What is Omnichannel Personalization & Its Benefits?

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Did you know that the omnichannel engagement rate for online customers stands at 19% as opposed to only 5.4% for a given single channel? This difference is enough for a brand to consider an omnichannel personalization route to expand its footprint in the digital space.  

In this blog, we will learn about What omnichannel personalization is, what are its benefits, and the best strategic practices associated with it. 

Let us get going!

What is Omnichannel Personalization?

Omnichannel personalization is simply a data-driven marketing effort. It is about providing a personalized experience to your customers via a given channel, which is based on the data collected from the users’ behavior on other channels. Thus, e-retail brands can collect user-data from anywhere and leverage it to provide a personalized experience to their customers via different touchpoints.  

Capturing, engaging, and delivering a consistent experience to the customers across all the channels is crucial for e-commerce brands. Omnichannel personalization solves this. 

Here are some examples of omnichannel personalization by e-commerce brands for a better understanding.

  1. A customer visits an online clothes store and expresses interest in a pair of jeans. The customer, however, leaves the website without purchasing that item. The brand then retargets the same customer via Facebook with a discount offer. The customer makes the purchase.
  2. An online sports equipment retail brand might integrate its mobile app with a fitness tracker to enable its users to monitor their activity. They then use this data to drive product recommendations – on the website and in-store.
  3. An online shoe retail brand might collect customer data from in-store & online purchases. They can then create a loyalty program based on the data and leverage their CRM to drive more sales.

Difference Between Omnichannel Marketing & Multi-channel Marketing

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A lot of people confuse multi-channel marketing with omnichannel marketing. However, these two are different from each other. 

Multi-channel marketing is business-centric. Multi-channel marketing is simply about how an e-commerce brand interacts and engages customers via different channels – and each channel is independent of the other. E.g. a customer might give their information to the company via SMS. But, when they interact with another touchpoint of the brand, say a social messenger, they will have to provide their information again for that channel. 

Omnichannel marketing is customer-centric. It brings all the customer touchpoints together. With it, each interaction is communicated and coordinated across all the channels. So, a consumer could be shopping for an item in the store one minute and making the purchase off an email alert announcing a sale based on browsing history.

“Thus, an omnichannel marketing strategy covers multi-channel marketing, but multi-channel marketing does not necessarily imply omnichannel marketing.”  

Importance of Omnichannel Personalization for E-commerce Brands

A Mckinsey report states that e-commerce brands can achieve a 5% to 15% revenue increase with omnichannel personalization at scale. This is not just true for their customers’ online journeys, but also for store walk-ins. Needless to say, omnichannel marketing is crucial for digital retail brands because of the following reasons;

Consistent & seamless personalization experience

A brand that deploys omnichannel personalization at scale enjoys one benefit more than their rivals – everyone in the company knows about all the customers’ interactions and the breadcrumb trail of their activities and actions. This gives the brands an edge to serve their customers one-on-one contextually.

Building long-term customer base for the brand (Enhanced customer lifetime value)

The success of e-commerce brands ultimately boils down to the size of their loyal customer base. Without personalization at disposal and a unified communication strategy, turning first-time buyers into loyal customers becomes a tedious task. However, omnichannel personalization is known to show a 90% higher customer retention rate than the single channels. 

Thus, an omnichannel strategy can be a core asset for the long-term business viability of your brand. 

Benefits of Omnichannel Personalized Marketing for Digital Retail Brands

Higher average order value

A unified personalization strategy at scale gives e-retail brands an opportunity to amplify their customers’ shopping cart activity. Such brands can always put their customers back on the purchase journey (without worrying about new acquisitions too much!) and increase average order value with targeted offers, intelligent product recommendations, and merchandising. 

One-on-one customer communication

Almost 70% of online smartphone users are likely to buy from a brand that helps them easily find answers to their questions. With a website and mobile experience sync, e-commerce brands can leverage one-on-one customer experience to resolve queries faster, enhance customer experience, loyalty, and purchases. 

Higher conversions and ROI

It is an observed trend that personalization at scale can yield a 5x to 8x ROI on a brand’s marketing spend. With dynamic content based on customer-behavior, clickstream data, context, product recommendations, and exclusive personalized offers, digital retail brands can significantly boost their overall conversion rates. 

How to Forge a Winning Omnichannel E-commerce Personalization Strategy?

New e-commerce brands often ask us one question more than the others – How can we create an effective omnichannel personalization strategy for our brand? We give them the following answers that should work with you as well!

1. Define your strategy and feedback loop for learning

Successful e-commerce companies have a crystal-clear understanding of the key-influence moments in the customer journey (as per their specific case & industry). This is usually broken into 3 stages – generating awareness pre-visit, conversion during the visit, and customer engagement post-visit. Once you’ve figured this out, you need to define the business outcomes at each of these stages. E.g Increasing average cart-size, repeated trips/visits, customer satisfaction, etc. 

These findings are then coupled with use-cases & testing with one objective – delivering business benefit & value to the customer.

E.g. An online food ordering app wants to increase their average order basket size. They collate the customer data and find out that their customers preferred physical restaurant check-ins during hot days. The company then implements personalized geo-fencing app alerts for their customers based on their location & previous purchases to drive more walk-ins.  

2. Leverage the 5 digital touchpoints

To achieve omnichannel personalization based on identified use cases, companies need to connect digital footprints. E-commerce brands must focus on the five customer touchpoints where this convergence happens – mobile app, website, digital displays, interactive screens, and point of sale.

To make the best of these five touchpoints for your omnichannel personalization strategy, consider how these can deliver a great personalized customer experience consistently.

E.g. a customer visits the website to shop for jewelry and adds a product in her cart. However, she leaves without making a purchase. She then receives an email from the brand with an exclusive discount offer for the same product she added to her cart. She misses the email but receives a personalized WhatsApp message nudging her to make the discounted purchase with the link. She checks out after purchasing the product.  

3. Think automation

Automation is opening up new doors for digital retail brands, especially when it comes to providing a personalized experience to their customers at scale across all the touchpoints. Automation serves two crucial purposes for an omnichannel marketing strategy – reliability & scalability. For instance, AI-powered e-commerce marketing tools like Wigzo help brands provide an omnichannel experience to their customers. Be it email, push notifications, SMS, banners, or even WhatsApp, automation helps digital retailers try, test, and implement their offers at scale for a much higher ROI.   

4. Agile marketing operations

Agility is the ability of a business to act quickly based on the immediate conditions and adapt to it if necessary in the long run. For new e-commerce brands, agile marketing operations bring high value to their growth. Your core team must be able to decipher individual customer needs based on the previous data, map new trends, change communication uniformly across all the channels, and coordinate effectively. Again, automation solves 90% of these agile marketing challenges.

Remember, agile operations are crucial for your e-commerce brand for fast learning, implementation, and adaptability to stay in the game for long.

Omnichannel strategy can sound overwhelming & tedious, but it does not have to be. With a deep understanding of your customer journey, the nature of their interactions at your touchpoints, and automation, you can offer better value to your customers and forge a loyal following. 

Need to boost your e-commerce bottom line with personalization & automation? Checkout Wigzo.

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Winay Bari

Winay Bari

Winay Bari is a passionate Digital Marketing Enthusiast with over 8+ years of experience in B2C, B2B SaaS Marketing. Currently working as Sr. Marketing Manager for Wigzo Technologies, Winay is an avid Chai Lover, Dreamer & Hustler!

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