Category: Omnichannel

Getting Omnichannel Marketing Right in Retail

by adminin Omnichannel, Retail, Uncategorized

In a previous blog, we saw how in retail, building the right omnichannel strategy is everything. Today we’ll discuss some omnichannel strategies that retailers of today can/must use to be successful.   

Google’s e-Conomy SEA 2022 report speaks about how SouthEast Asia is three years ahead of the projected time in reaching $200 million in gross merchandise value in 2022 itself. GMV is defined by Investopedia as “the total value of merchandise sold over a given period of time through a customer-to-customer (C2C) exchange site.” GMV is a strong growth signal of how well a company is performing w.r.t revenue, and is also an indicator of the rising digital adoption in consumers all across the world.

Google’s report emphasizes the undertaking of laser-focused marketing strategies in order to take advantage of the plethora of opportunities the region’s digital economy offers.

Sticking to our topic, what are some of the omnichannel marketing strategies that retailers can utilize to elevate their performance and grab market share in huge markets such as SouthEast Asia? Let’s explore:

Omnichannel Strategies in Retail

  1. Ensure Performance Across Channels

Being present on all channels is not enough; performance consistency and focus on delivering the best possible experience to customers, regardless of the channel they choose to interact with your brand, is an important yet very overlooked aspect of an optimal customer experience. 

Just fathom this, how many retail brands do you know that have a super-fast mobile shopping experience going on, just like they provide on desktop? Very few, in my own experience. Those that do, like Myntra, are far more conducive to natural mobile search and purchase than other prominent brands in the Indian market. 

Between two apparel websites that offer almost the same products, how much of a differentiator is mobile & app speed to you? (image format)

  1. Ensure Consistency Across Channels

Again, criminally underrated, because most brands are present just for the sake of being present, without care for ‘how’ they appear to the customer. It’s a very myopic outlook, which can be tackled by building a very strong brand identity system. A brand identity system is a set of brand guidelines that include logos, symbols, characters, and more, basically designed to keep the brand experience consistent, literally everywhere. Think of brands like Pepsi or Coca-Cola. They have been delivering a universally consistent brand experience for decades now. 

Consistency is not limited to branding. Retailers need to ensure that their in-store offers are consistent with their online claims. Similarly, the customer should feel a sense of service efficiency when interacting with your brand across all online channels, and in-store. 

It’s easy for consumers to spot which brands are genuine in building a top-notch omnichannel experience for their customers, and which are just ‘ticking the boxes’. And once you lose the attention of the customer, he’s as good as gone.

  1. Use Technology

By 2030, 125 billion devices are estimated to be connected using IoT, putting the number at 15 connected devices per user to handle. Your omnichannel strategy must consider the new wearables such as smart watches, to deliver increasingly personalized services, as customers are demanding. The data on personalization is there for all to see. A staggering 8+ people out of 10 are willing to share their personal details if they are treated to more personalized (read ‘better’) deals from brands. 

If you are behind on providing fully functional and maintained payment gateways on all fronts and automated chatbots, we take it you haven’t begun to use technology, but most chances are that you have done that. Those are staples today, but remember that the companies who adopted them first got the first-mover advantage. Updating to the next steps such as integrated shopping experience on new wearables will one day be as important as payment gateways.

  1. Learn From The Best

One of the best ways to stay ahead of the competition is to benchmark the best and replicate contextually. The consistency, performance, and technological advancement that Amazon has displayed through Amazon Prime is exemplary. Bringing customer data out of siloes from across devices and channels and connecting them, offering benefits and membership discounts, excellent product service at costs customers are willing to pay, are all elements of a revenue-generating omnichannel experience. 

Speaking of retail, Nike offers one of the best in-store + online integrations in the world. 

Credits: LinkedIn Pulse

The omnichannel retail infrastructure that Nike has put together is the very definition of seamlessness. Whether one is at the store, shopping online, or wants the product delivered to their home or the nearest retail store, everything feels automatic. It’s so good, you don’t notice it.

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In Retail, Building the Right Omnichannel Strategy is Everything

by adminin Customers, Explorazor, Omnichannel, Retail, sales

Let’s look at the retail landscape today and how important an omnichannel strategy can prove to be in efficiently marketing a brand and driving revenues.

THE NEED FOR AN OMNICHANNEL STRATEGY:

As many times as you have read it, the truth stands that the pandemic initially forced customers to shop online, and in time, customers adopted digital services big-time. This is evidenced by the fact that a whopping 20 million people in Southeast Asia alone converted to being digital customers in the first half of the year 2021. Online searches for terms like ‘instant delivery’ have shot up by 215% in India, just 2021 to 2022. 

The conclusion is that customers today are digitally present, and experience content and brands across so many touchpoints, that it is mandatory to have an omnichannel strategy in place for your brand.

An omnichannel strategy is a cohesive sales and marketing approach that seeks to use every customer touchpoint to provide a consistent and effective customer experience. It involves offering a company’s products & services at all customer touchpoints. Such touchpoints include digital channels like web and app, physical, brick-and-mortar experiences, and any other platform or device that a customer accesses.

‘Effective customer experience’ here means that a customer is satisfied with the product and/or while the company simultaneously generates revenue from that activity. 

2 WAYS AN OMNICHANNEL STRATEGY HELPS COMPANIES:

  1. Increased customer satisfaction – and company revenue

Let’s understand the power of omnichannel strategy in achieving customer satisfaction while simultaneously increasing revenue. 

Consider the example of Petco Health and Wellness, an American pet retailer selling pet food, products, and providing related services. During the pandemic, it understood that its competition and other third-party online retailers were not able to fulfill orders within time. Petco introduced ship-from-store options where customers could browse and purchase online, and pick up the same from physical stores nearest to them. 

Petco met the customers where they were, and provided a key micro-service that made customers love them – and made them some money. Petco’s acquisition costs were cut down by two-thirds, and they recorded a 100% year-on-year increase in sales.

  1. High CLV and retention rates 

Once sold to, they need to be retained. If you’re wondering who ‘they’ are, you’re probably working too late and need some sleep.

Back to the point. Once sold to, customers need to be retained. Creating an omnichannel presence, or being ‘omnipresent’ lets customers interact with your brand wherever and whenever they choose to. It lets the customers dictate what they want the brand to do, and brands can use this opportunity to foster real-time customer engagement and create lifetime value for the customers. 

We’ve covered the ‘how to do it’ in a related blog ‘Getting Omnichannel Right in Retail‘, but just factor in what you’ve read till now and the fact that the global e-commerce share of retail sales is expected to increase to a staggering 24% by 2026, and you’ll see that there’s no doubt that the companies absolutely need an omnichannel retail strategy.

SOME PREREQUISITES FOR BUILDING AN OMNICHANNEL STRATEGY:

Before you go about building an omnichannel presence, here are some of the things you need to have in place. Keep in mind that the list is more exhaustive, and below points are indicative of the nature of preparation you need to undertake. 

We can also help you with one of the rather important points..stick till the end.

  1. Creating/Mapping Customer Journeys 

When managers and teams work to create a framework for understanding customer journeys and how they react in certain recurring situations, for example, a festival that comes along every year, they are able to understand what the customer wants, and provide it to them. 

  1. Knowing who you are targeting

Let’s get this point through with an example. Think With Google shared crucial information for marketers wanting to reach audiences in Indonesia in the month of Ramadan. The data divided customers into 5 segments:

  1. The devoted prayer
  2. The homemaker 
  3. The Ramadan groomer 
  4. The tech followers, and 
  5. The home-comer

With almost the entirety of Indonesia following the religion of Islam, access to such data proves invaluable when slicing the total audience according to the right kind of demographics.

  1. Knowing what you what to communicate

Once you have the right audience figured out, taking the right message to them is equally important. Create a crystal clear overarching brand positioning that you want to reach to reach your audience with

  1. Conducting quick data analysis 

Driving real-time sales and delivering personalized CX in an industry where customers display volatile, or easily influenced, behavioral patterns requires lightning-fast data analysis. And this is where we believe we can help companies.

KICKSTART YOUR OMNICHANNEL STRATEGY WITH …

In the quest to deliver a standard, unified experience to customers, we’re proposing that you work on a standardized, unified dataset as the starting point of your omnichannel strategy. Our data exploration tool Explorazor is built specifically to help brand teams arrive at high-quality insights in an easier and faster manner than their current mode of working, which is primarily on Excel. The usage is very simple – query the integrated dataset using standard keywords such as ‘MS Value’ for Market Share Value and get instant data pivots. 

Explorazor is also infused with seamless root cause analysis, where managers can identify areas/events of concern via simple double-clicks. Other features such as pivots being downloadable as CSV files, various customizable options and chart style settings, time-period recognition (which is not present in BI Tools such as Power BI and Tableau) make data analysis so much easier, faster, and better for managers.

There’s no reinventing the wheel – one doesn’t have to completely leave Excel to use Explorazor either. Explorazor simply simplifies work done on Excel, to frame it as such. 

Multiple Brand Managers from Fortune 500 love Explorazor. As one of them shared his opinion with us “Explorazor is a more intelligent Excel to me”.  

Start with Explorazor, and end with more effective omnichannel strategies, optimized media spends, and higher revenues. Contact us at support@vphrase.com for a free trial and/or connect with our solutions consultant for a free demo.

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