As the entire world is facing a hard time to survive from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, business owners are facing the worst time in their life to run their businesses. Businesses and it would be ideal if you could insert online retailers, but if not, retailers is also fine should think innovative and start implementing Omnichannel retail strategies to survive and to succeed in this hard time.
This article elaborates on the value of an Omnichannel retail strategy and who to implement it successfully in your business.
What is an Omnichannel Retail Strategy?
It is an innovative and modern approach to do marketing, sales, and customer service across multiple channels. Omnichannel retail strategy delivers an integrated and cohesive customer experience by sharing customer data across multiple channels.
Omnichannel retail strategy delivers the smooth and flawless buyer’s journey, of course, benefits shoppers by making their lives easier.
In addition to that, Omnichannel marketing boosts customer engagement and retention, as well as purchase rates and customer spending, for organizations which use it.
According to studies, companies that place a premium on the customer experience make 60% more money than their competitors. After all, happy customers are the result of well-cared-for prospects. Customers that are happy with your service are more inclined to recommend you to others. Furthermore, keeping current customers is much less expensive than obtaining new ones.
The Value Of An Omnichannel Retail Strategy
1. Competitive Edge
Customers would always love to compare products before making a purchase decision. Some may prefer online search and comparison before making purchase decisions while they do shopping in a traditional store. Conversely, some online customers prefer to visit a traditional store to feel the product and cross-check whether it fits them properly.
So, providing such multiple channels/platforms to the customer will allow you to get a competitive edge in today’s competitive market.
2. Better Customer Experience
The omnichannel retail strategy offers a seamless and convenient way of shopping experience to the potential customers/buyers in multiple channels. The consistency provided by the omnichannel strategy provides a better customer experience.
In the business world, having a good and better customer experience will directly reflect on increasing customer retention and boosting business sales.
3. Enhances Sales & Engagement
The omnichannel marketing strategy will require some effort while implementing but once it is successfully done, it will be so worthy and deliver wonderful results. Since the strategy gives more channels it allows more customers to reach your business and increase your business sales significantly.
4. Cost Reduction & Increase in Operational Efficiency
When your business is fully connected with the potential customers through an omnichannel retail strategy, the chance of increasing your income through advertising will increase. Also, the multiple channels provided by the omnichannel will reach more potential customers from various places. This will reduce the cost of marketing your products dramatically.
5. Higher Customer Lifeline Value
Pim for retail strategy increases the customer lifeline value to a high level by boosting the relationship between the customers and retailers. Owing to that, customers who use omnichannel spend more time while shopping and feel more loyal to the brand.
Once the loyal and potential customer spends more time with the retailer’s brands they start to feel more connected.
5 Tactics For Retailers To Move Toward An Omnichannel Marketing Strategy
Well, those days are gone when retailers considered the omnichannel strategy as one of the options to implement. Now, it is considered as the most essential thing to do for surviving and to achieve business goals.
According to the recently conducted survey, retails who successfully implemented Omni-channel retail marketing strategies witnessed more than 91% customer retention rates. This clearly shows the importance of moving towards an omnichannel strategy by the retailers.
Here are the 5 tactics to follow by the retailers to employ their business towards omnichannel.
1. Empower Your Customer
The core strategy of omnichannel is to empower the customers; it simply gives the customers what and where they want. By implementing an omnichannel strategy, customers will find it more convenient for shopping for their needed products.
Once the customer finds it more helpful and convenient with the retailers while shopping surely they will do additional shopping and it will be more profitable for retailers. Based on the study reports, retailers who implemented omnichannel strategy witnessed 49% of additional shopping from their customers.
2. Customers Find Easy To Search Products
Customers will find it more difficult if they are unable to find the products they need or the desired product information. If things keep on continuing like this, it will cause an impact on customer satisfaction and will lead them towards taking a negative purchase decision. Even it will force them to move towards other stores or other brands.
Retailers using omnichannel make use of advanced POS systems to inform the product information and the completed details regarding the inventories to the customers easily. This will create a positive customer experience and saves a lot of time for the customers by skipping the missing products around the store.
3. Provides In-app Experience
The omnichannel strategy allows retailers to create better assistance to the customer in-store through sales-oriented gadgets. The omnichannel retail strategy allows retailers to cut the middleman and provide the complete information about the store right in the hands of customers either by providing mobile phone apps, stationary tablets in-store, and so on.
4. Loyalty Programs
Introducing Loyalty programs to your customers will make them aware of how you treat them. Also, with such programs, you can understand your customer more and identify your potential customers. Moreover, conducting such programs among customers is the key to omnichannel retail strategy.
It helps retailers to market new products to potential customers easily by sending promotional SMS or emails. Tracking and staying connected with potential customers becomes easy with such loyalty programs.
5. Real-Time Assistance
Having good and responsive real-time customer service assistance is more important to avoid customers getting frustrated and do negative promotions about the retailers on social media. Over the years, retailers never gave importance to their customer complaints. Now things changed dramatically if it hasn’t been addressed properly they will tend to lose more potential customers because of the power of social media.
Omnichannel customer experience will help retailers to maintain their brand voice by instant assistance to the customer complaints. Assistance will be provided via the phone, Emails, Live chats, or through social media.
Implementing an Omnichannel Retail Strategy through PIM System
If you started a new online business and wanted to grow your online business then implementing an Omni Channel Retail Strategy becomes essential. Wondering about how to implement the omnichannel strategy successfully, then you are in the right place.
Here we have illustrated how to implement it successfully. Follow these below-listed six steps to for successful implementation of Omni Channel retailing Strategy for your business.
Step 1: Know your Audience
Knowing about your audience is very essential as how much you know about your audience the more sales you will get and you need to know what your audience buys? How they buy and after knowing our audience it becomes easy to implement omnichannel in our business
Step 2: Segment Your Target Audience and email list
You need to Segment your audience for optimum impact once you’ve figured out who’s buying what and how they’re doing it.
Your contacts will be automatically segmented by CRM and marketing automated solutions depending on the personas you’ve built, or any behavioral or demographic indicators you provide. You may then customize your mail from each segment – or even individual customers.
Step 3: Aligning Content with every buyer journey
Every buyer has a unique journey, and it should be treated as an individual. Omnichannel strategy is useful in gathering all the details of the buyer’s and it helps a lot for delivering improving customer experience. It can be achieved by delivering personalizing content and assistance to your customers’ preferences.
Step 4: Analyzing and prioritize all devices and channels
You don’t need to imply every example of new communication at all times. You need to invest in your consumers’ experiences by relying on the platforms and touchpoints they prefer. Omnichannel strategy offers multiple channels by using that you can develop better customer experience.
Step 5: Focus On Customer Support
Customer is everything for business and you need to serve customers 24/7. You can’t do this physically but you can do this online. By using omnichannel retail strategy, retailers can deliver high responsive customer support service via multiple platforms like phone, emails, SMS, and social media.
Step 6: Integrating Your Funding
This is the final step in Implementing Omni Marketing and you need to make sure everybody on the company team gets input, from marketing to customer service to product developers and website management.
Conclusion
As more physical retailers spend more money and time to strengthen their online accessibility to potential customers, the omnichannel retail strategy becomes inevitable. Omnichannel creates an exceptional and fully custom-tailored customer experience that will boost sales and business growth through a positive customer experience.
