While the omnichannel approach is as old as marketing, the explosive growth of e-commerce has provided new avenues for omnichannel advertisers.
Hubspot defines omnichannel marketing as “the ability to deliver a seamless and consistent experience across channels, while factoring in the different devices that consumers are using to interact with your business.”
A successful omnichannel marketing campaign coaxes your target audience towards conversions and future purchases through multiple touchpoints.
But despite the technological advances that have made purchasing items as easy as touching a screen, e-commerce is by no means an automated process. Achieving long-term and repeated successes with an omnichannel approach requires diligence and flexibility.
The following items are core principles for running a successful omnichannel e-commerce campaign. Business managers and marketing firms ignore them at their own peril.
1. Create a Customer-Centered Approach
For marketers, one of the advantages of the enormous quantities of data available is that it enables them to learn about individual customers’ browsing and spending habits. Information collection of this type is by no means a nefarious goal, like establishing some covert database of deeply personal information.
On the contrary, the objective is to bridge the buyer-seller gap that’s inevitable with e-commerce and develop a relationship with each customer on an individual basis.
A good salesperson in a brick-and-mortar store will ask a patron what they are looking for. Comparatively, a customer-centric approach to e-commerce is constantly trying to answer that question: “What is this potential customer looking for?”
2. Create Macro Systems That Target Clients on a Micro Level
It might be tempting to saturate your campaigns with your most profitable items, but showing customers products they never intend to purchase is a waste of their time and your marketing resources. By following the user’s journey and determining how they are engaged during the buying process, you can focus your efforts on the products or services they are more likely to buy and tailor your campaigns to appeal to their likes.
Additionally, with omnichannel e-commerce marketing, you can target users at each stage of the purchasing process through various channels. For instance, each channel can be utilized for every stage of the funnel with different targeting and messaging. This way, your target audience won’t tire of seeing repetitive pitches.
This type of responsive marketing is much more effective than relying on industry reports and surveys. You are essentially responding to the individual’s preferences by providing more of what they like and less of what they don’t.
With this information, you can improve the viewing experience and remind your customers why they clicked on your ad or viewed your product to begin with.
3. Monitor and Modify
Omnichannel marketing is never a wind-up-and-walk-away approach to marketing. While many e-commerce marketing channels are automated — Facebook carousels, auto-generated emails, for instance — it’s essential to monitor which tactics are bearing fruit and which ones are dying on the vine.
Obviously, the omnichannel approach doesn’t result in 100% conversion — nothing does — but if a particular marketing channel lags behind the others, it may deserve extra attention. If the entire omnichannel campaign fails to deliver the expected results, you may want to examine how your team interprets the personal data of your target audience.
Targeting Is Key
Enhancing omnichannel e-commerce performance requires a commitment to customization. Each campaign is substantially dissimilar in that there is no one-size-fits-all solution. E-commerce is also a dynamic industry that’s constantly moving, and what works today may not work in the very near future.
By incorporating these three principles into your campaign, you can increase the reliability and efficacy of our omnichannel approach.