
Gain customer satisfaction and loyalty: Omnichannel strategy allows customers to make purchases at any channel at their convenience. It helps increase customers’ satisfaction and loyalty.
More engagement and sales: According to internetsearchinc.com, brands using omnichannel produced an 18.96% engagement rate, while single-channel retailers got just a 5.4% engagement rate.
Better turnover rates: Businesses with strong omnichannel consumer interaction strategies keep 89 % of their customers, while businesses with weak omnichannel customer engagement strategies retain only 33% following data from internetsearchinc.com
Increasing brand recognition: When you develop an Omnichannel strategy, it means that customers can find and see your brands from many different channels and places. Your brand will be more popularly recognized.
How to build an Omnichannel marketing strategy?
To create a good omnichannel experience for customers, you need to build up a perfect omnichannel marketing strategy.
Plan customer experience: You have to create a clear plan regarding how you want the experience to flow across all interactions. This can be made by understanding customer’s popular channels and their behavior across all channels.
Use data as a base: Basing on data from the system, you will know how your customer behaves and can design an according to solution to address their difficulties
Segment the user and personalize the journey: You may easily classify users into multiple categories based on common behavior patterns once you’ve analyzed the data. This will assist you in creating unique journeys for each consumer type.
Get the context right: You need to make sure your message’s context is relevant to the user, and send it to them at the time when they are most active and on the channel where they engage the most.
Select the right marketing automation tool: Make sure that you choose the correct marketing automation tool to implement your strategy as your plan. Before deciding on the best one, conduct a comprehensive investigation.
Apply customer-first strategy: Customers are the center of business. No plan or marketing tool can work unless your personnel is taught to provide a consistent experience to clients.
What defines a good Omnichannel customer experience?
There are five main criteria that define a good Omnichannel customer experience.
Convenience: Customers today want a buying experience that allows them to shop without having to spend too much time. Therefore, customers’ convenience is one of the most crucial criteria for a great customer experience.
Consistency: It’s critical to maintain consistency when applying the Omnichannel strategy. Building a strong brand that your customers remember requires creating experiences based on a consistent brand presence.
Relevance: It is better if you can design personalized interaction based on customers’ preferences, their context, purchasing history, and behavior.
Empowerment: If retailers can empower customers by informing them to make the best purchasing decision. Your normal customers can become loyal customers.
Agility: Businesses must have a scalable system, analytic tools to know all the market update situations and changes in customer’s behavior. This will help you to make in-time action when the opportunities come.
Conclusion
In general, the market and customer behavior have changed significantly during recent years because of technological evolution and pandemic. Customers now prefer multiple and integrated channels to get their best purchasing experiences. Businesses also strive to go Omnichannel to gain customer’s experience because of its importance. Omnichannel strategy is now an important step for any business if they don’t want to be dragged behind. Besides, you also should consider all the mentioned factors to get full advantages of this channel.
