Four Steps to Creating an Omnichannel Ecommerce Strategy

You understand that omni channel marketing is the best method of promoting your eCommerce store, and you’re ready to create a cohesive omni channel campaign that can boost sales and increase customer retention.

But where do you begin?

Implementing an omnichannel marketing campaign has unique challenges. That is why we have developed a simple fourfold process to help you navigate the system with ease and confidence.

1. Get Your Entire Team Onboard

For omni channel marketing to be successful, you must involve your entire company, including your customer service team.

Customer data is the core of your marketing strategy. You are tailoring your brand’s marketing message so that it speaks directly to your consumers.

For this to happen seamlessly, your sales and marketing team needs access to all interactions with your customer. When this data exchange occurs naturally and intentionally, the entire omnichannel process flows smoothly, and no critical marketing data is lost.

2. Get Inside Your Customer’s Head

To make the ultimate experience for your customer, you need to learn as much about them as possible, inside and out.

Walk in Your Customer’s Shoes

Many of your customers share everyday experiences and are irritated by similar things. For this reason, you need to step into your customers’ shoes to determine what their shopping experience is like at your eCommerce store.

Where are your customers making their buying decisions? Study their behavior, and then duplicate their experience.

• Search through your products
• Place an order anonymously from your store
• Request a refund to see what happens
• Return an item for an exchange
• Explore processes on all your channels
• Create a customer support ticket
• Ask third parties to follow these steps and report back to you

Once you have gone through these protocols, identify areas of friction and frustration. Find and correct weak points.

Your goal is to create the best customer experience possible.

Probe Your Customer’s Mind Often

To obtain the secret preferences and desires that hide away in the mind of your customers, ask for feedback often.

It can begin early in the buying journey with surveys, interactive websites, email preferences and more. Then, after your customer makes a purchase, ask them to review the product.

When your customer contacts customer service, your team should be asking more questions and collecting feedback. This data can then be used to personalize an experience with the customer in various ways.

3. Use the Data to Segment Customers

If you have been following the steps so far, you should have some relevant data about your customers and their behaviors. Now, it is vital to separate the data into useful categories. Segmenting ensures that you get the relevant message to the right customer at the proper time.

Below are three essential categories to use in segmenting:

1. Purchases

Segmenting by purchase history can help you identify opportunities to engage your customer with relevant offers.

When was the last time they made a purchase, and how much did they spend? If it has been a while since your customer made a purchase, you can place them in an automated campaign to re-engage them with your brand.

For customers who recently made a purchase, you can automate a cross-selling campaign and suggest similar or complementary products.

By segmenting your customers’ shopping behaviors, you can personalize an email campaign that speaks to where they are on their journey with your brand.

2. Demographics

Demographics provide valuable statistics that affect your customers’ buying decisions. This data might include age, gender, education level, marital status, geographic location, economic status and more.

For example, knowing that a female customer lives in Anchorage, Alaska, could help you market products designed for women living in colder climates.

3. Interactions

It is also helpful to know how the customer is interacting with your marketing campaigns.

When was the last time they opened an email? Did they click on a link?

Segmenting by interactions allows you to send a unique campaign to inactive customers in an attempt to re-engage them with your brand.

Alternately, if your customer has opened your campaign, but not yet made a buying decision, you can target them for a second email.

To make your marketing truly effective, implement all three segmentation strategies into your omni channel campaigns.

4. Continually Review Metrics

For your omnichannel program to remain successful, you must continually collect and review your data.

Detailed metrics help you track your success. If something is working well, you will have the data to prove it. The campaigns that get results are the ones you will be using again and again.

Campaigns that are not as successful, you will tweak until they are getting the results you want to see.

If you are wondering how all this strategy works in real life, we have put together a case study as a demonstration.

Case Study: Luxury Clothing Store Net-A-Porter

Marketing clothes exclusively online is riddled with challenges. So when the luxury clothing eCommerce store Net-A-Porter decided to set up business on the web, they chose an omni channel system to promote sales, increase brand loyalty and create lasting customer relationships.

Net-A-Porter opened three marketing channels to appeal to customers who were looking for quality luxury clothes: a social mobile app, email automation and ad re targeting.

The mobile app allowed customers to engage in social sharing within Net-A-Porter’s digital, app-based ecosystem through product shares and likes.

Net-A-Porter culled the data, which provided valuable insights. The company then sent laser-focused email marketing campaigns to their customers based on their social interaction and browsing data.

As a result of omni channel-driven marketing, Net-A-Porter showed astonishing growth, including

• $3 billion in sales in 2017
• 9% year-over-year growth
• Order size increased to almost $400

This case study of Net-A-Porter demonstrates how omni channel tactics for marketing work.

Today customers are more demanding than ever before, and if those demands aren’t met, there are plenty of other options to choose from.

In order to capture their attention and keep it, you have to make sure your message is always relevant. Omni channel marketing helps you personalize those messages regardless of who the customer is, where they are in their customer journey, and what channel they prefer to use.

By following the tips in this article and testing your processes regularly, you can create an omni channel marketing strategy for your online store.