As technology advances, we get to use bits and pieces of it in our everyday lives. This means technology keeps making marketing and sales easier for businesses. The more a business can adapt to the changing and evolving technology, the more cost-effective marketing methods it can explore. That, in turn, makes it easier for businesses to have higher profit margins and make more sales.
One such aspect is the use of omni channel marketing. This post will discuss what an omni channel is, how it works, and why every business needs to explore it.
What is Omni Channel Marketing?
Omni channel marketing is a method of marketing whereby promoting, selling, and serving customers is done through deep integration with each other’s functions and systems. The process is also known as omni channel retailing. The goal of omni channel retailing is to provide a smooth consumer experience. It does not matter when, how, or where a consumer faces a problem, as long as the business can solve it. When a business is implementing omni channel marketing, it can fix any problem that a consumer has in an absolute manner.
Omni Channel Marketing versus Multichannel Marketing
Omni channel retailing is often confused with multichannel marketing. This is because the nature of the function of both of these is similar. But these are not the same thing overall.
Businesses involved in multichannel marketing are not focused on providing an intuitive or synchronous consumer experience. Omni channel marketing, on the other hand, does provide a cohesive consumer experience, because it runs through an extensive network where all consumers are connected via a system. Since everyone involved in the process is part of the system, a large channel is created that helps the business adhere to consumer needs in an organized way. This is the omni channel definition.
Omni channel retailing is something that all businesses should adopt for approaching prospects and building relationships with new customers. It provides seamless interactions and transitions of customers with the business.
Omni channel retailing is not possible without practicing multichannel marketing. You need to do extensive research on your niche and target audience. Find out about your competitors and perhaps conduct a SWOT analysis. All these actions are part of multichannel marketing, and act as prerequisites for effective omni channel marketing.
Benefits of Omni Channel Marketing
Here are some of the benefits of omni channels.
1. Provide Smooth Online Shopping Experience to Customers
When you are using omni channel retailing, your customers would expect all sections and departments to be well integrated with each other. In other words, they would know that you believe in providing a unified experience to them throughout their buying process. This builds a great amount of trust and satisfaction within customers.
Most of the customers these days, when they shop from a business or company that has a good brand image, wish to get an omni channel experience from their subscribed services. As the number of touchpoints that they have to go through increases, they want the merchant to provide them with cohesive integration from each touchpoint to the other.
For example, if a customer wants to buy a product online, they might send in an inquiry about it first. The response to their query might come in the form of a live chat response, or a real person from the customer support staff team. Whatever steps they take, they want any walls in their shopping progress to be eliminated, so that they can buy what they are looking to buy as a seamless experience.
2. Skyrocket Customer Loyalty
This helps in maintaining brand loyalty among your customer base. The key is to train your staff to feel natural. An omni channel experience cannot be forced through your employees into your customers.
An omni channel experience encourages customers to spend more time at your retail store or online store. These customers are also more likely to recommend your brand to others in their personal and professional networks. That’s because they have a good experience shopping from your store every time they visit it. When you inform them about a sales offer or discount package, they will surely revisit your store to make another purchase.
3. Increase Your Profits and Sales
When your existing customers are happy with your products and services, your profits and sales will increase. It is relatively less costly for any business to maintain their existing customers than to get new customers or penetrate a new market segment.
Studies have revealed that omni channel marketing is a lot more effective than single-channel marketing. Every additional channel used by a business causes shoppers to spend more time in the store.
4. Make Your Data Collection Easier
With omni channels, businesses are able to track the activities of their customers more easily than otherwise. This is because they allow their customers to have a more personalized and cohesive experience at their store. This means every customer has the freedom to behave in the way they like the most, in order to optimize their shopping experience. Observing the behavior of these customers becomes easier.
With omni channel marketing, businesses are able to gain valuable insights into consumer preferences and behavior. They learn how to produce content from scratch, in a way that will entice their customers further to continue buying from their brand.
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How to Build an Omni Channel Strategy for Your Business?
Here are the steps you need to take if you want to create omni channels within your business.
1. Analyze Your Customer Base
The first step is to understand the kind of customers you are dealing with. Gather customer data and analyze it. Finding out your customers’ demographics, geographic location, and other factors are key to enticing new customers from the same categories into buying your products or services.
With the help of various analytical tools, you can get hold of this data in almost no time. If you are using social media marketing, you can access social media metrics from sources such as Facebook Analytics. If you are running an online store, you can register your website with Google Analytics and use those statistics. These techniques will give you access to large amounts of data about your customer base.
2. Select the Right Channels
Figure out what your customers are looking for, and select channels to provide accordingly. For example, if you are running an eCommerce website, and find out that most of your customers spend the most time on certain product pages, add more features to those pages. Prioritize your attention towards those web pages that are getting the most traffic and the longest browsing time.
3. Connect All the Omni Channels
It is now time to connect and integrate all your omni channels. Perfectly executing this could be tricky and require some practice. But with the help of relevant technology, you can keep tabs on your customers across all their touchpoints and channels.
Customers might first be seeing the reviews and testimonials published on your site, then move on to your social media pages to read about your brand updates. Then they might browse through your product pages to select an item to buy.
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Finally, they will go to the checkout page to make the transaction. They might also visit your physical retail store to have a more complete shopping experience.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
If all these omni channels are well integrated with each other, your omni channel marketing will be successful, and your customers will step out of your store happy and satisfied.
Build an Omni Channel Experience via a Strikingly Website
If you build your brand website or your online store on Strikingly, you will be able to provide a seamless omni channel experience to your users and customers.
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Strikingly offers tools and features that are perfect for good integration of all your customers’ touchpoints. We help you manage your orders, provide live chat customer support, build awesome product pages, create a smooth checkout flow, and allow your customers to provide feedback on their shopping experience.
Image taken from Strikingly
Most of the features required for running a basic website are available in our Free plan. By registering a free account on Strikingly, you can get familiar with our tools and see how they can help you provide an omni channel experience to your online customers.
We believe in the quality of service, the efficiency of our tools, and the ease of use of our platform for our users. That’s why we regularly post updates and release upgrades in our features to make it easier for you to provide seamless browsing and shopping experiences to your customers.
Besides allowing our users to integrate all sections of their websites, we also provide appealing and responsive website templates that save your time in creating a website. Our templates serve as ready-to-use web design layouts for you, so you can spend more time figuring out what sections to add to your site and how to integrate them with each other.
If you want to offer an omni channel experience to your online customers, sign up for an account on our platform today.
