A Snapshot of Omnichannel Consumer Buying Behavior
Omnichannel strategies are becoming more common to implement as marketing cloud providers offer tighter integration and measurement of strategies across the consumer’s journey. Tracking links and cookies enable a seamless experience where, regardless of the channel, the platform can recognize where the consumer is and push a marketing message that’s relevant, applicable to the channel, and guides them through to a purchase.
What is Omnichannel?
When we speak about channels in marketing, we’re talking about the marketing channels open to communicating with a prospect or customer. This could include traditional channels like television commercials, print advertisements, or radio. Digital channels include organic search, social media, paid advertising, mobile marketing, and other strategies.
Multi-channel retailing has been around since multi-channels have been around. At its root, multi-channel marketing referred to targeting advertising at a consumer or business in more than one channel. You would run concurrent campaigns across mediums and formats to repeatedly reach and guide the prospect to make a purchase.
Omnichannel refers to a cross-channel experience that you use to drive the consumer to a purchase. Marketers work to optimize an experience through applications, formats, and interactions that guide the consumer. They may start via a geographic search, visit a site, then get repeated remarketing ads that drive an offer home and end in the consumer visiting a retail location.
Consumers aren’t just responding to omnichannel strategies, they’re absolutely expecting a seamless experience between an e-commerce site and the retail location nearest to them.
Omnichannel Consumer Buying Behavior
BigCommerce.com produced the following infographic on omnichannel purchasing behavior and here the highlights:
- 58% of customers are deterred by shipping cost
- 49% of shoppers don’t buy online because they can’t touch and inspect a product
- 34% of online shoppers can’t wait out the delivery times — no matter how fast they are!
- 34% of respondents cited a difficult return process for their purchased goods
- 29% of shoppers prefer to buy at brick-and-mortar locations due to privacy concerns
How We Buy: Modern Consumer Behavior in an Omni-Channel World
Disclosure: We are an affiliate of BigCommerce.com