Ecommerce and Retail

Workable Strategies for Omni-Channel Communication

How do you lose a customer? Provide an inconsistent experience, ignore them, send them irrelevant offers? All great ideas. Your customers will switch to other companies to find better customer service, and nowadays people rely on online reviews as the new word-of-mouth

How do you keep a customer? And not only retain them, but foster their loyalty to your brand? When customers feel cared for by your company, they will spend more with you. The goal is to offer excellent and consistent customer service, across all platforms of your business. 

But CEOs and Marketing Managers know this is easier said than done. You need tools to help you provide the kind of consistent, high-quality customer service that will drive your business. You need Omni-channel communication; a modern tool that ensures a seamless experience for every customer interaction from beginning to end.

Building Customer Loyalty in Today’s E-Commerce World

Every businessperson understands that relationship management is tricky. Fierce competition keeps the pressure on to build your brand so that customers identify with it and are drawn to your story. There are some great strategies to help you do this.

Use Omni-channel communication to segment your customers and build targeted marketing campaigns for those segments. Engage your customers at the right time so they will feel seen and valued by your company.

1. Segment Your Customers

Segmenting your customers makes the all-important personalized buying experience possible. When you run specific and relevant marketing campaigns, you can increase your customers’ lifetime value and build loyalty. There are generally four ways to segment your customers:

  • Geographic (where are they?)
  • Demographic (who are they? Gender, age, income)
  • Psychographic (who are they really? Personality type, social class)
  • Behavioral (spending patterns, brand loyalties)

With AI-powered automation you can go as niche as you want with your segmentmentation, as well as gather valuable data about your customers and site visitors.

2. Personalize Your Communication

Customers want to know they are important to you. They want one-on-one communication, and research shows they are willing to exchange their private data for it. 

When you use a modern tool to gather data on customer buying patterns and behavior, you can provide the kind of personalized experience that will delight your customers. Strategies include:

  • Offering a time sensitive deal overlay when visitors try to leave the site 
  • Customizing upsell offers based on the individual customer’s buying behaviors and interests
  • Presenting an overlay of abandoned cart items as a reminder to your customer of where they left off

And there are many more personalization tactics. Ongoing improvements in marketing software tools can help your business provide the most dynamic solutions for customer needs. AI technology can help you understand and predict buying behavior, share data, and educate customers about your brand – proactively. Give them what they want before they ask for it!

3. Communicate at the Right Time

Here are some ways you can use banners effectively:

  • Announcing…! Highlight useful information (like Free Shipping) at a key moment in the buying process.
  • Exclusivity. Peak interest in your brand’s email newsletter or push notifications. Make your customers want to be on ‘The List’.
  • Raise the Stakes. Add buying pressure by showing who else is viewing or buying the same item right now. 
Communicate at the Right Time

Empowering Growth through Technology

With AI-powered omni-channel communication software your company can create a fantastic customer experience. Features such as the Single Customer View, Detailed Scenarios, and Web Layers (on-site overlays) can help uplevel your marketing strategies. 

Single Customer View

It’s untenable to keep track of all customer interactions across different platforms manually. With omni-channel communication, all of your customer connections are tracked – through email, on the phone, through social media, and even at local events – in one place.

The Single Customer View (or SCV) displays your user data profiles. Each profile contains that customer’s site activity, product preferences, purchase history, and more. Having all of this rich data in one view allows for highly specialized segmentation and targeted marketing. 

Make sure your SCV offers flexibility, scalability, and updates in real-time, so you can always provide the most relevant and helpful customer experience.

Detailed Scenarios

When it comes to managing your segmented marketing strategies, automation is key. Set up communication triggers based on customized conditions, and ensure timely engagement with every customer.

Detailed Omni-Channel Scenarios

Here are a couple automation examples: 

  • A welcome email to everyone who signs up for the email list
  • A webhook that alerts you every time someone checks in at your store

Deeper Practical Strategies

All these concepts and ideas are well and good, but let’s delve deeper and explore more practical ways to actually use omni-channel communication. Here are three specific strategies to look at:

1. Optimal Email Send Times

If you’ve become discouraged by your email marketing results, you’re not alone. But there is a way to optimize your efforts here to ensure you’re doing all you can. 

Strategy: Set up an email that triggers to coincide with a specific event, such as the delivery of a certain push notification. The algorithm will automatically send these emails at the right moment, returning better email open rates and engaging the right customers.

2. Reinvigorate Abandoned Carts

In 2016, Business Insider estimated that 2.75 trillion in abandoned shopping cart merchandise could be recovered. Would your company benefit from a piece of that? 

Strategy: Remind your customers what they left behind with an email, timed about an hour after their last interaction. Include a list of items in their cart and a call-to action. This is a more complex strategy to set up but it is worth the solid, measurable results.

Abandoned Shopping Cart Email

3. ROPO: Research Online, Purchase Offline

With the booming e-commerce market it may be hard to believe that 90% of US sales still occur in person. For companies with storefronts it’s imperative to connect their online and brick-and-mortar worlds in order to store and capitalize on customer information.

Research Online, Purchase Offline (ROPO)

Strategy: Start a Loyalty card program that customers can use in stores which links their online profile and data. Now you can combine their online behavior and offline purchase history. Get a more complete customer profile, include them in your targeted marketing campaigns, enrich their experience with specialized offers, and foster that all-important customer loyalty.

Into the Future

It’s essential for any business to stay relevant, and the software tools to keep your company ahead of the curve are AI-powered. Omni-channel communication gives you the power to wow your customers through personalization, automation and targeted marketing. Let this approach increase their lifetime value as well as your own.

Samuel Kellett

I lead the content team at Exponea (an all-in-one marketing software, enabling personalized customer experiences at scale), where I manage the production of e-commerce articles and case studies, as well as the content for webinars and events. My passion is storytelling: I am constantly exploring new and creative ways to explain complex topics. When I’m not at my desk, I enjoy performing with my improv comedy troupe, watching films and tv, and planning my next adventure.

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