Few marketing strategies can create as many seamless touchpoints between clients and a brand as omnichannel marketing. This provides more opportunities for customers to interact with your Ecommerce business, and has the potential to significantly improve conversion rates.
There are all types of online shops, each with its own unique Ecommerce business templates, marketing campaigns, and sales strategies. Here’s a guide on how omnichannel marketing works, what it can accomplish, and strategies on how to integrate it into your marketing campaign.
Omnichannel Marketing
The easiest way to learn what omnichannel marketing is would be to lay out its goals and understand what it’s supposed to accomplish. When implemented correctly, omnichannel marketing creates a seamless Ecommerce shopping experience across various platforms.
For example, a customer may find a product advertised for a particular Ecommerce vendor on a social media platform. They then follow the link to said vendor’s profile, where they browse other items and potentially add them to the cart. For one reason or another, they don’t finalize their purchase and leave the items in the shopping cart.
You may contact the buyer directly via social media to sweeten the deal and inform them of other great products they don’t know about. The customer decides to finally make a purchase.
Then they receive an additional email verification confirming their purchase, which also features a sneak peek into upcoming items. They can purchase by downloading your Ecommerce app or visiting your vendor profile for more information. This process in and of itself creates numerous touchpoints between the customers and the vendor, increasing the engagement between the two parties.
Additionally, there are some other extra ways to include marketing material even after the purchase has been completed. For example, an email with marketing material can be sent to the buyer with some extra deals and discounts for future sales if they download your app or sign up for weekly newsletters.
If you notice that a large number of clients are finding your products through social media and PPC advertising, then it would be a great idea to reach out to them personally via communication channels with personalized marketing material. And if you’re selling physical items, you can even also utilize unique types of packaging that make your brand even more recognizable.
So to break down all the little exchanges that took place in this single use-case, we see that several channels and methods of communication are being used on top of layers of interaction between buyer and vendor. All of this culminates in an experience that is uniquely tailored to the client’s browsing and purchasing habits.
Implementing omnichannel marketing is a difficult process, but a rewarding one when you understand the benefits.
Benefits of Omnichannel Marketing
If you’re having a hard time convincing your team to implement omnichannel marketing, share this list of benefits in your marketing plan presentation.
Greater Customer Engagement
Customer engagement is a vital piece of the business market strategies. In fact, shopping has proven to have a certain psychological effect on humans that few other activities can replicate. This is why each individual has their own unique browsing and shopping habits and preferences. Ecommerce is all about accommodating these habits and preferences to give the shoppers a more engaging experience that feels as though it’s tailored specifically for them. With the right customer engagement framework and offering a tailored experience, you will create a deeper engagement and higher conversions. By integrating issue tracking software seamlessly into your operations, you can address customer concerns promptly and tailor their experience to their unique browsing and shopping habits, resulting in a more engaging and satisfying journey for each individual.
Improved Brand Appearance
At the core of a successful omnichannel marketing strategy is consistency. When using omnichannel marketing, a retailer must make sure their message is consistent throughout all communication channels and platforms, such as social media, email, online ad, listing, their own Ecommerce platform, or vendor profile. Coincidentally, consistency is also at the heart of successful branding.
This means omnichannel marketing has the potential to improve brand appearance by communicating consistent brand messaging throughout all your marketing content. To further augment this, considering the best review software can play a pivotal role. By incorporating this service into your omnichannel strategy, you not only maintain consistency in your communication but also actively engage with customer feedback and sentiments. This proactive interaction not only reinforces your brand's reliability but also fosters a stronger connection with your audience.
More Conversions
The success of marketing services can be measured in a lot of ways, but few things speak louder than sales figures and conversion rates.
As a result of greater customer engagement and more brand visibility, there’s also the benefit of more conversions. Personalized shopping means catering to the buyer’s preferences and needs. The more you cater to them, the more appealing it is for them to shop from you. And the more appealing it is to shop from you, the more often they’re likely to do it.
7 Omnichannel Marketing Strategies for Ecommerce
Omnichannel marketing can seem complicated at first. However, it doesn't have to be. By implementing effective strategies, you can optimize your omnichannel marketing approach and considerably improve conversion rates.
An important aspect for succeeding is having a solid understanding of marketing principles and techniques. Pursuing a degree in marketing can provide you with the necessary knowledge and skills to excel in this field. There are several comprehensive marketing degree programs that cover various aspects of marketing, including omnichannel strategies. By acquiring a formal education in marketing, you can enhance your expertise and confidently implement successful omnichannel marketing campaigns.
Let’s take a look at some of the most effective omnichannel marketing techniques.
1. Understand the Audience and Their Shopping Behavior
As was already stated, there is a deep psychological experience to shopping, besides the act of shopping itself. There are tons of split-second decisions being made as a customer browses through items. Obviously, you can’t control what decision the customer will make, but you can certainly understand their shopping behavior and habits and use them to your advantage.
Collecting data on customers and their behavior gets very challenging when working with tons of data. Marketing data warehouses such as BigQuery (without analytics) can offer a huge advantage in this regard. Powered with built-in systems, such as advanced machine learning and business intelligence, BigQuery (without analytics) can analyze large batches of raw data and offer a comprehensive report on what the data means for you and your marketing mission. This can be instrumental in the success of your omnichannel marketing campaign.
It can also give you plenty of insight into customer behavior. For example, you might learn that a large portion of your client base likes to browse during late hours. You can include a night mode feature for your Ecommerce app or website, making it less of an eyesore to browse through it at night. Late-hour SMS or push notifications can also be scheduled to be sent out at night while some clients are browsing, featuring muted and soft colors.
Utilize 24/7 customer service, so that even at night you’re ready to answer their questions. Use a client portal and other channels to assist customers more effectively. You can also schedule marketing content via email, SMS, or social media to be delivered at these later hours.
Understand your audience’s shopping habits and tailor your omnichannel marketing to complement their user experience on your Ecommerce platform.
2. Map Out the Customers Journey
Understanding the customer’s journey through the sales funnel is crucial in omnichannel marketing. Because there are so many channels, touchpoints, and opportunities for customers to interact with your brand, it’s important to understand the client journey and what routes can be bolstered to improve the chances of landing the sale.
The first place to look would be inbound traffic. Where are most of your clients coming from? This can be social media ad posting, online listings, emails, Google, and so on. Once you understand the initial touchpoint where the customer is introduced to your brand.
Let’s say most of the inbound traffic to your Ecommerce shop comes from Google. This means you’d need to strengthen your SEO, but it also explains that you need to step up the marketing on other channels, such as email or social media.
Up next in the client journey, you need to see what they must do to reach the shopping cart and make the purchase. How easy is it to reach this destination? Is there any more room for additional marketing content on the way?
The purchase is not the final touchpoint with your brand. Omnichannel marketing should also be extended beyond the transaction. What is the overall return rate of customers? Does your client check out your social media presence after making their purchase? How often do they revisit your platform after their latest transaction? Looking beyond the purchase will lead to future purchases, and is an important step in marketing strategies.
Mapping out the customer experience yields valuable insight for your omnichannel marketing strategy, as it tells you how and when customers interact with your brand, where the most influential touchpoints are, and how this information can be leveraged to improve their shopping experience.
3. Personalization of Marketing Content
The success of your omnichannel marketing campaign is dependent on how well you can deliver personalized content to your customers. Keep in mind your marketing material will be reaching them through a variety of channels via email, social media, push notifications, etc.
For each of these channels, ensure that the messages are unique, but align with the brand voice and ethos. A great example of this could be sending out congratulatory messages via push notifications and email, and while both channels are delivering the same content, birthday wishes with a sweet deal, the way the message is phrased should be different for an added personal touch.
4. Variety of Payment Methods
Part of operating an Ecommerce website or platform is accommodating the diverse preferences of your customers. If you’re pursuing wide-reaching and flexible omnichannel marketing strategies, then your payment systems must provide customers with multiple payment options. Don’t limit your Ecommerce store to cards or bank transfers.
Omnichannel marketing means a brand will be reaching out to a very wide audience who use diverse digital payment systems. As digitized payments are becoming more common, it’s important to allow your Ecommerce venture to handle as many of them as possible.
5. Flexible Ad Retargeting Tactics
You can’t expect all advertisement channels to be effective in getting your brand name out there. Trial and error is a fundamental part of finding the right channel to advertise your brand and products through. This is the bread and butter of omnichannel marketing, since it’s all about using different channels to retarget ads.
For example, if you notice that a particular group of clients has a very low email open rate, it may be better to reach out to them via social media, SMS, or push notifications through your Ecommerce app. The flexibility in targeted ads and reaching audiences with more personalized marketing content are stellar lead generation tools, making omnichannel marketing so effective.
6. Responsive Website
To successfully implement omnichannel marketing strategies, the customer experience on your Ecommerce store must support as many devices as possible. Nowadays, online shopping is performed on various devices, such as desktop PCs, laptops, tablets, and phones.
Responsive websites are ones that can be opened on any device and offer all the same functions across the board. This means a user can browse for items through their phone, put it down, then purchase the items on their laptop or PC. Allowing for a seamless transition between different devices allows for a smoother shopping experience and fewer hurdles for your clients to jump over on their way to finalizing a purchase.
7. Use Automation to Your Advantage
We’ve talked about sending out effective ads and marketing content to clients on various devices. But since omnichannel marketing sweeps across different platforms and channels of communication, it’s natural that your brand will be exposed to a large audience. Creating, delivering, and following up on so many prospective clients would be pretty much impossible without automation.
A great example of automation in marketing is email campaigns. These days, you can use a variety of email automation tools to create, structure, optimize, and deliver email marketing content effortlessly on a regular basis.
Concluding with Omnichannel Marketing for Ecommerce
Implementing omnichannel marketing strategies for Ecommerce is not an easy task. It requires extensive cooperation and the full effort of the entire marketing team. All marketing channels and modes of communication are needed to implement omnichannel marketing strategies into an Ecommerce marketing campaign, so make sure your team is ready.
But while difficult to pull off, omnichannel marketing can reward your Ecommerce shop with solid brand presence and positive identity, on top of greater marketing reach, and an unmatched buyer experience that your customers will not forget.