Why Should Brands Adopt Omnichannel Retail?
Here’s an interesting fact from Google’s Omnichannel Reality Report: Buyers who frequently shop from multiple channels have 30% better customer value compared to others.
This means brands have more chance of engaging with their consumers if they increase their presence across different channels – physical and online alike.
But that’s not the only reason why brands, retailers, and e-commerce actors need to start investing in going omnichannel.
Here’s a list of reasons why you should already be thinking about going omnichannel:
1. To Boost Sales:
Giving customers the ability to browse through a universal range of product catalogs, that can be accessed from any sales channel, improves the chance of ‘reverse showrooming’. It is a term that brands use, to describe promotions and marketing activities that encourage in-store visits and thereby increase sales revenue.
So, shoppers are more likely to choose brands that offer a centralized database, accessible through any channel. This means increasing the visibility of your products and promotions across all your sales platforms.
From listing the products on online channels to promoting them through retail stores, you ensure a higher chance of your brand being selected; wherever your shoppers first see the product.
2. To Improve Customer Segmentation:
With omnichannel operations, you are able to monitor your customers across all touchpoints, understand them better and know what their preferences are. You can draw information about the products they have checked, what they like to buy frequently, which offers they are drawn to, etc.
With proper analytics in place, you can easily identify similar types of customers and segment them appropriately. You can effectively group the customer data based on their intent, types of products they shop for, choice of channels, etc. This can help you prepare result-driven promotions and attract more sales.
3. To Make Way for Personalised Shopping:
Nowadays, consumers don’t just focus on the quality of the products alone. They expect a seamless service experience, user-friendly interface, uniform branding experience, rotating product choices; and they want this fast.
If you have the right analytics tools, you can closely monitor the behavior of each customer and deliver what they expect. By tracking the time your customers are more likely to purchase certain items to tracking demographics of loyal customers, each transaction enables you to create preferences and push campaigns that will attract your shoppers the most.
So, in a way, you can create personalized catalogs to gratify your buyers in making the right decision every time they shop with you.
4. To Achieve Visibility Over Your Business Operations
As the offline and online worlds converge, your brand has an opportunity to take action and find new approaches to eliminate operational challenges.
An omnichannel strategy enables you to connect all your backend and frontend systems into a centralized view. Integrating your inventory, customer data, sales information, order distribution, etc. at one place will also enable you to control and optimize business operations better.
Consider a long line of customers in your retail outlet waiting to pay for the products they have shopped for. While they wait patiently, you can simply take orders on connected POS devices and redirect them to faster checkouts.
And this can only be possible by piecing together a network of all your systems together and fostering an easy exchange of data between them, which is a key to a well-operating omnichannel strategy.
5. To Increase Inventory Turnover
As technology penetrates into our daily lives, omnichannel strategy can help you eliminate unintentional operational flaws and limitations. You will be able to optimize your stock levels and develop powerful replenishment cycles in order to be prepared at all times. As you get a better overview of inventory, you fulfill more orders, predict seasonal demand better, procure the right stock levels, have better reports, and successfully achieve long-term business goals.
With seamless management in place, your stock will automatically rotate faster and boost revenue.
6. To Improve Market Share
The Southeast Asian e-commerce landscape is a highly competitive market. There are different business models such as B2C, B2B, B2C2C, and even C2C that co-exist. As the retail environment becomes more and more challenging, brands keep struggling to retain the current market share.
But, with innovative business models and a unified sales strategy, you can cut through this highly charged market. By creating a unique and singular omnichannel experience that facilitates better customer engagement, you can have a fair competitive advantage and also help capture a larger market share.
An omnichannel concept offers a 360-degree view of all the purchases from all of your active platforms. While omnichannel might be difficult to implement, it should seem simple enough after it’s put in action. So, you must make sure that you have covered all your bases.
And as you start implementing it, you will realize it improves your conversion rates, customer satisfaction and positively impacts your operations. This further translates to better ROI and new revenue streams. Many brands, therefore, abide by its advantages and view omnichannel as a strategic and structured retail concept.
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