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By: Sagar Sharma

Omnichannel eCommerce: The Secret Mantra For Your Success In eCommerce Business

Any type of business uses a different approach for their sales and distribution for enhancing their business. For a product-based industry, it is important to provide all the essential product details to all the members involved in the product supply chain across the different channels.

An eCommerce sales approach using multiple channels allows in giving unified experience to all the customers across various channels. It is important to understand the customers, their shopping trends, establish brand position, and create a consistent experience across multiple platforms.

What is Omnichannel eCommerce? Why is it so important?

The omnichannel includes various sales channels including the physical and the digital storefronts. It allows in creating a unified and seamless branding experience for the customers on different platforms. Omnichannel networking allows the customers to move freely from one channel to the other with ease for a better and improved shopping experience. It allows for better interaction with the customers for the improved buying experience and building customer relationships and brand loyalty.

Using different channels for sales does not make it an omnichannel. Spreading the brand across channels along by connecting those experiences makes it an omnichannel experience. The interaction between various channels builds an influence on one another; it helps in creating the omnichannel experience. Creating a coherent journey during the sales of the product across the different channels helps in providing an efficient omnichannel experience.

Importance of omnichannel eCommerce

The omnichannel approach provides the shopping experience to the customers wherein it understands them and provides them the products based on their needs and requirements. The omnichannel approach allows in understanding the expectations that the customers have from the enterprise, thus allowing them to build the commercial strategy to fulfill the needs.

Omnichannel eCommerce allows in identifying cross-channel shopping behaviors and designs seamless shopping experiences. It also leads to a better understanding of the customers and enhances business and customer loyalty.

Benefits of Omnichannel eCommerce

The omnichannel approach allows in marketing the product through the different retail channels like online, on-site, social media, mobile technology, various applications, etc., and integrating these channels to provide a better experience.

Integrated communication and analytics

The different channels used for the sales and promotion of the product uses different streams of information to understand the needs of their customers. The analytics allows in understanding the capabilities, quantification, and communication reviews with the customers.

The omnichannel approach allows in interacting with the customer data from the cross-references and generating data for customers across the different channels.

Meeting customers

The omnichannel approach provides the customer-centered viewpoint to all the retail businesses and an opportunity for managing the customer relationship across different channels. It provides interaction with customers on all the platforms, giving quality services, preventing loss of information, providing quality rewards to customers when they shop.

Obtaining data from each transaction

Omnichannel eCommerce allows tracking each customer on the different channels for the individual transactions. These transactions have a great potential for managing the business systems.

Target specific audiences

Having the customer and transaction analytics data in place, allows the marketing and the retail team to focus on the specific targeted markets. The customers that prefer purchasing generic products can be provided the coupons or rewards for purchasing the branded products. This gives the customers a chance to try a better product with a higher profit margin

Integrate the business

The omnichannel approach enables customer services, merchandising, sales, inventory, enterprise resource planning, etc. It allows the working of all the parts of the business together to provide the best and highest quality of products and services to their customers.

Channel communication management

For having a better shopping experience, the customer needs some detailed information about the product from the different channels. Customers can select the product from the online store and can expect to pick up the product from the store nearby them.

For this service, they need to have integrated communication. Providing customized service to their customers helps in building trust in the brand and also improves customer loyalty.

Experience and service focused shopping

The omnichannel approach in sales management is essential for having the service focussed shopping. It allows in providing the highest selection and services for any product of the customer requirements.

Improved customer experience

Omnichannel provides a seamless experience for the customers as it enables improved communication with the customers to understand their needs and demands.

As there are increased numbers of touchpoints for better shopping, seamless integration is very essential. Interaction with the customers to understand them better and provide the best service allows the customers to purchase with confidence in the product.

Increased sales and traffic

The omnichannel shopping experience allows the customers to look out for the products of their choice on the different channels and make their decision for the purchase.

Having different channels for making the search available to the customers, the addition of each channel to the omnichannel eCommerce leads to shoppers spending more money on the products thus increasing the sales.

Enhanced customer loyalty

Once the customers get the best shopping experience for any product, they depend on the same channel or the brand for the other products. Once the customers gain confidence in the brand for the quality of the product and the services provided, they return to the business for more shopping and suggest their friends and relatives do shopping.

Omnichannel eCommerce enables business leaders to provide discount coupons, mid-sale campaigns, etc. to create customer engagement and to build customer loyalty.

Tips For Choosing Right Omnichannel eCommerce Strategy For Your Ecommerce Business

The omnichannel strategy used for enhancing the business depends on the nature of the business. It also depends on the type of channel engaged for the marketing of the product and the behavior of the target audiences.

1. Allow the brand personality to shine

Personal connection with the audiences enables in making them feel connected to. It is important for creating a unique personality that makes the business relatable and more human. If there is a growing competition for the product, it is important that the brand personality enables in setting the enterprise apart and ahead of the competitors.

2. Align the omnichannel business with a cause

Consumers tend to pay more for supporting the companies that are committed to the social values they share. Corporate social responsibility works well with the marketing strategy for a well-defined cause. It is very important to support any cause with sincerity. Today’s customers value authenticity and will immediately reject the brand if they consider it to be insincere.

For an enterprise, it is important to embrace the selected cause wholeheartedly. The content created should be around and related to the selected cause. This allows in building a community around the brand and can anchor the omnichannel marketing strategy.

3. Stay localized as possible

It is better to be local but in the case of having worldwide audiences, providing localized content becomes critical. The customers are more likely to be engaged with the products that target their location. The customers feel closer to the brand if it is local and they are more likely to support and trust the business.

It is important to understand customer-specific segmentation. This enables the enterprise to craft or personalize the content and provide a customized experience to the customers.

4. Optimize mobile site

Omnichannel marketing is driven by smartphone penetration as most of the customers prefer shopping on mobile. The window-shopping research stage is usually done on mobile phones while the final purchase is completed through laptops or desktops.

It is important for optimizing the mobile sites by having a responsive website that works well with the mobile device. A good mobile website provides the details in an uncluttered manner and is easy to navigate.

5. Take benefit of user-generated content

The user-generated content needs to be created based on the details provided by the customers who have purchased and used the product. These reviews can be collected in the form of feedback on the sales page.

6. Make use of promos and discounts

These techniques like promos and discounts are old-fashioned but work efficiently as a marketing strategy for attracting more customers. Providing coupons, free delivery, offers, etc. also enables keeping the customer engaged across various channels. The setting expiry date for the offers and discounts can be used for communicating urgency.

7 Killing Omnichannel Marketing Strategies For Your Business Success

Different omnichannel marketing strategies that an enterprise needs to follow for having a successful business include:

1. Audit the existing marketing strategies

Before formulation or developing a new strategy for marketing, it is essential for auditing and understands the already existing strategy. This will help the enterprise to understand the positives and negatives in the existing strategy that they need to change and continue with. This will provide an insight into what worked for the business and what failed.

This will help in the efficient development of the new strategy and not repeat any previous mistakes made while making the strategy. The reviews provided by the customers can also act as a good point for development and improvement. It is suggested to monitor all the channels for getting insights for the improvement.

2. Analyze customer interaction with the brand

Understanding the customers is the main aim of the omnichannel marketing strategy. This understanding is not limited to the personal details of the customers like age, gender, and geographical location but also includes the online behavior of the customer towards the products and services, their product selections, the purchasing decisions, etc.

It is important to analyze how the customer interacts with the brand and how they connect with the enterprise. This will help the enterprise to understand their customers better and provide them with a personalized journey for the product purchase.

3. Smart segmentation of audiences

The organization needs to understand their customers and based on this understanding, it becomes easier for segmenting these audiences. This segmentation is crucial as it allows in personalizing the journey and ease of communication. The audience can be segmented based on a different array of criteria like their preferences, choices, online customer behavior, etc.

Based on the proper segmentation, the marketing team can plan for the different campaigns for different customers and personalize the content for them.

4. Personalization of content for each channel

Customers tend to switch between the different devices while making their selection for online shopping. On average a customer uses around nine applications on their smartphone. Thus the marketing team should plan to target most of the channels.

The different ways to target the channels include sending emails, SMSs, push notifications, etc. It is very important to craft a personalized message for the different channels.

5. Retargeting the audiences

The customer may not purchase the product at the first instance but the marketing strategy should be such to keep prompting the relevant banners to the customers on different platforms like social media, websites, etc for making the top-of-mind recall. This will encourage the customer to visit the site, look at the products and make the purchase.

6. Leverage on the automation tools

While planning the marketing strategy and communication with the customers, it is important to remember the leverage on benefits of automation tools for optimization. These automation tools will allow for smart segmentation of the audiences, sending personalized messages, scheduling the campaigns, etc.

7. Test, measure, and repeat

While planning the omnichannel marketing strategy, it is important for testing the strategy, measuring the outcome to understand how it is working. Based on the results of this analysis, the strategy can be altered for improvement by the addition of images, messages, schedule, segmentation, etc.

8. Work collaboratively

For the success of any enterprise, it is essential that all the teams within the organization work in unison with improved collaboration. A robust cross-functional team will heal all the departments or teams in the organization to work together and succeed in providing valuable inputs beneficial for the business.

Bottom Line

To enhance the business, an enterprise needs to understand their customers, create a strong and memorable position for the brand, prioritize the mobile experiences, and deliver a seamless experience for the customers across all the channels. The enterprise can efficiently do all these by using the omnichannel eCommerce strategy for sales and marketing.

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