Omnichannel is the gold standard of retail marketing. It’s a customer-centric and seamless shopping experience. By cohesively joining all marketing channels, it should turn the buyer’s journey into a smooth slide to the checkout rather than an obstacle course. 98% of Americans switch between various devices every day, but they still expect the same service, convenience, and experience regardless of how they interact with a brand.
Today it's all about becoming the next Amazon, eBay, and Walmart. Customers demand speed and convenience. They want to buy things fast and check out quickly with no hassle. It’s not easy to put together an omnichannel marketing plan. The rewards of doing eCommerce omnichannel right include transaction increases of 15% to 35% and customer retention rates as high as 89%.
If you’re looking for a textbook version of how to create an omnichannel marketing plan, this isn’t it. What you will find are 7 marketing tools and strategies that have helped our clients enter and thrive as omnichannel eCommerce businesses.
To that end, let’s dive into what we know works well.
1. Leverage Automation with the Right Platform
The key to scaling faster is to build on the right infrastructure to support your rapid growth. Shopify has integrated eCommerce automation into its platform, calling it “Shopify Flow.” It reduces your team’s manual labor, managing day-to-day tasks.
Flow allowed us to run three Shopify stores without needing to hire an employee for each one.
Julio Giannotti, Web Manager at Interline
Automation can streamline tasks at almost any level, such as:
- Manage sales promotions and pricing
- Simultaneously push new products to your store, social media, apps, and sales channels
- Send personalized welcome messages
- Automatically message your marketing team about out-of-stock products
- Adjust prices at checkout based on strategies like quantity or customer location
- Flag high-risk orders
- Identify, tag, and segment customers
- Apply discounts or specialized shipping rules
- Rollout seasonal promotions or product drops
What’s good about Flows is its relative simplicity. It follows a “trigger, condition, and action logic.” It sets up in minutes without writing a single line of code.
We’ve found, when it comes to Shopify website design and development, they connect with tons of great marketing apps to assist in the automation process. Consider Shopify to get your store running faster and ready for omnichannel.
2. Utilize Shipping Rules To Speed Up Delivery
From the initial setup and development of your platforms and marketing message, getting the product properly priced and out to your customers comes next. We work with a variety of partners to leverage automation and technology, and we often use systems like ShippingEasy for blazing-fast delivery rates and accuracy in establishing proper automation to speed up the shipping, 3PL, and 4PL processes.
ShippingEasy is the only platform for e-commerce merchants offering the best shipping rates and powerful automation, plus email marketing and inventory management tools that put your customer and shipping data to work for you.
E-commerce merchants cut literally hours of work from their day by incorporating ShippingEasy’s intuitive and user-friendly automation rules. They can personalize the e-commerce shipping experience to create long-lasting relationships with customers. Automated email campaigns allow merchants to add thousands of dollars in increased revenue to their bottom line without increasing their workload.
Multichannel inventory management with velocity and forecasting reporting increase accuracy and avoid costly stock-outs for merchants who sell across multiple platforms and marketplaces. From order to delivery, first-touch to multitouch, and from warehouse to customers’ hands, ShippingEasy makes life easier for e-commerce merchants of all sizes.
3. Purchase Software That Solves Omnichannel Issues
As an omnichannel retailer, your goal is to create a seamless flow throughout your buyer’s journey. From the moment they get to know your brand, to the first purchase until they become a frequent buyer and advocate.
Partnering with ChannelAdvisor makes your organization manageable, organized, and scalable. They integrate all your channels from marketing, selling, and fulfillment. For more information, check out this resource on ChannelAdvisor and how it can increase online sales.
4. Personalize Your E-mail Marketing
Have you heard about Klaviyo (pronounced Clay-vee-yo)?
Klaviyo is (in our opinion) the king when it comes to customer info gathering and segmentation for omnichannel retailers. Along with e-mails, clients can now send SMS messages via Klaviyo with pinpoint personalization.
Our team has been working with Klaviyo for over five years, and we’ve done over 100 builds. If you are ready to scale your email automation, check out this resource on Klaviyo email marketing and how it grows brands.
5. Use Pop-Ups That Convert
Capturing leads is crucial to building an extensive targeted email list. Justuno is the right tool for capturing audience data at every touchpoint.
It’s a suite of website conversion tools that create custom email pop-ups, sign-up bars, exit pop-ups, and relevant on-site messaging. We use it to help our clients to convert daily website traffic, grow their lists, and boost sales.
Pop-ups have proven to convert a higher percentage of visitors than other lead gen sources. As lead gen experts, we found that they provide effective targeting and segmentation.
6. Start Building Trust with UGC
Yotpo can quickly build brand trust, by incentivizing and posting UGC (User Generated Content) on your eCommerce website. Consumers trust other customer reviews 12 times more than company-generated marketing content.
For example, Yotpo received a 4.6 out of 5 ratings from over 1,600 Shopify users. It’s statistics like these that sway consumers to buy, and where Yotpo can help your business. Their app helps accelerate brand growth by incorporating UGC reviews, photos, and referrals directly to your site. To learn more, check out our resource on what is yotpo and how it can improve your digital marketing.
7. Increase Visibility and Trust More Than PPC
Search engine optimization is still the top way to drive targeted traffic. It’s the foundation of any omnichannel marketing plan. Organic content development and SEO enhance your brand’s authenticity because people trust organic results much more than paid advertising.
Today’s consumers are smart, savvy, and more affluent (such as the typical iOs/Apple user). They are usually very well educated, go to top-tier schools, and are familiar with the psychology of marketing and targeting. Consumers like these are less likely to engage with ads because they are aware of how businesses target them.
The best users are the hardest to trick into buying, which is why we use multiple eCommerce SEO strategies to find the best customers.
8. Court Your Biggest Fans
Influencer marketing is not about hiring celebrities and sports figures. It’s about building relationships with your best buyers and biggest fans on channels like Facebook and Instagram. These are the folks who will spread the word about your brand.
As influencer marketing specialists, we advise our clients to send products to their fans so they can check them out and be the first to know. This tactic builds a loyal following of evangelists who will spread the word far and wide with minimal ad spend. Influencers can be more than customers. You need to build relationships with your current partners, vendors, dealers, and bloggers so that they will write about you.
Omnichannel Can Mean Higher Margins
Integrate these tips and techniques with your store. They work on any channel where your customers' shop, whether it’s a brick-and-mortar store, smartphone, or any connected device.
Omnichannel eCommerce requires the ability to aggregate customer data from a variety of sources and then use it to send out personalized messages. Doing so enables retailers to sell products to their customers nationwide at the full price rather than discounting to compete locally. Use these tools to manage your omnichannel growth.
