Omni-Channel Strategies for Retail Success

Is your channel inefficient to reach the larger part of target audience? Do you face challenges in building an effective relationship with your customers?

To be everywhere is a dream…. and that’s the promise of Omni-channel!!!

In today’s digital-driven landscape, the success of e-commerce business is determined by overcoming two main challenges i.e.:

• Customers interact with the brands via phones, e-mails, social media and much more. Hence, you need to pave your way out by putting up your brand across multiple channels.
• Your brand must be contented enough to catch the attention of the audience as in the rat race your brand can lose its value over time.
• To be very precise, shoppers look for quick, cost-effective and personalized shopping options.

But, how can a business provide consumers everything while improving their bottom line? No single formula, algorithm or any magic wand can tell you when, where, why, what each individual customer will purchase.

The answer is Omni-channel retailing. But what’s that?

Omni-channel retail is all about connecting dots with multiple retail channels; bringing everything closer on the web to nurture more sales and engagement. The best omni-channel strategy can get the ball rolling as it enables retailers to get insights about customer’s shopping behaviors and customer’s buying habits across multiple channels.

Want that Ahaaa….. moment? Start Omni-channel retailing today… Let’s zero down some of the strategies that can give an edge to your business.

Consistency is the key:  With the advancement of online retail aka eCommerce, pricing and product information are on the fingertips of the consumers. When they communicate with your brand, they don’t realize from which channel they are shopping, but surely look for the cohesive message; which means that your tone of content should be uniform across the multiple platforms. Whether they are shopping from your brick-mortar store, buying online, social media pages etc. the interaction and user-experience must be consistent across all the channels. If not, your business can be at risk and you may lose your loyal customers. The success of Omni-channel marketing strategies depends on keeping the unified voice of your brand.

Locate your customers: Pro-research and analysis are needed, to locate on which platform is your active and non-active users and what are their preferences. To get such optimized and traceable data, you can use some special tools like Google analytics to visualize the certain aspect of your data. Gathered insights can help to produce the detailed map of the customer’s journey.  Some important aspects you need to look for are:-

• Who they are?
• What they do?
• When they buy?
• How they buy?
• What they expect from you?
• What they think about you?
• What they think about your competitors?

With such insights, you will be able to predict your customers’ needs and desires and this would ultimately lead to customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Play with the strength of every channel:  Although you develop the best strategy and sync your products with the various customer outlets, it doesn’t mean that you all are all set. Optimize your communication at both macro level – like in-store or online – and also on the micro level – like Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter etc. Apart from this, you can also assimilate a live chat platform that helps the customers to connect with the product experts for any query directly from website or app. You must break down each channel into communication component and then optimize from there. Including such communication strategy across omni-channel is a great way to understand customer behavior and address their concerns.

Be global but act with the localized content: This one is for you, if your website ships and delivers internationally. Global customers get put off when they see unfamiliar content on the website and are greeted with the foreign language. Serving people locally using their local language and currency is the best way to increase local visitors. Offer your customers a translated version of English hosted website in a separate country-specific directory (i.e. /es/ for Spanish’ version). Make each brand interaction personal and in-line with the language and cultural preferences of respective geography. This makes your brand a local brand even if they are interacting with a global company.

Analyze your performance: The thumb rule is to analyze the performance of Omni-channel marketing strategy by using some of the marketing tools. It is necessary to understand which strategy is working and which is not. And this needs to be done across all the channels and based on that you can make alterations in your marketing strategies.

Example of Omni-channel

StarBucks: StarBucks- the giant coffee company is frequently mentioned on the top list of Omni-channel efforts. The coffee of Starbucks is simply loved by the user and it’s all because it provides seamless user-experience across all channels. Their customers have the option for tracking their Starbucks card balance across its website, mobile and store. Any changes in that, is updated in the real-time across all the channels- no matter where they are and which device they are using. Additionally, they can either pay with physical reward cards/phone and their balance will be updated online and in the app.

Wrapping it up…

Today, doing business through traditional marketing channels is not enough – you need to be available to your buyers across multiple channels. The more effective you pass your message to the buyers coming on various channels, easier will be for them to know who you are, what you do and how it can benefit them.

Whether you’re creating an in-house, outsourced or a combination of both, you can consult Omni-channel experts to devise your Omni-channel retail efforts. Ask to speak to one our experts now!