Are you really delivering a seamless experience across platforms? Today’s savvy digital consumer expects the highest standards, so if you’re operating across several channels and they aren’t cohesive, you could be losing out. This is an area you need to focus more in if you’re still asking what is unified commerce?
Developing an omnichannel strategy is the way to unify what can often be disparate experiences, especially within the ecommerce sector. There are plenty of statistics to show that brands using an omnichannel marketing approach enjoy up to 90% higher customer retention rates than those who don’t – so it’s not something you can afford to ignore. You can boost both engagement and sales as well as maximizing your reach for a minimal extra spend.
Keep It Mobile Friendly
We are a nation firmly attached to our smartphones, so it’s incredible now many businesses still don’t properly consider mobile-first marketing. All graphics, websites, text and images should be created with mobile interaction in mind.
A smartphone is the key to bringing together online and offline marketing activities and is the main portal into what you do. Mobile channels should never be an afterthought – they have to be the main consideration in a modern tech-led world. When you optimize all of your content for mobile use, you don’t miss out on sales and leads by making it easier for customers to browse and buy directly from the device they always carry with them.
Do Your Research
When it comes to things like social media, there are a lot of potential options out there. So it’s best to begin with the research, finding out which platforms your audience are actually using. This varies quite a lot, and there’s little point creating a marketing strategy that hinges around Twitter if your audience only uses Instagram!
You don’t have to jump on every single channel out there. Instead, focus your energies where they are going to gain maximum results. Creating buyer personas is a great way to understand which channels to target. Constantly evaluating the results you’re getting is key to ensure a good return on any investment.
Map Out The Customer Journey
Understanding the journey that your customers make as they interact with you online, what touchpoints there are, and where potential barriers may arise, is an important activity to support your omnichannel approach. Setting up marketing workflows can help enormously, allowing you to keep promising leads warm, drip feed them tailored content and use retargeting to serve them personalised offers.
Through this, you can also evaluate each channel you’re using for its performance and make sure that everything continues to drive the results. Make sure that the message and content you use is optimized for each channel – it’s no good copy and pasting the same message and format everywhere as what works well in one place won’t necessarily translate in another. You can still reuse content, but make sure there are changes made to it to take into account the differences in usage between each channel you use.
