Article

Kapil Arora
Kapil Arora 3 June 2019

A Complete Guide to Omni-channel Marketing: 7 Strategies That Convert More Sales

Explore Omni-channel Marketing to expand reach, maintain alignment and, boost sales. Offer integrated experience throughout the buyers journey. Make the most of each marketing touch-points to engage customers and enhance their experience to influence them to make a purchase. This articles illustrates 7 strategies that can help you in understanding the ecosystem and planning the omni-channel marketing endeavours.

With the profusion of technology, a number of e-commerce businesses are vying to provide their customers with a hassle-free shopping experience. Bearing in mind to engage with the customers any time, everywhere there arises a need to deliver unified communications across all brand touch-points.

Thus, the demand for ‘Omni channel Marketing’emerges.

This article describes some compelling omni channel e-commerce strategies that help e-commerce businesses to increase conversions. However, before we delve deeper, let’s have a quick refresher on:

What exactly does omni channel marketing mean?

Omni-channel marketing is a concept of providing an integrated and seamless customer experience across multiple channels relevant to the buyer’s journey irrespective of how fragmented and non-linear the journey is.

Source: Buyer’s Journey via Insights.com

The term emphasizes a shift in the way buyers proceed through the marketing funnel.

Simply put, employing omni channel marketing for your business means having a presence across several online (website, mobile app, SMS, social media, email, WhatsApp) & offline (retail store, call-center, events) channels, offering seamless navigation across them.

A topology of Omni channel marketing

Starbucks, Chipotle, and Disney are a few examples of brands crushing omni channel marketing the best way to prompt your own strategy.

Being a marketer, it is essential to note that “omni channel” is different from “multi-channel” in many aspects and have completely different definitions.

Omni channel is the successor of multi-channel marketing. While in multi-channel marketing, businesses interact with consumers by sharing content across multiple touch-points without any optimization between the channels, however, omni channel marketing refers to a singular experience for buyers across all inter-related channels.

Omnichannel marketing strategies allow customers to access real-time information irrespective of their location, time, or the channel used. In a way, it enables businesses to break the gap between online and offline.

What’s an omnichannel buying experience?

Let us have a look at the sample omnichannel buyer journey:

  • A buyer finds and purchases an item from your brand through, for example, Amazon.
  • Soon, he receives an unboxing experience (tailored-for-Amazon), with material advertising inventory which is not found on Amazon accompanied with a discount offer, your loyalty program information, and a URL to a dedicated collection page on your website.
  • When a customer opens the landing page, it triggers the pixels for your Facebook shop, Instagram store, and display advertisements promoting items that complement the original purchase.
  • On making a second purchase, the customer receives an email which notifies him of the nearby retail brick-and-mortar store or event and displays the “refer-a-friend” program.
  • A bunch of follow-up emails motivates the customer to take a look at new trends on Pinterest or tag your brand on Instagram and promote your loyalty program.
  • Before your next pop-up Ad, all the loyal customers are sent a link to your brand’s private collection where they are encouraged to buy via their smartphones and are notified of an exclusive VIP lounge.

Thus, using information about one sales channel and passing them to the next channel is how the basic omnichannel buying experience feels like.

The significance of omnichannel marketing in e-commerce

Omnichannel marketing is not a mere marketing tactic, instead, it is an evolution for e-commerce businesses. This approach facilitates eCommerce companies to reach more people, faster, and easier than ever before.

Getting Omnichannel is about being ubiquitous - available everywhere, all the times.

There are manifold benefits of adopting omnichannel approach:

1. Providing a better customer experience

Apart from providing customers with the freedom to search and buy through a unified shopping experience, Omnichannel approach empowers the consumer to interact with a company in a way which feels natural to them.

The unification of physical and digital channels means the e-commerce companies can always send the best action whenever it’s needed. Accomplishing this leads to an increase in conversions and better customer retention.

Thus, omnichannel marketing enhances customer loyalty.

2. Instant revenue growth and conversion rate

The greatest benefit of omnichannel marketing in retail is that it facilitates businesses to generate great ROI.

According to Google, Omnichannel shoppers have a 30% higher lifetime value as compared to those who shop using only one channel.

This means, With the customers using more channels, they are likely to purchase more. Moreover, Omnichannel strategy brings more customer retention by boosting loyalty rates.

3. Lower production and warehousing costs

The omnichannel marketing approach with the centralization of data in an e-commerce business can facilitate you to produce accurate sales forecasts and demand estimation. Moreover, this helps to reduce wasted inventory and the expenses related to overproduction and warehousing items that are not sold.

4. Lower advertising cost

Since, digital marketing and advertising have become heavily data-driven, a system which centralizes all business data can help lower your expenditure on advertisements, by offering historical data on order details.

5. Omnichannel retail enhances retargeting

Many e-commerce businesses are not able to manage customer targeting and simply display the same product on page after page. Opting omnichannel marketing, you can further showcase a product across multiple channels to better attract customers to visit your e-store.

In short, opting omnichannel marketing either increase the sales of a company or decrease the operational costs.

7 Tips to plan an optimized omnichannel marketing strategy

The brands that opted extremely strong omnichannel communications retain on average 89% of their customers as compared to 33% of brands with weak omnichannel communications.

Keeping this in mind and placing the customer at the center of marketing efforts, here is a list of persuasive omnichannel marketing strategies that are sure to create conversions.1. Know your buyer completely.

To provide your customers with the best of what you can, having a deep knowledge about them is quintessential. As a business, you need to know their source, destination, what products they dislike, their shopping goals, challenges, and which specific channel do they use to access your content.

Below is a report generated by Netsertive which displays what channels are used to devise a better omnichannel strategy.

Source: Netsertive

Note: These stats may differ based on your business’s buyer personas.

Knowing which device/channel is being widely used by your customers can help you ‘listen and respond’ well on the preferred devices/channels.

2. A fully automated marketing technology

Automating every process from email marketing to inventory management eliminates human error and enhances work productivity. You can implement the following automation technology to streamline your processes:

  • An automated email marketing platform like GetResponse.
  • Customer relationship management software
  • Content management system
  • Shipping Software like Shipstation
  • An Inventory management app like Zoho
  • A social media management tool such as Hootsuite
  • A responsive eCommerce theme
  • Analytics and data visualizations solutions

Apart from these, it is beneficial to add personalization which creates a sense of relationship with shoppers across multiple channels.

3. Optimize for mobile devices

With increasing smartphone users, more and more people are using mobiles for shopping. As per Google, the probability of someone moving out from your website increases at the following rates:

Source: Google

Users can abandon your websites if they feel page load lags, poor mobile design, the need to pinch and zoom, or any other issue like this. In order to implement omnichannel marketing in e-commerce, optimizing for mobile devices becomes an absolutely necessary step.

4. Responsive web pages

Create responsive web pages to let your customers view your content well irrespective of the screen size. Pay special attention to the landing pages where the website visitors would be filling personal information.

5. Share content with users accessible across multiple touch points

An important factor to note is that customers are likely to purchase more if they are exposed more to your brand across channels in a consistent manner.

It is reported that  47% of shoppers who interact with their retailers across more than 10 channels make purchases from their favorite retailer’s website at least once a week as compared to 21% for those who interact across one to four channels.

So, as a retailer, provide a consistent experience across multiple channels to reach your potential buyers where they are whether online, in-store or on mobile. The customer’s journey will then help you track and influence their behavior.>

6. Producing and sharing user-generated content

Asking users to generate the content for your brand is another effective technique. Effectively curated content can then be shared across several channels. This helps you to not only gain new consumers trust by posting your consumers’ own experiences but it also facilitates you to build a persistent relationship with them.

In order to inspire your audience for producing more user-generated content, you can plan to incentivize them.

As the content obtained through user-generated content is fresh and authentic, it has an added bonus which pacifies the lords of SEO.

Moreover, turning the user-generated feeds produced by real people into shoppable content will promote conversions.

7. Offering coupons and discounts

Coupons and discount vouchers are often what compels a customer to ultimately buy. Here are a few ideas to offer discounts:

  • Multi-Buy Offers/ Buy 1 Get 1: Who wouldn’t like to buy multiple products at a single items’ price? Multi-buy offers or Buy1 Get1 is a good way to give your customer an option of purchasing multiple products for less price which otherwise is costly if purchased separately. When a buyer can pay the same price for two products, the chances of not buying the products become negligible. This approach is best to sell away the unpopular products along with a discounted popular product.

  • Gift with purchase: Offering a free gift to the buyer at the checkout can be the inflection point to make them purchase.

  • Volume-based discounts: These types of discounts gives the shoppers additional percentages of discount on buying a certain threshold of product. For instance, if you spend $100, you get 5% off your purchase, but if you spend 150, you get 10% off. Or in another example, Levi’s offers 10% more discount on a purchase of one additional product.

Final thoughts on Omnichannel Marketing

The notion of omnichannel marketing is to integrate multiple marketing channels together having a ubiquitous approach which allows customers to browse products online while they can look for them in the stores.

Understanding how powerful technology is, customers today have much higher expectations from the stores.

Therefore, with the increasing competition, marketers must shift their gears towards omnichannel efforts in order to gain customer retention and in turn, revenue.

How are you thinking to implement omnichannel marketing in your e-commerce business? Do share your views.

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