How does omnichannel marketing work in the online shop?

Customers today have high expectations when it comes to communicating and interacting with a company, a brand and an online shop. Regardless of whether offline or online, one of your central tasks is to create a seamless customer experience across all your channels. This is where omnichannel marketing comes in, offering you an effective way to deliver a consistent message, support the purchase decision, improve customer loyalty, increase conversion rates and ultimately ensure your long-term success.

What do you need to consider with omnichannel marketing, what are the benefits of omnichannel marketing and how do you best go about it? In the following article, we take a closer look at omnichannel marketing for you.

What is Omnichannel Marketing?

Omnichannel marketing aims to provide customers with a holistic and consistent user experience across all channels, media and devices. So no matter whether your target group is shopping in a brick-and-mortar shop, browsing your online shop or finding information on your social media profiles – everywhere your customers encounter a consistent message and can continue their actions without detours when they switch channels. In the best case, the coordinated coordination of all media and the merging of all sales channels creates the feeling that everything is one. Crucial for omnichannel marketing are collected data and settings that are stored and can thus be taken into account for other channels.

Two classic examples should illustrate omnichannel marketing at this point:

A prospective customer looks around your online shop and discovers a product that he would like to purchase and also hold in his hands as quickly as possible. Fortunately, you have a branch very close to him and the desired item is in stock here. The customer can reserve the product on your site and pick it up directly in the stationary shop. Offline and online dovetail into one sales unit in the sense of omnichannel marketing.

A customer has an enquiry and contacts your customer service by phone. He then remembers something important and writes you an email. In terms of omnichannel marketing, they can continue the consultation without having to explain their initial situation again.

The most important features of omnichannel marketing include:

• Consistent message
• Inclusion of all distribution channels – offline and online
• Personalisation
• consistent interaction across all channels
• Data collection and analysis
• Interfaces with other departments in a company

What is the difference between omnichannel marketing and multichannel and cross-channel marketing?

What is the difference between omnichannel marketing and multichannel and cross-channel marketing?

With multichannel marketing, you operate all channels separately. This would mean, for example, that you run a brick-and-mortar shop and an online shop, but the customer cannot act across channels. Either he buys a product locally or orders it from your online shop.

Crosschannel marketing is similar to omnichannel marketing in a way, as it also links several sales channels. With crosschannel, customers could purchase something online and pick it up in your branch. In contrast, channels and devices work together in omnichannel marketing in a much more interlocked way. With omnichannel marketing, the customer should hardly notice that he is changing channels.

What is the goal of omnichannel marketing?

The focus of omnichannel marketing is on creating a continuous customer journey so that a high degree of flexibility is created in the choice of channels and devices. It should be ensured at all times that users can switch between sales channels at will and continue their actions here. The basis of omnichannel marketing is stored data.

Do you know the ROPO effect?

ROPO stands for “research online, purchase offline”, which means that a visitor finds out about a product online in your shop and buys it in the stationary trade. Omnichannel marketing creates the consistent change in this case. Furthermore, it should be possible for a customer to purchase a product on site and then return it to the online shop. With omnichannel marketing, this path is also open in the other direction.

What are the advantages of omnichannel marketing?

Omnichannel marketing significantly increases customer satisfaction because users can decide for themselves through which channel they interact with you and at the same time their personal preferences are taken into account everywhere. Remember, the lower the barriers, the higher the chance of closing a sale.

Omnichannel marketing brings these advantages:

• Consistent and smooth buying experience
• Increase in conversion rate
• higher customer loyalty
• easier acquisition of new customers
• gaining valuable data on user behaviour
• positive image building
• More professional customer service
• Strengthening of all sales channels

How can omnichannel marketing be built?

The basis of omnichannel marketing is the creation and maintenance of a central database in which all important customer information is recorded. Only in this way is it possible to act across all channels. Among other things, it becomes possible that a prospective customer who has favoured a product, for example, is shown this again and again at different touchpoints across all media and channels. With the right omnichannel marketing strategy, you can prepare customers for a purchase in a targeted manner.

When implementing omnichannel marketing, you should consider a few things and create the appropriate conditions.

Target definition and target group analysis

Omnichannel marketing starts with setting goals. What do you want to achieve with omnichannel marketing and which channels can you interlink to achieve this? What is possible at all? Also take into account the wishes and ideas of your target group. Omnichannel marketing will only be successful if they also have added value. Therefore, analyse the current user behaviour and take a closer look at where they encounter hurdles.

Query resources

Once you have defined your goals with omnichannel marketing, the question is how to achieve them in reality. Do you have the right IT for a database and is the technical know-how available? Who will take care of the legally compliant processing of the data? This is a particularly important point in omnichannel marketing.

Create strategy, determine measures and calculate costs

After you have clarified the goal and resources, you derive a strategy from this, fill it with concrete measures for omnichannel marketing and, based on this, draw up a cost plan that you put in relation to the potential. Ultimately, everything boils down to increasing your turnover with omnichannel marketing.

When strategically planning omnichannel marketing, always make sure that the customer experience is the focus of every measure.

Consider for this:

• The channel change in omnichannel marketing is left up to the customer. He can, but does not have to change the distribution channel for an interaction.
• Network not only channels, but also your departments. For targeted omnichannel marketing, customer support needs access to data from sales or purchasing. This is the only way to provide personalised advice across all channels.
• Design all sales channels in a uniform way. This applies to the design as well as to your message and the product range.
• Use customer relationship management software for data management. This way, information can be stored centrally and is accessible to the departments involved from anywhere.
• Ensure the greatest possible personalisation across all channels and stages. When a prospect approaches your customer service team on social media about a product they ordered, it is important that the support representative can immediately address the question individually. In addition, customers should receive personalised messages at as many touchpoints as possible so that you consistently strengthen the customer relationship.

Personalisation in omnichannel marketing

As you have read, personalisation is an important criterion for omnichannel marketing. The more touchpoints you address your customers individually, the more effective the customer journey will be. But be careful! Find the right balance. A prospective customer could quickly feel disturbed or, in the worst case, even annoyed. Such a negative experience must be avoided in omnichannel marketing.

One possibility for personalisation in omnichannel marketing are so-called exit intent pop-ups. The dialogue boxes “pop up” when the visitor is about to leave the website. They are triggered automatically by an intelligent mouse trigger. With an exit intent pop-up in omnichannel marketing, you can not only prevent a user from leaving the page, but also win back shopping cart abandoners or generate newsletter subscribers. You can also increase the dwell time and the conversion rate.

The data protection-compliant exit intent pop-ups from uptain work with intelligent data processing, which means that the customer receives a personalised message with the appropriate content, the right tone and at the optimal time – without appearing intrusive. In terms of omnichannel marketing, an added value is created for the shop visitor according to his current challenge or hurdle and he perceives the exit intent popup as a service.

Use the potential of omnichannel marketing

Omnichannel marketing meets today’s user demands. As we gain more and more sales channels in the course of digitalisation, it is crucial to dovetail them as cleverly as possible for a positive customer experience. In this way, you significantly increase the likelihood of purchase and ultimately success in the long term.