Omnichannel personalization is not just another fancy marketing strategy – it is the real deal! Considering the fact that more than 73% of the online consumers use various platforms and channels to shop online, omnichannel personalization is something every e-commerce brand must strive for.
As the online retailing game skews towards impeccable customer experience and value, e-commerce brands can leverage the omnichannel strategy to uplift their gross sales.
Wait, but why and how?
Read this full blog to find out why omnichannel personalization is crucial for digital retail brands in 2021, and beyond.
From Multichannel Marketing to Omnichannel Unification
Most e-commerce retail brands are already using multiple channels to reach their target customers. Mobile apps, website, brick & mortar stores, and referral networks. Hence to say that these channels work but are scattered. The omnichannel marketing approach takes multichannel marketing a level up by unifying all these channels.
Why Unify All Brand Channels?
A customer might discover a brand via its website. But, then they might decide to approach it via Social handles, mobile app or any other channel. In the case of multi-channel marketing, customer data is not shared across different brand channels. Thus, if a customer decides to switch to another channel, they will have to provide their information from scratch.
However, if the customer data is distributed contextually across all the marketing channels, this problem goes away. This is the omnichannel marketing approach that essentially unifies the customer data, experience and contextual communication consistency across all channels.
The Need to Keep-up with Evolving Consumer Behaviour
There are so many digital touchpoints that e-commerce companies find it tedious to keep up with their customer journeys across all of them. Let’s say Reeta began to research some beauty products on her favourite retailer’s website. The brand will put in the effort to recommend her the best product based on her browsing history. Though, Reeta abandons her cart and closes the website. She then comes across a promotion for the same brand via SMS – now offering 20% discount on products similar to her taste. However, in order to avail the discount for the one product she liked, she has to start over again. Moreover, the brand does not know about Reeta’s discount expectations on the product since the channels are split.
For a brand that employs omnichannel marketing, this would have been a cakewalk. For instance, they would have identified Reeta’s choice of products, identified her need to avail a 20% discount, they would have triggered a nudge with a tailored offer – say over Reeta’s WhatsApp. That would have translated into a sale, and Reeta would have got more value.
This is just one example of evolving customer behaviour. Modern customers want the sellers to keep up with their choices, preferences, shopping style and so on. And, omnichannel marketing is a one-shot solution to address these e-commerce-customer gaps.
The Power of Omnichannel Marketing
Catering to evolving customer needs is only one benefit of omnichannel marketing. It packs a powerful punch for a brand’s marketing & sales – if implemented properly at scale. Some of the other benefits of omnichannel marketing for digital retail brands are;
Hyper-Personalized Messaging
It pays to provide a seamless and hyper-personalized messaging to your customers based on their preferences, past purchases, online actions and behaviour. A 2019 survey revealed an astonishing fact as to why personalization is close to so many hearts – personalization makes users feel like ‘individuals’ rather than just ‘numbers.’ Personalized emails, SMS promos, recommendations and on-site nudges can increase the conversion rate significantly unlike generic marketing communication built over ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach.
Optimizing Customer Journey & Experience
Omnichannel marketing gives brands the ability to get a top-level view of their customer journeys. They can discover answers to the questions like;
- How does a customer discover us?
- What is the typical research/browsing time before they add products in the cart?
- What segment do they belong to (first-timers, repeat customers, etc.)?
- What are the distractions and challenges they face while interacting with our brand?
- What are their needs, preferences and desires which they seek to fulfil with our brand?
The answers to these questions can reveal great insights into the optimal customer journey for any given digital retail brand. Moreover, e-commerce businesses can leverage unified marketing channels to enhance customer experience. For instance, they can identify the most preferred communication channel for customers to send them exclusive deals, or recommend trending products to them when they opt-in for it.
Enhance Customer Lifetime Value
Besides more sales conversions, omnichannel marketing can significantly enhance customer lifetime value or CLTV. Different brand surveys reveal that CLTV can be boosted by as much as 10% for each existing customer if they are within the omnichannel personalization bounds.
Drive Better Customer Loyalty & Retention
Building a customer list is hard. Retaining that list is even harder! With omnichannel personalized marketing, digital retail brands can drive better CX and in turns better loyalty. This makes sense because e-commerce brands using omnichannel personalized marketing at scale can retain up to 89% of their customers compared to just 33% for the brands that do not.
Implementing Omnichannel Personalization for Your E-commerce Brand
Now that you’ve gauged what an omnichannel marketing strategy can do for you, let’s ponder upon its implementation.
The best way to deploy omnichannel personalization at scale will be AI-driven automation like Wigzo. With minimal resource addition at the backend, a marketing automation tool can help you bring together different brand communication channels. Pre-made workflows, seamless enterprise integrations, custom message templates, event/action triggered nudges and contextual communication workflows can help companies unify all their marketing channels – and provide hyper-personalized experience to their online customers.
Stay tuned for our weekly blogs on optimizing your e-commerce marketing and automating processes for best possible returns!
Want to see Wigzo in action for your digital retail brand? Request a FREE Demo here.
