Three Essential Steps toward Omnichannel Success
Consumers have limited time, detectable habits, and preferences about how they interact with brands. Marketers have become increasingly empowered to know and respond to these preferences on all channels.
As brands leverage opportunities offered by omnichannel marketing and further embrace the technology that unlocks each channel’s capabilities and insights, they will give customers the personal experiences they crave. Beginning the journey toward true omnichannel can be daunting, but the immense value it creates for both customers and brands far outweighs the rethinking, reinvention, and innovations it demands.
The Core 4 Digital Marketing Challenges Multi-Location Brands Experience — And The Tech Solution
One particular area that’s difficult to navigate for multi-location companies is how to best serve highly targeted marketing campaigns to local customers across hundreds or thousands of very unique communities where your retail locations exist. Across the many multi-location brands at which I’ve worked, including national retailer Batteries Plus Bulbs, it’s an issue with which our internal marketing teams and outside ad agencies struggled.
In this article, I’ll identify four main marketing challenges I believe all multi-location retail marketers can relate to and how to use technology to solve them.
Converting Prospects to Customers Through Event Marketing
The marketing journey is not as predictable as it once was, and there are potential roadblocks to conversion at every stage within the funnel. Today’s buyers have access to high-quality information about products and services through digital media, so they’re not reliant on the sellers for insights. In the most successful companies, sales and marketing organizations overcome these roadblocks together. They work in concert to generate brand awareness, educate prospects, forge relationships, and ultimately to turn prospects into customers. Event marketing plays a key role in these efforts.
Connected Consumers Are More Demanding Than Ever – How Retailers Are Adapting
As the omnichannel approach to retail takes off, industry insiders are beginning to wonder whether giving shoppers what they want, when they want it, across any connected device, is causing consumers to develop unrealistic expectations about the types of experiences and services their favorite stores can provide.
95% of Consumers Plan on Buying Most Holiday Gifts Online
While brick-and-mortar sales remain a robust part of the holiday shopping experience, online shopping is asserting clearer dominance than ever before this year. A walloping 95% of consumers plan to do the majority of their holiday shopping this season online, according to multi-channel engagement platform Leanplum.
Defining Your Purpose: 4 Ways to Optimize Purpose-Driven Marketing
Ultimately, ensuring the success of purpose-driven campaigns comes down to building meaningful connections using all the technology, data, and creativity at one’s disposal to reach the elusive double bottom line. Here are four tips that can help marketers tap into data and technology to optimize their purpose-driven campaigns:
From Personal To Individual: Why Engaging Unique Consumers Requires Unique Communication
People everywhere receive “personalized” emails daily from brands greeting them by their first names. For a long time, brands have assumed this conveys genuine care for each customer. It’s certainly not the case anymore. Technology has evolved, and consumer expectations have risen to such a level that marketers must do much more. It’s no longer about saying, “We know you,” but rather, “We understand you.” To do this requires a major shift from personalization to individualization.
It may sound relatively straightforward, but what this shift entails and how companies can incorporate individualization in their everyday communications presents a whole new set of challenges.
The Retail Fight Against Showrooming
If showrooming didn’t make brick-and-mortar retail obsolete, it’s definitely disrupting it for the better. The question is what brands need to do to survive and thrive through this transition. The answer lies in omnichannel marketing and sales, which is a many-pieced puzzle. Let’s explore what that means and why showrooming took off in the first place.
4 Ways Multi-Location Businesses Improve Marketing Return with Call Analytics
By implementing call tracking and analytics systems, marketers at multi-location businesses can obtain valuable first-party data on the calls and conversations they generate for each location. This first-party data helps inform marketing campaigns that open doors for new customers, reinforce relationships with current customers, and increase return on marketing spend.
Not sure how to maximize the business impact of consumer calls on your multi-location brand? Discover four things you can do now.
Heard on the Street, Episode 28: Location-Based Survival of the Fittest, With Gimbal
According to Gimbal’s SVP of location platforms Adrian Tompsett, the key to the location business is having a long-term and holistic view of customer value. That means using location intelligence to go beyond just triggering promotions to increase the customers’ basket size, instead using the technology in ways that will provide additional value in the long term.
Omnichannel or Multichannel? Which One And Why
Omnichannel creates a smarter shopping experience that benefits both consumers and brands. Data is shared across all channels, enabling stronger engagement and moving the consumer toward a purchase. For the customer, it creates an easier shopping experience and a stronger brand connection.
Report: Consumer Expectations for Brands Higher than Ever in Age of Convenience
With the omnichannel age upon us, the impact of bad customer experiences is unprecedented. The main fear for businesses should no longer be a standoff between the worker behind the customer service desk and the angry customer who failed to get his discount; it should be the rant that hits social and is shared or liked a slew of times, dragging digital reputations through the mud.
Identity Crisis: Optimizing a Brand While Pursuing Omnichannel
Andrew Witkin: When viewed as a way to raise brand awareness and impressions, a clicks-to-bricks move can still net an overall gain—if the traffic from the retail space driven to the website costs less than what it would to purchase those impressions through online advertising. The end goal of an omnichannel strategy is not only to engage customers with an experience that isn’t available online but also to use this unique experience and brand awareness to boost online sales.
Data Science as a Solution: conDati Opens Doors for Digital Retailers
The pitch is that today’s marketers with omnichannel inspirations need a machine learning-driven platform that will not only assess the success of campaigns across several media but also point them toward paths for future success. That’s an expensive technical infrastructure to create in-house, and conDati’s betting its solution is worth the spend.
Loyalty Solution Narvar Acquires Kronos Care, Expands in Europe
Customer engagement and loyalty solution Narvar, which has tripled in size over the last year, announced on Tuesday its acquisition of Kronos Care, a fellow customer engagement startup founded in just 2017. The move will help Narvar conquer the European market, bolstered by the local expertise of the Paris-based Kronos.
Why Are Retailers Hesitant to Explore Omnichannel Opportunities?
More than 90% of shoppers combine digital and physical channels on the path to purchase, and four in 10 online shoppers are using buy-online, pick-up-in-store (BOPIS) checkout options. But the big news coming out of the 2018 holiday season isn’t how many shoppers are taking advantage of online-to-offline fulfillment. It’s how few retailers are offering it.
10 Ways To Provide a Cutting-Edge Retail Customer Experience
Delighting customers isn’t about getting one thing right; it’s about firing on all cylinders, both online and in brick-and-mortar stores, to make an authentic connection with buyers to drive satisfaction and loyalty.
What does that look and feel like? Here are 10 examples of best practices that represent the state of the art in retail CX.