Omnichannel Marketing Playbook: 5 Ideas to Improve Your Strategy
This is a guest post written by Allen Burt.
How can I do better?
This thought keeps lingering in your mind as you analyze the stats of last quarter’s performance.
Your online retail is up and running. Your investment in a new channel is moving along. You’ve made a decent profit. Everything is going well.
But, you just want to do better.
This isn’t a bad thing!
Striving to improve your business is what keeps momentum up and keeps your business alive.
Sometimes, after business owners open up a new channel of growth in their strategy, they become overwhelmed with growing that channel.
It’s easy to become more focused on operations and just let the marketing strategy for your new channel fall to the wayside.
Like developing a marketing strategy for your primary channel, your new one requires just as much planning and focus.
Today, consumers are demanding their marketing experience to be a seamless one: the same or better than interacting with your normal channel.
Even if you already have a marketing strategy in place for your new channel, chances are it will become outdated quickly.
That’s why you need to foucs on improving your marketing strategy.
Why You Should Improve Your Marketing Strategy
A study done by Forrester highlights that many brands get “comfortable” with their strategy, only to become surpassed by competitors who were able to meet their customer demands quicker.
That means if you’re investing in omnichannel marketing, your strategy needs constant analysis and, maybe, revision. Keeping up with customer demands is becoming increasingly difficult.
Keeping up with customer demands is becoming increasingly difficult. But, making that investment (and executing on it well) can provide a nice return to your overall business.
An example of a company who’s doing it right: Dick’s sporting goods.
Mobile Commerce reports that Dick’s Sporting Goods saw its Ecommerce sales grow to nearly 15% of total sales in 2014’s fourth quarter due to their aggressive omnichannel marketing strategy which included:
Sending weekly specials targeted geographic areas near physical store locations accessible to the customers
Strengthened their loyalty app
Arming employees with mobile devices so customers could order online while in-store
Using physical locations for customer pick-up of their online orders
Dick’s opened up a few new channels and improved others, but the interesting part is that their Ecommerce sales grew to 15% of their total sales in just one quarter! Proof that keeping up with customer demands pays off.
Maybe you’re not Dick’s and don’t have the budget for an app.
No problem.
Just wanting to improve your omnichannel marketing strategy is a step in the right direction.
Let’s take a look at 5 steps that can help you improve your omnichannel marketing strategy and help you meet your customer’s demands quicker:
- Make Sure You’ve Defined the Best Channel
People adapt as technology changes. Today, your customers adapt to new technology quicker than ever.
That means what you consider a “channel” for engaging with your customers is also changing.
Many retailers think diving into omnichannel retail means opening a brick-and-mortar store or, vice versa, creating an online retail site to go along with their current channel.
Both of those are, indeed, ways to dip into omnichannel retail. However, a channel can be so much more.
Omnichannel retail is any method of transacting with a customer, including browsing, buying, and returning, as well as pre- and after-sale service.
Essentially, a channel is any avenue that can lead to a sale.
Now, things like product features or platform integrations become new channels, ready to be experimented with, iterated and optimized.
A great example of a company using a product feature to grow is Airbnb.
They found a way to reverse-engineer integrating with Craigslist, allowing the user to have their listing automatically posted to Craigslist when their Airbnb listing was created. This allowed them to expose their product to a much larger audience.
airbnb
A case study from Quicksprout gives an overview of their growth hack, and highlights the fact that the company realized “no product exists in a vacuum and the users they needed were already congregating in a different location. So they got their attention”.
You can read a more technical post on Aribnb’s strategy here.
Selecting the right channel for your business can be done by taking a look at these 3 factors:
- Your customer demands: What do they want that you don’t have?
Example: My previous Ecommerce startup, Offmap.com (high-end travel packages), utilized social sharing in our customer acquisition strategy.
The social strategy worked, but it didn’t go as viral as I had hoped. Why? People wanted to see. They wanted actual imagery of what made Offmap’s packages worth it.
Our social sharing strategy provided a needed “trust element” about why we were better, but in the travel industry imagery is key to giving potential customers that “vacation bug”.
Talking about an unguided hike through Peru doesn’t compare to actually seeing what that means.
In hindsight, using Instagram as a channel to help push sales could have been the secret sauce to growing more.
- Your highest-performing channel: How can you piggy-back here?
Example: At Offmap, PR was our highest performing channel for customer acquisition.
By offering the audiences of specific publications unique benefits (like WIRED readers getting early access by using the link unique to the WIRED publication), we were able to increase our value proposition and the sense of “exclusivity” of our product.
Using PR was great, but leveraging their platforms to amp up the value perception of Offmap’s travel deals proved a smart channel optimization.
- Your lowest-performing products: What are you missing?
Example: You’re a clothing Ecommerce and you have a few items that aren’t performing as well as you’d like. Before you decide to remove them altogether, push them through a new channel. Using a service like CM Commerce can help you test these products and possibly move some inventory.
When a user makes a purchase, you can customize their receipt to suggest similar products for purchase, or even offer a discount on their next purchase.
By funneling your “lowest performing” products through these channel features, you can start getting more eyes on them.
Action Steps: Your own answers to these questions will generate a short-list of possible channels for you to begin experimenting with.
- Think About Context
Getting the most out of your new customer acquisition channel will require you to tailor your message to perfectly match the expectations of your target customer.
Forbes gives a great example in this article:
Take, for example, a customer who faithfully shops in your grocery store twice a week, but never purchases meat. Unless she’s a vegetarian, that means she’s buying meat elsewhere.
But why? Her purchase history, register receipts and coupon redemption habits all indicate a sales potential, as well as a consumer benefit. If you offer a personalized coupon, does her behavior change?
Theoretically, eliminating an extra trip to the store each week is a win-win for both you and your loyal customer.
The underlying concept here is context. How can you apply that to your business, product or service?
Think about where your customer is consuming your products and marketing content.
What device are they using?
What interaction do you have with them once they’ve completed a transaction?
By learning all you can about the customer, once they’re engaged with you, contextual marketing can easily be strategized and applied.
The first step in taking what you’ve learned about your customer and using it to improve your marketing strategy is to get it organized.
If you have Google Analytics set up (I hope you do at this stage), you can keep track of many of these metrics.
However, to really get the most out of the data and to make sure you’re tailoring your messaging as needed, you may want to look into a CMS that allows “lead scoring” or a marketing software that integrates with your current management system.
Once you’re organized, analyze the data and identify ways in which you can engage with customers based on their likes.
Let’s say you own a clothing boutique, and also have an Ecommerce store. You observe that your jewelry product pages are getting a lot of views, and the majority of your goal completions (jewelry purchases) come from online and not in-store.
In your next email campaign, or using a customized receipt solution, offer your shoppers a discount on jewelry by presenting it in-store.
Your online audience loves your jewelry products. Recognize that.
Offer them an incentive to make a purchase they will like (win for them) and, at the same time, incentivize them to stop into a location (win for you).
Action Steps: To learn more about contextual marketing, we recommend keeping up with Daniel Newman on Forbes.
Get started with this article about personalizing your marketing or this article on his personal blog “How Omni-Channel Marketing Shapes The New Buyer’s Journey”.
- Adapt As You Grow
Expanding into omnichannel retail means you already have something you’re selling – you’re just opening up a new channel of sales. Because it is a new channel, it needs it’s own strategy and goals.
You shouldn’t expect the strategies you use for your other channels to work for a new one.
Blue Bottle Coffee certainly didn’t use the same strategy from when they were a Farmer’s Market coffee outpost now that they are a Silicon Valley favorite.
What was a one-man coffee stand is now a full-blown Ecommerce business with a subscription model. They adapted as their business grew, and eventually adopted new channels with new strategies.
Many companies focus on creating a strategy with no room for iteration, when your customer acquisition plan should be something that changes and grows as your company changes and grows.
Action steps: Spend some time completing the easy, 5-step guide from Startup Marketing below:
Define your ideal customer
Define your goals
Defne your acquisition funnel
Know your metrics
Track (almost) everything from day one
4. Deploy Automated Emails
Depending on the goal for your business, automated emails could prove to be a very effective channel to nurturing customer retention.
Here’s a personal example:
After hearing some buzz about Headspace, a meditation app from a former monk, I recently downloaded the iOS app to give it a shot. Of course, I received a welcome email and didn’t expect much more communication via email.
Like most other band-wagon meditators, I fell out of practice quickly and didn’t visit the app again for several days.
Then, I received an email with some encouragement and wise words, assuring me that everyone falls out of practice and not to give up. I logged back into the app that day and completed a session.
According to KISSmetrics, “it costs 7x more to acquire a new customer on average than it does to keep an existing one.”
Customer retention is an important element of omnichannel marketing that is very important and too expensive to overlook.
There are many events (or triggers) you can use to your advantage in each customer’s interaction with your business. Whether your omnichannel initiative is a mobile app, an Ecommerce site or a pop-up shop, you can identify specific triggers in your customer interaction, then automate an email (or chain of emails) to be sent.
Action steps: We like Vero for automated email and sumome for website popups.
- Follow All The Way Through
Automated email is one way to develop customer retention, but there are other ways to capitalize on your interaction with a customer after their purchase, signup, or any action they’ve completed to become your customer or user.
By using good customer service as a foundation, you can decide how you want to follow all the way through with your customers.
Here are a few options we recommend:
- Help desk solutions
By improving your customer’s help desk experience, you can better your chances of retaining them as a customer and be more confident in that user or customer being a brand advocate.
We like GrooveHQ, and you can read some of their case studies here.
- Better digital receipts
As a company that develops digital solutions for Ecommerce businesses, we’ve had clients request integrating solutions like CM Commerce because of their ability to engage with customers long after the sale.
We like the fact that you can suggest similar items for purchase or allow a customer to leave feedback.
You can read more about using powerful receipts to follow through here.
- Send snail mail
Sometimes following through can mean going the extra mile or doing something out of the ordinary.
Recently, Blue Stout used the service Bond to send some “handwritten” notes to our clients.
The overall client response was positive and appreciative. One client told us “It was nice to get something tangible from a digital company!”
snail mail
Sending something physical is a dying practice, but it could be a nice surprise to your customer.
Action Steps: Apply the 3 options I mentioned above. They will help you increase your relationships with your customers.
Conclusion
Ultimately, omnichannel marketing is an initiative that requires you to be resourceful, practical, and flexible.
With the knowledge you have from your existing channel, you should be able to effectively knock out a strategy and define goals and benchmarks for your new initiative.
Use what you know. Don’t try to do too much.
If you’re a small company, be realistic in what you want to accomplish.
Managing your own expectations is just as important as managing your budget.
Lastly, keep trying to get better because there IS always room for improvement.
Have you tried to use one of the ideas above to grow a new channel of your business? Let us know in the comments why it did or didn’t work.
Allen Burt is the Founder and Managing Director at Blue Stout. Blue Stout is a digital production agency that builds custom commerce applications, like Ecommerce shops and interactive mobile apps, for clients ranging from startups to billion-dollar public companies.