Retail Solutions: Build Your Omni-Channel Strategy
Trends in mobile usage, dramatically changed the way of many businesses and strategies. Retailers that are early adapters to mobile optimization attracted more mobile traffic and managed to increase conversion rates. But few of them are using the retail solutions on the track of their omni-channel strategy and they have a bigger advantage in marketing and branding.
Think that, the bricks in your wall are coming from different channels but they are also parts of the same plan.
Omni-channel is an important keyword in marketing especially for these days. Diversity of sales channels are increasing rapidly. That’s why, building an effective omni-channel strategy is not easy. But it is also vital for delivering the messages of your brand and keeping them consistent. Think that, the bricks in your wall are coming from different channels but they are also parts of the same plan.
RETAIL SOLUTIONS
All the actions and messages delivered from your channels should support your omni-channel strategy. But it is easy on paper, right? We know how challenging it is. So in this post, we will focus on discussing the right retail solutions for supporting your omni-channel strategy with a sales and marketing perspective.
Retail Solutions for Sales and Marketing
According to us, first rule is personalization!
Never plan same marketing plans for all segments. Instead, after segmenting your audience for your marketing goals, personalize your messages and channels by using right retail solutions. The most effective communication channels and messages vary depending on segments. Try to build a perfect channel combination for your segments by using A/B tests.
bespoke scent in a store, the music played in a store and design of a product catalog can both support the same marketing message
All the messages should be seamless across all the channels and support your omni-channel master strategy. For example, bespoke scent in a store, the music played in a store and design of a product catalog can both support the same marketing message. That argument may sound irrevelant but be sure that it isn’t. If you build your marketing message around the idea “elegant”, the smell of your stores can perfectly empower this message implicit way. The music played in a store can also feel your customers like “elegant”. But if your catalog design is styled as energetic or sportive, it may not support your omni-channel strategy.
Your e-commerce site should also support these messages by personalization. Machine Learning and Data Science is very important in this manner. Barilliance for personalization and Mona for shopping assitance can extremely help you as marketing focused retail solutions.
Marketing automation is critical for online sales. As a part of marketing automation, e-mail marketing is also an important channel to deliver personalized e-mails based on segments. You can create Mailchimp campaigns for delivering right messages to the right people at the right time aligned with your omni-channel strategy.
You should always build bridges between traditional,online and sales channels. For online sales, don’t forget that a lot of online shoppers start a purchase on one device and finish on another. Try to connect your catalogs and print advertisements with your online sales site.
Retail Solutions for CRM
CRM is a vital process to understand, keep and delight your customers. Gathering data is not enough. You should also segment, filter, analyze and summarize this data to get insights. Actionable plans should follow this analysis, otherwise churn or customer dissatisfaction can be expected. So, first you will need data and statistics tools such as Minitab, SPSS or R and complementary reporting/BI tools such as Tableau or Microsoft Power BI.
Surveys and polls are important for customer feedbacks or predicting potential customer behaviours. SurveyMonkey and Hotjar seem like good fit for this purpose.
Your leads, opportunities and customers should be tracked with histories of communication, behaviours, visits and follow-ups. Organizing all of these is a challenging task and a good CRM tool is very important. Hubspot may seem an expensive option if you use with Marketing module. Hubspot is an integrated marketing&crm application with a lot of good features but our experience with Hubspot didn’t make us delighted and we are still not sure if it worths it’s high price. But if you only need a CRM application not integrated with marketing, then you can use Hubspot CRM for free. On the other hand, Zoho One suprised us and went beyond our expectations as an integrated tool. Suprisingly, it has lower price comparing with similar alternatives.
Customer experience should be seamless across all of your channels.
So, you gathered data, analysed, summarized and integrated with a CRM tool. Now it’s time to plan actions aligned with your omni-channel strategy. You should set your CRM tool to follow-up your customer segments, tracking behaviours and creating smart alerts accordingly. Train your agents to communicate with a pre-defined style based on customer segments according to your omni-channel communication strategy. You can plan a good omni-channel strategy and use right retail solutions. But never forget that your customer experience should be seamless across all of your channels.
