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Omnichannel: Improving Your Sales Strategy
12 de October de 2022
Scrolling down on Instagram, you find a shirt by your favourite brand. You go to their website and see that there’s a store 200 metres from you. As you enter the shop, you already know the price of the product and the app points at its exact location in the store. You just have to pay for it at the register and take it home with you.
Was it an online purchase or a physical one? What was more important during the process? The boundaries that separate online and offline shopping are getting increasingly blurred. The advent of e-commerce and of new digital marketing tools were a game changer that brought new possibilities to traditional businesses that use physical stores and to advertising.
It no longer matters the channel in which the purchase takes place, but rather the harmonisation between channels. They must all move in the same direction. This is known as omnichannel.
Integration Is the Key
Omnichannel is a strategy that consists in connecting all the channels on which the brand has a presence in order to improve customer experience and develop a fluent relationship. Unlike multichannel, that involves having a presence in several different channels, in omnichannel, the key lies in integration and customer relationship to foster an efficient shopping process.
In order to safely implement it, you must define the goals and strategies that will integrate some of the channels in a coordinated way:
- Physical Store
- Web or e-Commerce
- Marketplaces
- Social Networks
- Apps
- Search Engines
All these points must be interconnected in order to make the sale easier and increase client satisfaction (or, in the case of B2B businesses, the satisfaction of the user of a service).
Don’t Loose Sight of the Sales Cycle
Digital marketing is based on a sales cycle that has four key stages:
- Attraction
- Retention
- Conversion
- Repetition
However, in order to define omnichannel strategies, it’s important to mind the customer buying cycle, think about the relationship that customers have with the brand, the points of contact and the way they move through the sales experience. Their process could be summed up as follows:
- Awareness (need or desire)
- Research
- Consideration
- Decision
- Experience
- Repetition
Taking into account this journey, it’s crucial to create points of contact with the client. It’s also important to think about offline and online sales channels for all those stages. The key is to integrate them to the same strategy, one that promotes an easier journey and maximises satisfaction.
Some Advice to Move Through Omnichannel
- Map out the points of contact: Mind the sales channels and customer buying process; it will help you lay the foundations so that you can find points of contacts in every stage and design efficient strategies.
- Identify the KPI: On every micro-process you can establish KPIs in order to check whether you’re fulfilling your goals and to find possible errors in the user experience.
- Come up with new experiences: Put yourself in the customer’s shoes; think about their needs and how to attract them with value to our product. That’s a good starting point to implement new strategies that will satisfy their interests.
- Test efficiency: Marketing trial and error dynamics require constant testing and follow-ups in order to improve and refine the strategies.
From Integration to the Metaverse: Trends
The channel integration process is always moving forwards and the line that divides physical and digital shopping is becoming increasingly blurred. The coexistence in close relationships brought by omnichannel will only progress in the coming years.
The physical shop won’t disappear as soon as some people say: depending on the type of business, it will always be a valuable asset; but, if we take a look at the trends that point at more hybrid models, like shopping online but picking it up at the store or seeing a product at the store and ordering it online.
The metaverse, incipient, is one of the other big mysteries when it comes to marketing strategies. Many companies have integrated it into their strategies but, for the time being, it’s still in the experimental phase.
Omnichannel requires an integrating strategy that is mindful, at all times, of the customer’s buying process and that connects all the sales channels.
Article written in collaboration with Carles Revilla, expert in Strategy and Marketing and Professor at EAE.