The ultimate guideline for running successful eCommerce business in today’s digital environment is omnichannel marketing. It is the most effective method for ensuring great customer service and user experiences. These factors contribute to a strong brand image, increased revenue, and high customer retention rates.

A survey by Google & Temasek forecasts that South East Asia’s e-commerce business would rise over $102 billion by 2025.

However, before putting your efforts on developing your online channels, keep in mind that many of your target buyers still browse, shop, or do both offline in a nearby brick and mortar store.

Hence, you need a strong marketing strategy to attract the customers online. Adopting multichannel marketing tactics may appear to be a hard task. It may even seem impossible, given the intense focus on personalized experience. However, before you become overwhelmed, keep in mind that there are now sophisticated solutions available to systematize your marketing. Your responsibility is to identify the channels that are most effective for your business and to establish strategies for implementing them. To do so, you’ll need a firm grasp on what is omnichannel, benefits of omnichannel in ecommerce and the most effective strategies to implement it.

All you need to know about eCommerce Omnichannel

Omnichannel eCommerce begins with a presence across several platforms. However, the story does not finish there. A genuinely omnichannel business attempts to provide a consistent consumer experience across all platforms. Essentially, you allow your customers to engage with your brand in a variety of ways. However, you must ensure that they can continue where they left off with other.

For instance, a retail business may have an eCommerce platform in addition to multiple brick-and-mortar locations. Additionally, you may have social media pages and email campaigns dedicated to promoting certain retail locations. An omnichannel strategy enables a customer to discover a product via mail and purchase it from your web store. They can then seek assistance via your Facebook page or return an item to the physical store.

According to Harvard Business Review survey, 73% of internet customers used numerous channels to complete their purchase. Harvard Business Review states that the more channels a customer used, the greater their value:

1. Customers would spend 4% more in-store and 10% more online throughout any given shopping trip than any single channel customer.
2. Customers who used four or more channels also spent additional 9% in-store than customers who used only one channel.

However, it’s critical to remember that as the total no. of brand touchpoints grows, the requirement for a consistent and smooth experience grows as well.

This is why omnichannel eCommerce, a strategy for exploiting and integrating numerous offline and online channels, has become critical for firms seeking to maintain growth and remain competitive. An omnichannel strategy connects all possible touchpoints in order to provide shoppers with a smooth end-to-end shopping experience.

Also Read Top Omnichannel Trends in Retail Sector

eCommerce Omnichannel marketing strategies to implement

Determine your Prospective Buyers/Customers

Your omnichannel approach will improve the customer experience, which requires a thorough understanding of your customer, i.e., target audience. Recognize your customers and their expectations of you. Create user persona profiles using the available information. It is always prudent to segment buyer personas according to shared characteristics such as demographics, occupation, age, and expectations.

Additionally, you may use behavioral analytics tool to collect all of the necessary data for creating buyer profiles. However, the fewer profiles you build, the easier it is to deduce critical information for developing an omnichannel strategy that is flawless.

Comprehensive Competitive Analysis

It might be really beneficial to understand how your competitors manage the omnichannel experience. If a competitor is performing well in the industry and has established a reputation as an omnichannel brand, determine what they are doing better.

You should be able to recognise the following:

1. What is the omnichannel approach of your competitors?
2. What are the gaps in your user experience as a result of competitor analysis?

Once you’ve determined the answers to all these questions, it’ll become second nature to quickly and effectively meet consumer expectations.

Segment your audience

Once you have a firm grasp on your customer, segmenting customers becomes a piece of cake. Segmentation is critical since it enables you to customise the buyer’s journey and communication. You can segment your audience using a variety of factors, ranging from basic demographic information to more advanced criteria such as their likes, interests, and online consumer activity. The more precisely segmented your consumer base, the more effective your omnichannel marketing plan will be. With proper segmentation, you’ll be able to develop distinct campaigns for distinct customers and customise their experiences.

Know how appICE can help you in customer segmentation

Customer Journey Mapping

User journey mapping for various buyer personas enables you to track the path taken by your consumers when they execute an activity on a website, mobile app, or brick-and-mortar store. What is it that keeps them from abandoning at any point? To orchestrate an omnichannel experience, it is critical to understand the points of failure in the channel flow, which can be easily recognized via customer journey mapping.

Individualize each channel’s programming

90% of users transfer between devices to achieve a task, and according to App Annies, the average smartphone user utilizes at least nine apps every day. If you want to increase the number of visitors to your app, you must utilize all available channels. There are numerous ways to reach them, ranging from SMS and email to push alerts. However, before you target all channels, take the time to write a unique message for each one. For instance, a message sent through push notification cannot be as lengthy as an email copy. It must be brief and convey the message in the fewest feasible terms.

Efficient customer support across all channels

Customer service is a fundamental component of any digital commerce business’s strategy. To successfully implement omnichannel commerce, it is necessary to scale customer assistance across all accessible channels.

If a consumer contacts you via Facebook Messenger, you should be able to provide active customer service. The same holds true for website and application support. Redirecting customers to several support channels is not a recommended practice. The correct approach is to invest in additional customer care employees and chatbots for Messaging and other platforms.   Additionally, help should be accessible via all available channels, including phone calls, emails, chat, and direct messages.

Automated marketing across channels and touchpoints

Your dedicated system should provide cross-channel marketing automation. Every journey across every touchpoint and channel must be meticulously documented to identify areas for improvement. This enables you to track user activity across channels, hence enhancing the user experience across touchpoints. For example, you’ll know how many email subscribers you’re gaining, how many transactions you’re making, and how many customer visits you’re receiving across all channels.

On the basis of this data, you can then develop a strategy for increasing sales across low-traffic and low-traction channels and scaling up marketing activity across the channels that receive the majority of eyeballs.

Takeaway

The use of omnichannel marketing tactics enables you to deliver superior customer experiences. This will be possible across all channels and all through the client journey. With the help of  appropriate marketing automation solution, the above mentioned strategies for implementing omnichannel effectively can help you outperform your competitors. Additionally, these will assist you in nurturing your audience into lifelong consumers.