Omnichannel Retail

A Google survey shows that nearly half of all customers today are not fully satisfied with the customer experience: shopping frustrations have increased between 2019 and 2022, rising 13 percentage points to 49%. Today, more than ever, customers expect an optimized shopping experience. Only if this is perceived positively are they willing to commit to a brand in the long term.

This is where omnichannel marketing comes into play. This marketing method has just gained in importance with the COVID-19 pandemic. In some cases, brick-and-mortar retail completely collapsed. It became obvious that an efficient fusion of all marketing channels was needed to bind customers to a brand and secure sales.

diva-e would like to show you the challenges and digital opportunities that companies in the retail sector in particular face when they want to use omnichannel marketing.

The term omnichannel - also spelled omni-channel or referred to as omnichanneling - is more in vogue than ever and on everyone's lips. To meet the expectations of today's customers, 75% of whom already clearly prefer a hybrid shopping experience, many companies are already promoting services that link their online and offline channels to significantly improve the customer experience. However, a closer look reveals that these services, such as Click & Collect, do not yet fully meet customer expectations in their implementation, as they cannot fully live up to the omnichannel approach.

In the following, we will look at the challenges that companies have to overcome on the way to an omnichannel concept, especially in the retail sector.

Customer centricity and personalized addressing of customers

Companies often have the problem that they can no longer identify their customers when they switch from one marketing channel to another, e.g. from online stores to bricks-and-mortar stores. As a result, they can no longer address them in a personalized way. The employees on site in the stationary trade do not know, for example, what the customers have searched for or bought online. But that would be important in order to be able to advise them better in the store and subsequently bind them to their brand, as happens with a functioning connection of marketing channels with the omnichannel method.

So the key challenge is to capture and integrate customer data from different channels to get a comprehensive picture of customer preferences. This requires the use of effective customer relationship management (CRM) systems that make it possible to track and analyze customer interactions and behavior.

Personalization of content and offers is another crucial aspect of customer centricity in omnichannel marketing. Customers expect customized experiences tailored to their individual interests and needs. This requires intelligent use of the collected customer data to provide personalized content in real time. Here, diva-e is at your side as an experienced partner in omnichannel consulting. We support you in data management - feel free to arrange a consulting appointment with us.

In omnichannel marketing, data integration is a complex process that requires both technical and organizational expertise from companies. Customer data often comes from a variety of sources in different formats and structures (e.g., CRMs, social media, Google Analytics). This creates individual data silos that must first be linked. However, this is precisely what many companies still find difficult. As a result, they do not get a holistic picture of their customers and the approach cannot be personalized - which is crucial for omnichannel marketing, especially in retail.

Companies must therefore be able to combine data from different sources and obtain a 360-degree view of the customer. As a marketing agency, diva-e supports you in this challenge with your omnichannel approach - e.g. with a strategy for system and data integration.

Customers expect a seamless and consistent brand experience regardless of the channel through which they interact with a company. For many companies, technical hurdles make this unified customer experience even more difficult. After all, different systems and platforms must be able to communicate seamlessly with each other and exchange data in real time. This means, for example, that a customer can start shopping online and continue later in the store or via a mobile app. Another prerequisite for this is that the customer always has access to the most up-to-date product information - from the online store to social media to the retail store.

With a functioning omnichannel strategy, many opportunities arise for your company: improved customer loyalty and better exploitation of upselling potential are among them above all.

Ideally, customers can check the availability of a product online and reserve it directly in preparation for a visit to a brick-and-mortar store. Studies show that, as a rule, three out of five customers who store in stores already obtain information online in advance. In this respect, displaying the availability of products in the store on the website is one of the most important omnichannel services.

In turn, as part of a fully integrated omnichannel customer experience, the retailer's employees have the opportunity to track when and how a customer was last in contact with the company. In our use case, on-site customer service representatives would thus be able to see which additional products customers were still looking at when they visited the website and which products were purchased in previous online or offline transactions. With this information, on-site staff are able to make the customer visit to the store even more personalized and provide your customers with more individualized advice based on preferences.

An omnichannel business model thus enables you to take your relationships with your customers to a more personal level. Putting your customers at the center of everything you do, which they expect from you now more than ever, will help you build stronger customer loyalty and, in the long run, ensure the financial success of your business. According to a hybris publication, the general probability of cross-selling and upselling for new customers is 5% to 20%, while for existing customers it is many times higher and can be as high as 60% to 70%.