Do you stick to just one channel to browse for products and purchase an item?
You don’t.
If you are like the 73% of online shoppers out there, you frequently switch your shopping channels – from apps and SMS, to websites and social media. Harvard Business Review has established that quite a few customers prefer channel-hopping in their journey with a brand before they finally make a purchase.
The era of the Modern Consumer necessitates businesses to be operational on all the possible digital and online touchpoints that a shopper could want to reach them through.
The conclusion is clear as day: omnichannel marketing is heralding a new era of conducting business.
What is Omnichannel Marketing?
Put simply, omnichannel marketing is a business strategy that walks a consumer through your brand with a seamless experience, regardless of the channel where each touchpoint is created. From the beginning to the last touchpoint, the consumer is able to experience an efficiently mapped, indefectible journey, creating memorable encounters that they would like to return to.
Creating a Seamless Customer Journey
In essence, omnichannel marketing delivers an “unbroken” chain of events to the consumer, so they feel connected through the channels. For example, say that a customer discovers your brand on social media. After browsing through your feed, they decide to follow the link in the bio to your website. On your website, they peruse the products and services and choose to be contacted on instant messaging by your sales team.
Now, to create a seamless experience for this customer, your business gathers the following information:
- How they discovered your brand
- The social media posts they interacted with
- The products and services they looked at while visiting your website
Equipped with the aforementioned information, the sales team can finally contact the customer on instant messaging, personalizing his experience while seamlessly collating all his experiences across all touchpoints throughout the journey until now. This is the major difference between multichannel and omnichannel: while multichannel marketing is a generalized unification of all the channels of a business, omnichannel goes a step further by personalizing the experience for each individual customer.
Advantages of Omnichannel Marketing
Harvard Business Review has established that omnichannel customers are 30% more valuable than other consumers of a brand. This finding is testimony that putting up an omnichannel strategy in place has the potential to boost your revenue. Let’s look at some more advantages of omnichannel strategies.
1. Boost Customer Retention
Omnichannel strategies help a brand boost customer retention. Improved customer experiences through a well-stitched journey from end-to-end work as a benchmark for consumers to compare brands.
Pro Tip: Who is the leading competitor in your niche? See which channels they are present on, and try to expand your presence there.
2. Improve Turnover
As established by Harvard Business Review, omnichannel consumers are given to spending more, as much as 10%, while shopping online as compared to single-channel customers. These customers also spend 4% more shopping in-store as compared to single-channel customers.
Pro Tip: Focus your efforts on creating a great omnichannel experience for your customers, and they will be willing to spend more.
3. Improve The Customer Experience
Bettering the customer experience of your brand can’t be stressed enough. Omnichannel strategies help you achieve just that. Consider the following numbers:
- Salesforce found that positive customer experiences have the potential to bring back 89% of the customers to your brand
- Glance research establishes that 78% walk out of a purchase because of poor customer experience
Key Takeaway: Poor customer experiences can actually cost a lot of business to your company.
4. Gain More Customers
Great consumer experiences establish your brand as a preferred choice in the minds of your customers. Each positive experience creates a consumer that can potentially become an advocate for your brand. Customer advocacy matters because a Nielsen study found that 92% of the consumers trusted the recommendations of their friends and family.
Moreover, having various data input points from different channels make lead enrichment easier. You’re not only able to get more customers but qualify them quickly.
Pro Tip: Adopting even the simplest of omnichannel mechanisms (like letting consumers shop at physical stores using credits and benefits accumulated on the store’s mobile app) can delight your consumers exponentially.
You can further boost the effectiveness of omnichannel marketing with the ability to track website visitors using a powerful tool.
3 Brands That Nail Omnichannel Marketing
It can be a challenge to come up with the right omnichannel marketing strategies for your own company. The best course of action, in this case, is to learn by example. The three brands discussed below do omnichannel the way it is meant to be.
1. Target
Target, people’s favorite home goods store, has partnered with Pinterest to provide its customers with a better shopping experience. Customers can now use the Pinterest lens on the Target app to take a picture of something they like and get information on whether Target sells items similar to the one in the picture. Seamless, right?
2. Disney
The entertainment biggie has omnichannel marketing down pat. The visitors on their website are intuitively directed to their My Disney Experience tool that customers can use to plan their Disney itinerary. The app carries all the details about the park – the rides, restaurants, queues, etc. and lets the customers decide the course of action.
Furthermore, the park includes “Magic bands” – a wearable tech that lets customers unlock their rooms, charge purchases to the room bill, get pictures, enter parks and rides, and much more. They also partner with a range of influencers and coupon marketplaces to promote Disney discounts that then lead back to their shop.
3. Singapore Airlines
Singapore Airlines have revolutionized its customer experience by compressing every aspect of flying into a mobile-based application, allowing customers to choose everything and create a seamless flying experience for themselves:
- Book tickets
- Order food
- Download magazines, and newspapers for the flight
- Book cabs
- Book stays
Customers even get the option of integrating their preferred payment methods on the app.
Conclusion
Omnichannel marketing has become an essential tool today to deliver exemplary customer experiences to your visitors. This marketing strategy also helps to give your business a wider audience base that can be tapped by stitching all the channels together. In tangible terms, your business can improve revenues between 4% to 8% over the market simply by ensuring that the customer experience is good.
