Table of Contents:
- 1. What Is An Omnichannel Retail Strategy?
- 2. How Is Omnichannel Better Than Single And Multichannel Retail Strategy?
- 3. How Does Omnichannel Retail Strategy Improve Customer Experience?
- 4. An Example Of Omnichannel Customer Experience
- 5. Conclusion
- 6. FAQs
In today’s channel-rich landscape in retail marketing, omnichannel possesses the potential to the engagement of shoppers with a retail band, so much so that they are eventually drawn to their retail store.
This is the pinnacle of building customer loyalty and engaging customers by leveraging the omnipresent marketing approach.
Single- or multi-channel approaches do not even come close to how influential omnichannel retail strategies are, and their core capability is to shape customer experience to the extent of winning over a lifetime of loyal customers.
This became strikingly clear with Harvard Business Review’s research on 46,000 shoppers, where early retail trends favored the great potential of omnichannel retailing, and that continues today.
This article aims to help businesses see the significance of omnichannel retail strategy and how it impacts customer experience.
What is an Omnichannel Retail Strategy?
An omnichannel retail strategy is a consumer-centric, cross-channel organizational approach towards marketing, customer service, and sales, which integrates multiple communication or retail changes to offer customers a seamless and cohesive customer experience.
This strategy includes the presence or use of all teh traditional mediums such as email, voice, and SMS, as well as the more modernized digital channels like social media, messaging apps, and live chat.
Here are the benefits of utilizing an omnichannel customer experience:
- Increased customer engagement
- Increased customer satisfaction
- Better conversion rates
- Much deeper insights and data into customer behavior
- Seamless customer experience and journey
- Improved customer retention
- Boost brand loyalty
- Optimized marketing budgets
Route Mobile’s OCEAN , the Omnichannel Experience Automation Network, is a personalized omnichannel suit that utilizes the ICE frameworks ( Insights, Conversational UX, and Engagement to enhance the customer experience.
Must Read: Why Omnichannel Customer Engagement is the Future of Retail?
How Is Omnichannel Better Than Single And Multichannel Retail Strategy
Understanding what these terms mean first will give much more clarity on what differentiates them from each other and which is better.
- Single Channel: This strategy simply means a business selling products or services through one channel.
- Multi-Channel: This retail strategy sells products or services through multiple marketing, communication, and sales channels.
- Omnichannel: Using a retail strategy to provide a unified, seamless shopping experience across all channels with consistency and cross-platform integration.
Omnichannel retail strategy is evidently better than single or multichannel retail strategy due to the following:
- Communication through multiple customer touchpoints
- Cross-platform integration
- Collect more holistic customer data for better personalization
- Consistency in marketing and customer approach across all platforms
- Give you a competitive advantage against businesses using single or multiple retail strategies
Also Read: 6 Reasons why brands/enterprises should turn to an Omnichannel platform.
How Does Omnichannel Retail Strategy Improve Customer Experience?
Aid in Personalization Customer Experience
30.9% of retailers say that they are unable to track customers across devices, while 38.2 % can only track them some of the time.
Without the ability to track customers and follow through their customer journey, businesses fail to create personalized experiences for customers due to a lack of customer behavior data, inconsistency in marketing or communication, and other challenges.
Dealing With Fragmented Customer Journey
73% of retail consumers are already using multiple channels to shop. This includes their ecommerce website, mobile applications, and retail stores. Without using an omnichannel retail strategy, retail businesses fail to gain a unified consumer view and are exposed to only a fragment of their customer journey.
And, without platforms like OCEAN , which helps to track and manage consumers across platforms, recording their activities, behavior, and past purchases, retailers are lost and fail to be part of the customer journey.
After all, even though a potential buyer doesn’t buy from you at one point in time, they are going to make the purchase. The questions are: Are you there as a potential option, or have you forgotten after a single touch point marketing?
Offering Unified Data Collection For Improved Customer Insights
Adapting an omnichannel customer experience approach provides retailers with unified data integration across multiple customer touchpoints, including websites, mobile apps, physical stores, e-commerce, social media, and more.
This centralized data collection helps to give a holistic view of customer data and helps to perform more advanced analytics to derive actionable customer insights.
Extensive consumer data is the backbone of providing personalized customer experiences and targeted marketing practices for more engagement and conversions.
Brand Consistency Leads to Increased Customer Loyalty
The unified marketing approach through Omnichannel retail stores helps businesses integrate multiple channels and provide a much more cohesive and seamless customer experience, customer engagement, and stronger relationships.
The consistency in messaging and reaching out to customers through multiple touchpoints helps customers build trust, leading to brand loyalty.
An Example of Omnichannel Customer Experience
A potential buyer receives a personalized email from a fashion brand informing them that there is a sale on items in which they previously showed interest.
The email will include links to the online store and mobile app, which will allow customers to browse through it. The mobile app makes the brand easily available to customers on their phones.
Customers might decide to visit the store, or if they come across it, they will be pre-disposed to enter as it will be familiar. Throughout this journey, the customer can or will make purchases at any multiple touchpoints, on the website, app, or in-store.
Even after the purchase, they receive more emails or notifications about sales and personalized offers on the app, further increasing engagement for that individual customer.
This cross-platform, omnichannel retail strategy will keep a customer engaged and potentially gain their trust and brand loyalty.
Conclusion
The omnichannel retail strategy has the capability to derive such trust and brand loyalty that it even translates into retail store visits, multiple purchases, and post-sale engagement for the long term.
This article highlighted how omnichannel leverages consistent brand messaging across multiple channels to achieve increased customer engagement and a much higher conversion rate than single and multi-channel retail approaches.
Since without technology, the right tool or platform, and experts, retail businesses cannot implement omnichannel retail strategies at scale, it becomes crucial to opt for a BSP with specialization in omnichannel automation like Route Mobile’s OCEAN.
Contact our team to find out if OCEAN’s personalized omnichannel experience is suitable for reshaping the customer experience of your business.
FAQs
Is Omnichannel Retail Strategy Better Than Multichannel for Customer Experience?
Both omnichannel and multichannel strategies use multiple channels to communicate with customers. However, only omnichannel prioritizes integration, consistency, and a unified marketing approach across all the channels, which is more powerful for engaging customers, developing trust, and generating sales. So, yes, omnichannel is better than multichannel for customer experience.
How Businesses Can Leverage Omnichannel Customer Experience?
Retail businesses can leverage an omnichannel strategy to enhance their customer experiences by building consistency and integration across multiple channels and a unified marketing strategy with a consumer-centric approach. To make this happen, they can use technologies such as data analytics, conversational AI, and Customer Data Platforms (CDP) to create a seamless shopping experience and journey for customers across channels.
What Technology Are Used In Omnichannel Retail?
The most prominent technologies used in omnichannel retail are advanced inventory management systems, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, Artificial intelligence (AI), conversational AI, Natural language processing (NLP), data analytics, and unified retail or commerce platforms like Route Mobile’s OCEAN to manage and optimize every aspect through a central unified platform.
