6 Valuable Gains from Omnichannel Marketing in Online Business Growing
How does ‘omnichannel marketing’ help me to grow my online business Originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.
Whether you realize it or not, it omnichannel marketing is all around you.
As technology continues to change, so do business practices and marketing strategy. Think about how quickly the internet has evolved the ways businesses promote their products and services. It wasn’t that long ago a company could only reach customers through snail mail, the phone, or in person.
As a customer, you interact with brands every day. Sometimes, it remains through face-to-face interactions; often, it is digitally through email, social media, and company websites.
What Is Omnichannel Marketing?
When you have an excellent customer experience while shopping or interacting with brands, chances are they have implemented an omnichannel approach.
Omnichannel Marketing Definition
Omnichannel marketing creates a seamless customer experience across all channels. This marketing strategy takes digital interactions, such as social media and e-commerce purchases, and integrates them with interpersonal interactions. These in-person interactions include in-store staff for B2C brands as well as sales and customer success managers for B2B brands. Omnichannel marketing requires all departments to work together.
Benefits of Omnichannel Marketing
#1: Instant Revenue Growth
Omnichannel shoppers actually spend 4 % more, on average, during in-store shopping trips and 10 % more online than customers who only used a single channel.
The average omnichannel customer also spent more in the future: 17 percent more, on average, with the retailer over the next six months, and they even purchased 15 % more items, as compared to those who used just one channel. These facts and figures are good reasons to invest in an omnichannel strategy that will pay for itself dozens, if not hundreds, of times over.
#2: High Customer Retention
Winning a consumer’s attention and loyalty in a competitive market full of other merchants is not an easy undertaking. And keeping them is even harder. Omnichannel marketing can help you manage customer relationships across all channels and influence their loyalty to your brand. For customers, it’s nice to be distinguished and greeted in each channel they use.
Seamless flow on customers’ journey empowers them to interact with the company in a natural way, and the familiar environment of the brand and ability to respond to a consumer’s demand in the desired way increases overall customer satisfaction.
#3: Easily Personalized Offer
Luckily for merchants, consumers are becoming more willing to share personal data if they see a tangible benefit in exchange. They also expect to be able to earn points on their accounts regardless of the channel they use. Hence, this allows you the opportunity to personalize your offers to them. Their shopping experience is rising when they can shop whenever and however they like in the way that reflects their specific needs.
In the sense of rewarding with coupons, there is a growing tendency to accept digital forms of vouchers received via mobile instead of traditional printed forms. That personalization creates loyal customers who spend a lot on the brands they love.
#4: Importance of All Channels
To confirm our case study above, we should mention that 67% of retail customers start shopping on one device and finish on another or complete their purchase in a physical store. Shoppers tend to use around 10 sources of information to make a purchasing decision. This should motivate you to take full advantage of all your channels and look for more if your customers use them.
The ability to use digital technology at home, on the go, or in-store — to research products, compare brands, read reviews, check product availability, and pay for items — enables the seamless experience many shoppers now demand to complete their purchases.
#5: Cross-Channel Insights
Multiple channels of communication create different streams of information and you need to be able to control and understand these metrics. With a good omnichannel analytics tool you can interact with customer data no matter where it is generated from and cross-reference it with other data generated from similar customers across platforms. With this overview, you get a better picture of the effects of your business efforts.
#6: Customer Self-Service
According to a survey by Nuance Enterprise customers consider self-service as a very convenient alternative in their shopping habits. New channels create new touchpoints and new opportunities to engage with customers.
Thanks to digital assistants, customers are more ready than they’ve ever been to embrace a self-service which makes them feel more independent; at the same time, it also allows you to keep in touch and receive feedback from them. The catch is that the systems in place usually require an integrated or attractive way to meet the needs of more sophisticated customers.
If customers can get answers to their questions without taking up your time and resources, it increases your efficiency and their satisfaction.
Contributed by Zaujan Baig, M.B.A Marketing & International Business, Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University (2018)
