What is Omnichannel Marketing & It’s Importance in Retail Business?

What is Omnichannel Marketing?

Table of Contents

Do you know that most of your customers preferred to first check the product, its reviews, and rating online and on various social media channels before buying it online or from a physical store?

Sometimes, the customers shop online while they are standing in front of a physical store or research online about the product and buy from a physical store.

All things matter on how much trust they are in your brand and how you’re influencing them to buy from you through retargeting. That’s why omnichannel marketing has become an extremely important marketing strategy to retarget your customer where they’re spending most of their time. The channels can either be online channels like applications, websites, social media platforms or offline call centers, retail stores, etc.

So, if you want your business to flourish and increase brand awareness, you must apply omnichannel marketing strategies to grow your business. You can also use omnichannel marketing to synchronize communication between the channels.

So let’s start with its definition,

What is Omnichannel Marketing? 

Omnichannel Marketing is a kind of marketing strategy using which you can create your brand’s presence across various channels. This will give your customers a positive experience throughout their journey. Omnichannel marketing has become an extremely important form of marketing that has simply revolutionized marketing strategies and has also allowed businesses to reach new heights.

What is OmniChannel Marketing
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To create perfect omnichannel marketing strategies for your customers, you need to understand your customers deeply. For that, you need to carry out a detailed analysis of the behaviour of your customers

You need to know how exactly your customers would prefer to purchase items from your brand and even from your competitor’s brand. This data will help you to identify your drawbacks and focus on your strengths. It will also help you to isolate the common issues that your customers face while shopping.

If you target your customer from more than 1 channel then the conversion chances are 4-5 times higher than the single one. Here’s a table below that reflects how important it is to have different marketing channels for your business:

Benefiits of Omni channel marketing
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Omnichannel marketing vs Multichannel marketing vs Cross-channel marketing

Multichannel marketing, cross-channel marketing, and omnichannel marketing are the most popular kinds of marketing strategies that are being adopted by various organizations to acquire customers. So, let us see how these marketing strategies differ from one another and which strategy is best for your business.

Multichannel marketing

Multichannel marketing strategies involve using multiple channels to reach customers. These channels can either be online or offline. Many companies are also using indirect marketing channels like social media, press releases, etc to connect with their customers. Multichannel marketing has its own set of advantages and disadvantages. In a multichannel marketing strategy, the channels work independently. There is no communication between the two channels. The customer will not be able to move from one channel to another continuously.

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If you are new to the business, then it is always better to start with multichannel marketing as this kind of marketing has fewer risks involved. However, multi-channel marketing strategies are becoming obsolete day by day as customers need to have a connected approach to get a better shopping experience.

Cross-channel marketing

Cross-channel marketing and multichannel marketing are quite similar to one another. However, the only difference between them is that in cross-channel marketing, the marketing channels are all connected. This allows you to record all the customer interactions. The customer will also be able to seamlessly move between the channels during their shopping journey.

Most companies have started to implement cross-channel marketing strategies in some form or the other. In cross-channel marketing, although the channels are independent of one another, the channel campaigns can be easily integrated. The communication is based on the sales approach.

Omnichannel marketing

Omnichannel marketing is an integration of both multichannel and cross-channel marketing. It integrates the key elements of both cross-channel and multichannel marketing. Omnichannel marketing is used to create a more interactive and customer-centric shopping experience for users. Omnichannel marketing strategy recognizes the customer’s role across various channels and devices.

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Omnichannel marketing allows the brands to establish themselves in a better way. It unifies sales and marketing and enables the growth of your business. Currently, omnichannel marketing strategy is being adopted by large and by eCommerce brands. We’ve given 2 examples at the last of this article you must checkout.

Why is Omnichannel marketing important for your Business?

As we have already seen, omnichannel marketing has changed the way of thinking for most marketers. So, let us have a look at some of the reasons why omnichannel marketing is of absolute importance for your business:

Data analysis: Omnichannel marketing gives the advertiser a clear picture of their advertising campaigns. You will get to know how exactly the customers are reacting to their marketing campaigns. You will get a proper insight of your customer engagement in each campaign. This will allow you to visualize your customer’s behaviour and design effective campaigns and strategies for your business.

Personalization: Omnichannel marketing can be used to give a personalized experience to your lovely customers. A personalized experience is similar to a luxury gift. In the world of hurry and worry, everyone wants personal attention so giving personalization to each customer has become a necessity for every brand. With the help of omnichannel marketing, you can target your customers personally. That will help you to connect with your customers in a far better way.

Better communication between the departments: Before omnichannel marketing, there was a clear boundary between sales and marketing. With the introduction of omnichannel marketing, everything has become a single unified. There is no strong demarcation between sales and marketing. That allows you to conduct your business activities smoothly and efficiently.

Cost-effectiveness: Omnichannel marketing strategies are cost-effective. Most advertisers waste a lot of time on designing marketing strategies that ultimately go in vain. This won’t happen in the case of omnichannel marketing. Here, you will get a clear idea of what is best for your company. You can take the help of data and analytics tools to reach your target audience. 

How to design a perfect omnichannel marketing strategy for your business? 

If you want to create a perfect omnichannel marketing strategy & campaign for your business, then first and foremost, you need to keep the customer experience in mind. Only then will you be able to design your strategy in the best possible way. You need to know what exactly fascinates your customer and design your strategies accordingly.

You need to put more emphasis on the context. Try to understand what kind of content exactly interests your customers. You must also have a deep knowledge of the type of customers who are regularly visiting your website. You need to know your customer intent as well as buying behavior. You must also understand who your customers are and what they are looking for on your website.

How To Include Omnichannel Marketing In E-Commerce/Retail?

Today, E-Commerce and retail businesses are incomplete without the involvement of omnichannel marketing. Using omnichannel marketing, you can help and influence your customers to communicate with your brand from various social platforms they’re using.

Various omnichannel marketing campaigns conducted in recent years have proved that omnichannel marketing has increased user engagement by around 18%. E-commerce companies that use more than 3 channels for conducting their business activities are more successful as compared to other organizations that stick to a single channel. Omnichannel marketing has also helped to increase the retention rate of these websites by over 90%.

Omnichannel Marketing in Retail
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Some Examples of Omnichannel Marketing in E-Commerce (Retail Industry)

Amazon.com

Amazon is a leading eCommerce marketplace in the world. It started with selling books from its website and now millions of products are available in thousands of categories you can choose from.

Amazon uses omnichannel digital marketing strategies to engage its users and also influences them to buy a product by showing retargeting ads throughout the internet either on social media channels and on search engines like Google. 

I’m sure if you’d ever visited the Amazon website or an app and moved out without making any purchase, Amazon starts retargeting you on different social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and also shows banner ads and influences you to buy that product.

This approach is one of the main reasons for its customer acquisition success in this highly competitive market.

Starbucks

Starbucks is also a leading coffee retail chain in the world. As we all know that now we’re completely addicted to our smartphones. We can’t live our single day without our smartphones.

Starbucks understands this very well and that’s why they launched their Starbucks app that allows you to find nearby Starbucks stores, redeem gift cards, manage your loyalty card, and a wallet for online payments. 

Starbucks is one of the top brands that leverages complete omnichannel marketing to engage its users. In the retail market, the best way to engage with the customer is to give discounts, free beverages, birthday gifts, etc. This helps to keep their customers retained and engaged since they’ll need to continuously use the application to receive rewards. Starbucks reward program is far better than a traditional loyalty program. Starbucks has made it possible to check and reload your card via phone, website, in-store, or on the app. Any change to the card or your profile gets updated across all channels, in real-time.

Apart from these 2, there’re endless examples of omnichannel marketing, like Nike, PepperFry, and many more. If you want to read more examples, check the Hubspot article.

Conclusion: 

So, we can say that omnichannel marketing has already proved itself to be an extremely powerful tool to revolutionize marketing strategies. There are thousands of brands who have already mastered the power of omnichannel marketing and with time, it is going to dominate all other forms of marketing.

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