Retail Battlefield : How to Win the New Age Customers?

The Solution: Omnichannel Marketing

Hubspot defines omnichannel marketing as “a multi-channel sales approach that provides the customer with an integrated shopping experience” irrespective of the device or channel they use to interact with the brand.

Examples of Omni-Channel Brands

• Disney
• Virgin Atlantic
• Bank of America
• Oasis
• REI
• Starbucks
• Chipotle

As opposed to a multi-channel platform, a successful Omni-channel initiative should be coherent across all the channels, as shown in the above graphic and should be aligned with all the multiple platforms involved in the customer journey. To achieve the synchronization between them and to execute it smoothly, the brand requires incessant coordination, empathy towards customer pain points, investment in technology and manpower, and most importantly, time.

Unlocking the Potential – Results of Using Omnichannel Strategy

How to Harmonize Omnichannel Marketing for Retail Growth?

• Understand Your Customers Needs

As said by Laurent Simonin, CEO of Smart Traffik, explained in an email interview with Retail Customer Experience, it’s all about reducing the gap between online and offline. “A seamless customer journey comes under the influence of social media, mobility, geolocalization and the fact of being constantly connected, and provides a frictionless experience that will harmonize the customer journey, whatever the point of contact is between him and the brand/retailer,” said Simonin. Today’s customer wants to face only a single entity regardless of the channel used- app, web, store, via email or online chat. And Omnichannel makes the cut. It interlinks all the multiple channels without any breakage.

• Understand Your Customers Needs With Data

Data and Content is the king when it comes to Digital Marketing. So in order to understand your customers gather data about them from different channels such as their in-store experience, email, social media, web, and geographical location. Extract their digital behavior, understand their channel preferences, and trace out a graph to standardize the data. After studying it, draw a customer retention strategy and figure out how you can provide personalized experiences to your customers.

• Customer Feedback Matters

Pull out all customer feedback, analyze them thoroughly, and draw insights. This will help you to catalyze action and take the next step in crafting strategies to increase your brand engagement. If these strategies are put in a right place, it will help you in boosting engagement, increasing conversion rates, and decreasing shopping cart abandonment.

• Create Brand Advocates

“Word of mouth” in consumer decision making is an influential source of information that plays the highest role in making purchasing decisions. According to the Nielsen Global Trust In Advertising Survey, 92% of people trust recommendations from friends. Look at the data:

MCKINSEY: While word-of-mouth has different degrees of influence on consumers at each stage of the consumer journey (Initial Consideration, Active Evaluation, Moment of Purchase), it’s the only factor that ranks among the three biggest consumer influencers at every step. Therefore, creating brand advocates that talk about products, services and experiences can help in increasing conversions as well as in improvising customer experiences.

• Avoid Common Pitfalls

Before placing any of your strategies in place, just personally experience how people will visit your app/web/store; how they will shop, in other words, just become a customer and validate their experience and then figure out, what problems have you faced and how can you enhance the shopping experience. By gradually mastering these new touch points’ retail marketers can increasingly achieve exemplary customer satisfaction as well as stronger sales incentives.