How to Grow Across Channels With Omnichannel

Abstract

How do businesses manage to deliver a seamless brand experience across various channels? The answer lies in a powerful approach called omnichannel. Derived from the Latin word ‘omni,’ meaning ‘all,’ this strategy encompasses sales, marketing, and customer support, regardless of which channel you choose. 

Most customers have a preferred channel when purchasing from a brand. Others use multiple channels to inform their buying decisions, affecting consumer behavior, preferences, and expectations. Hence, it becomes crucial for businesses to proactively connect with customers to better understand their needs and find ways to serve them more effectively. 

A retail survey conducted by PwC revealed that 96% of consumers intend to adopt cost-saving behaviors in the next six months as a result of inflation. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic continues to have a large degree of influence on the experiences of consumers and the industries that cater to them. 

While e-commerce experienced massive growth during the height of the pandemic, it is now witnessing a decline. But looking at long-term growth, this short-term fall may simply be a mean regression: 43% of consumers said they intend to increase online purchasing in the coming six months. These findings stem from the Global Consumer Insights Pulse Survey conducted in December 2022, which gathered responses from 9,180 consumers across 25 territories.

Introduction

Making Your Business Stick to Customers

The global retail sector is currently facing an underminable future due to the rapid advancement of various technologies, influenced by social and economic trends. The emergence of new retail channels has intensified competition and placed pressure on prices. However, the most significant challenge lies in the exponential growth of online retail, as it has swiftly become the preferred choice for the majority of consumers due to its speed and convenience.

Online retailing stands out as the most effective channel for conducting business due to several factors: the dynamic nature of lifestyle, demographics, technology, economic volatility, and the influence of the mobile age. To succeed in today’s retail landscape, retailers must adopt a strategic approach. They need to understand their roles within the industry and maximize value across different channels. By doing this, retailers can strengthen customer relationships and ensure their long-term sustainability.

Retailers also need to ensure that their business models and platforms are able to perform and deliver consistently. This is crucial not only for delivering an exceptional customer experience across multiple channels but also for leveraging the valuable data gathered on the purchasing behavior of these different channels.

Businesses should prioritize flexibility in their product ranges and pricing strategies to effectively meet the changing needs of customers. This allows them to adapt and pivot as required.

Need for Omnichannel

Omnichannel retail aims to deliver a seamless customer experience across all channels, utilizing interactive platforms to enhance engagement. A prime illustration of this is IKEA’s mobile app, The Smallest IKEA Store. This app not only enhances the customer journey but also offers strong functionality, where users can conveniently check stock levels, item availability, and estimated inventory. These valuable features empower customers to plan and organize their purchases while staying informed about store news and updates.

The omnichannel approach heightens system complexity by expanding the choices of the customer. It also allows businesses to address each customer’s specific preferences and expectations. Consumers appreciate personalized experiences, which builds trust in a brand. However, retailers can only provide personalized experiences if they have access to customer information. This requires careful data collection without compromising personal privacy.

Omnichannel differentiates itself from other approaches by offering a multi-channel experience incorporating email, social media, and a well-crafted landing page. This strategy aims to deliver a smooth customer experience, regardless of the number of devices used or the time intervals between interactions.

By establishing a unified customer perspective, omnichannel effectively creates a coherent journey across all channels so that customers can expect a streamlined and uncomplicated shopping experience. Consider this example: 

A potential customer visits your website’s mobile app and comes across several items they are interested in purchasing. They add these items to their hotlist for future consideration.

Later in the day, the customer switches to their computer to continue their research. Thanks to omnichannel marketing, they can easily access the same list of saved products they had chosen earlier, even though they have changed devices and a considerable amount of time has passed. There is no need to waste time re-entering search terms because everything is conveniently available, just as they left it.

Once they return to the website, they can refine their search and make a final decision on the product they want to add to their basket. However, they decide to delay payment until their next payday.

Three days later, the customer completely forgets about their cart and receives a cart abandonment email. They are intrigued by the email, which highlights the product in their cart and provides an incentive to complete the purchase immediately. The shopper follows the emailed link back to your site and completes the purchase using the mobile website.

This customer journey showcases the seamless integration of three devices and four channels (mobile app, mobile site, email, and desktop). It demonstrates that each step is interconnected, as they all work together to create a unified customer experience across all contact points.

Creating an Omnichannel Strategy

From a customer’s standpoint, omnichannel marketing enhances the user experience, improving their journey as customers. From a marketer’s point of view, handling multiple channels and strategies can be challenging. Here’s a step-by-step guide to building your omnichannel strategy:

Explore The Platforms Where Your Audience Exists

The first step to building a robust omnichannel strategy is identifying the platforms, channels, and devices that your existing customers use daily. This entails gaining insights into their interactions, preferences, experiences, and pain points associated with these channels.

Analyzing your existing customer base eliminates the need for guesswork in crafting an effective omnichannel strategy. One valuable tool for collecting user data is Google Analytics. Utilizing its acquisition reports allows you to determine what points in the multi-channel funnels are customers reacting to. This data should serve as the foundation for constructing and refining your omnichannel strategy, ensuring that you prioritize the most significant touchpoints.

Determining the Buyer Persona

In order to engage with both your current and potential customers, you have to stay one step ahead. This includes closely monitoring your existing customer base while simultaneously considering the needs and preferences of future customers. A key strategy to achieve this is by creating a detailed customer profile.

The essential characteristics of a perfect buyer persona include demographics, consumer behavior, purchasing patterns, and any other preferences. But it goes beyond that: the customers’ purchasing patterns, payment methods, traffic sources, channels, and devices matter just as much. For this, you have to create a detailed customer journey map.

When refining your target market profile, include additional potential customers who not only have marketable potential but also demonstrate genuine interest. Build a diverse and inclusive set of buyer personas that encompass various characteristics so you can capture the attention of both online and offline clients with the highest customer lifetime value (CLV).

Do Your Audience Segmentation

When you have identified your target market, it’s important to break them down into smaller groups to truly understand their preferences and dislikes. This is useful if you offer a wide range of products or services and want to know who is buying what. Segmenting your audience is also a smart strategy to customize your marketing, sales, and services, given that 74% of customers get upset when they receive irrelevant content.

Most CRM and omnichannel marketing automation solutions can help with this by using rule-based client segmentation. Typically, businesses divide their customer base based on factors like gender, location, past purchases, interests, loyalty, and level of engagement. You can even enhance these customer profiles by adding new information. By using segmentation and automation, you can create triggers based on specific events or behaviors.

Map The Customer Journey

The next step is using customer journey mapping to mobilize the user experience from start to finish. This helps identify important interaction points and find ways to optimize and streamline them. It involves tracking the user’s journey across different channels, both online and offline.

Any of your personas can be used to position oneself as a specific consumer. Begin at the awareness stage and go through the entire process until advocacy. What challenges do you face along the way? How can you improve this journey? What additional value does each touchpoint add? Take note of these observations and explore ways to enhance them. An omnichannel strategy involves multiple paths within a single campaign. Therefore, it’s important to connect them all in real-time to avoid any gaps, errors, or uncomfortable experiences.

Prioritizing Specific Channels and Devices

While using multiple channels for your strategy, it’s important to recognize that not all channels are equal. Omnichannel tactics encompass various channels, including push notifications and text messages. For a successful omnichannel approach, companies need to prioritize the channels and devices their customers prefer. Instead of using all channels, focus on investing in opportunities that enhance user experience and engagement for increased profitability.

Enable Seamless Integrations Across All Channels

Now comes the challenging part: connecting all the online and offline touchpoints. This is the most crucial step in adopting an omnichannel approach. The success of your omnichannel strategy relies on seamlessly integrating multiple channels, and failing to do so can cause everything to fall apart.

At this stage, you have to gather your resources and face the difficulties head-on. Using the right technology can make this process easier. The goal is to bring together all the channels and track your customers’ shopping journey across every touchpoint. Integration is key, ensuring a consistent customer experience whether they discover your business online, visit your physical store or make purchases through your mobile app.

Measure Your Performance

The last step is identifying the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that correspond to the plan’s performance as you develop your omnichannel strategy. However, it can be challenging to evaluate and compare the outcomes of multiple communication channels. Using tools to examine all the cross-channel data can help you overcome this. The reports and analytical data available will show the direction of your campaign. But it’s not enough to just measure effectiveness in numbers; your omnichannel strategy should also be adaptable to other tools to continuously improve and grow over time.

Implementation and Optimization

Here are some pointers and recommended methods for creating a foolproof omnichannel strategy:

• The future of omnichannel is mobile, so ensure you have a mobile-friendly website. Consider creating a mobile app as well.
• Invest in your technology to stay ahead.
• Make every touchpoint shoppable to take advantage of every chance to increase sales.
• Use shoppable posts on social media.
• Tailor your content to the customer journey for a personalized experience.
• Adapt your content to different platforms (images, videos, reels) to match marketing channels.
• Establish trust and credibility by safeguarding customer data at all costs.
• Carry out frequent testing to understand your customers better and determine what works in your favor.

Omnichannel Metrics

Given that multichannel campaigns have a 287% greater buy rate than single-channel efforts, you can gauge how effective a strategy is by monitoring measurements and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). However, not all metrics are applicable in an omnichannel setting. Here are eight specific metrics to keep an eye on when using omnichannel strategies:

Conversion Rate

The conversion rate refers to the percentage of website visitors who actually make a purchase or subscribe. Put simply, the higher your techniques perform, the greater the conversion rate. You can calculate it using this formula: #conversions / #visitors * 100.

The appearance and user experience of your website can impact this rate. It’s ideal to provide a personalized online experience to make it more user-friendly.

Customer Satisfaction Score

The customer satisfaction score (CSAT) measures how happy customers are with their interactions with your business. To determine this score, customers are asked a simple question: “On a scale of 1 to 5, how satisfied were you with your experience?” Customers who rate their experience as 4 or 5 are considered satisfied, while those who rate it as 3 or lower are considered unsatisfied.

To calculate the CSAT, you divide the number of satisfied customers by the total number of responses and then multiply by 100.

Customer Lifetime Value

Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV) measures how much money a customer is likely to spend on a company or its products over their entire relationship. It shows how loyal customers are to a company. By studying customers’ buying habits and keeping track of CLTV, you can send them tailored content that matches their interests.

Always make sure your CLTV considerably exceeds your client acquisition costs to achieve growth.

The Net Promoter Score

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) uses questions to gauge customer satisfaction like “How likely are you to recommend this brand to a friend or colleague?” Based on their responses, they fall into one of three groups:

1. Promoters: These are customers who give a score of 9 or 10. They are highly satisfied and loyal.
2. Passives: Customers who give a score of 7 or 8. They are generally happy with their experience, but they may not actively promote your brand.
3. Detractors: Customers who score between 0 and 6. This group is dissatisfied with their experience. It’s important to address their concerns promptly because their negative feedback can impact your brand’s reputation.

The NPS can be calculated in this formula: NPS = (percentage of promoters – the percentage of detractors)

Ticket Volume

This is the total number of tickets in a company’s support queue at any given time. It helps a brand understand the state of its customer service. For example, a high number of tickets may mean that your customer care team is not working efficiently. It suggests that you may need to invest in a customer engagement platform.

Customer Loyalty Index

This gauges a brand’s consistency in retaining customers by taking into account a number of variables. It poses three questions such as:

• “How likely are you to tell your family and friends about us?”
• How likely are you to make another purchase from us in the future?”
• What likelihood do you have of trying our other products?”

Customers may select a response from 1 to 6, with 1 denoting “Definitely Yes” and 6 denoting “Definitely No”. The loyalty index of a customer is determined by calculating the average of their three responses.

Customer Effort Score

This indicator determines how much effort a customer must do in order to engage with a company. If customers have a positive experience, they are more likely to buy from the company again. Studies show that 96% of customers who had a problem with a company were less loyal. To determine the effort score, customers can be asked the following question:

“To what extent do you agree that you had no trouble in finding and purchasing what you wanted?”

Customers can choose from five options, ranging from “Strongly disagree” to “Strongly agree.” To calculate the CES Score, add up all the responses and divide by the number of responses.

Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate

This is the percentage of customers who didn’t complete a purchase despite initially wanting to do so. If this rate is high, there’s an issue that needs to be solved, such as poor website navigation or technical issues.

This rate can be calculated as follows:

Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate = (number of transactions initiated / number of transactions completed)

Key Takeaways

It is essential to develop a well-rounded omnichannel strategy that focuses on creating a smooth and consistent customer experience across various platforms. With the changing ways consumers discover brands and their desire for convenient shopping options, businesses need to adapt to meet their expectations. By embracing frictionless cross-channel transactions and continuously understanding their target market, companies can effectively cater to evolving customer needs.