In today’s fast-paced and highly competitive e-commerce landscape, having a solid omnichannel strategy is crucial for success. By selling on multiple channels, brands can reach a wider audience, increase brand awareness, and ultimately drive more sales.
However, with the addition of new sales channels, the complexity of managing them all increases. This is where automation and seamless integration become a priority for sellers. With the right technology stack, brands can automate repetitive tasks, like managing inventory, pricing, order management, and the fulfillment experience across multiple channels, providing customers with a consistent shopping experience.
Let’s take a closer look at how developing an omnichannel strategy can benefit a brand and how platforms like Cymbio and Distribution Management can make it easier to seamlessly manage different channels for greater sales and growth.
What Is Omnichannel Marketing?
Omnichannel marketing is a marketing strategy that employs multiple channels to reach customers, including online and offline channels such as social media, email, mobile, search, and physical stores. The goal of omnichannel marketing is to provide a seamless and consistent customer experience across the entirety of a brand’s channels. Through consistent messaging, content and a cohesive sales experience, brands can create stronger customer relationships, which will ultimately help them drive more sales.
The Omnichannel E-commerce Experience Today
Today, customers expect to be able to shop for products seamlessly online, in-store, and on mobile devices. This means that companies must be able to provide a consistent experience for customers across all channels.
Turning to a multichannel experience is essential to reaching customers where they are. While online sales surged in previous years due to Covid-19 restrictions, now that businesses are back open, e-commerce sales have taken a slight dip. According to the 2023 Square Future of Retail Report, e-commerce sales accounted for 43% of sales in 2022, slightly lower than in 2021. However, what this proves is that using an omnichannel experience is essential for providing customers consistency in their products and services on any channel.
When it comes to the shopping experience, customers are also looking for options that suit their needs and lifestyles. For this reason, services such as BOPIS (Buy Online Pick Up In Store), BORIS (Buy Online Return In Store), ROPIS (Reserve Online Pick Up In Store), and product subscriptions have become more commonplace. Not only that, but these services support a seamless shopping experience as well as a retailer’s ability to maximize revenue and lifetime value per customer.
In order to effectively leverage digital channels, you need to be sure that your order management and fulfillment are up to task as the lines between brick and mortar and the digital domain continue to merge. Today’s customers expect fast, free shipping so your solution must be capable of speed directly to the customer and to the shelf.
Finally, in order to create a successful omnichannel strategy, companies must ensure that their back-end systems are integrated and able to communicate with each other in order to provide a consistent experience across several channels. This includes inventory management, order tracking, and payment processing.
The Benefits of Using an Omnichannel Strategy
By offering a consistent experience across all channels, businesses can create a more seamless and enjoyable shopping experience for their customers. There are a number of benefits that come along with establishing an omnichannel strategy, some of which can include growing your brand, increasing your sales, and helping you keep your existing customers. Let’s take a closer look at how exactly selling on multiple channels can be advantageous.
Grow Your Audience
Selling through multiple channels allows brands to expand their reach and target new customers. For example, by selling on popular marketplaces, brands can tap into a vast customer base that they may not have been able to reach on their own. Additionally, by turning to social commerce and selling on platforms like Instagram and Facebook, brands can connect with potential customers and promote their products to a highly engaged audience.
Build Brand Awareness
An omnichannel strategy can also help establish a seller’s brand as a reputable and trustworthy source for their products. By consistently presenting a strong brand identity across multiple channels, brands can build a loyal customer base and create a sense of trust and familiarity with their products.
Drive More Sales
Studies show that brands that use three or more channels in a campaign see a staggering 494% higher order rate than those that use a single-channel campaign. This goes to show that an omnichannel strategy can help drive more sales for e-commerce sellers by leveraging the inherent strengths of different channels in order to ultimately sell more products.
Increase Customer Retention
Companies that use an omnichannel strategy to engage their audience retain 89% of their customers, compared to companies with weak omnichannel engagement who only retain 33%. By providing customers with a unified and consistent experience across all touchpoints as well as offering personalized and tailored experiences that meet customers’ needs. Omnichannel strategies also help build customer loyalty by allowing customers to easily access information, make purchases, and get support from anywhere. This helps foster a sense of trust between customers and the brand, which increases customer retention.
Improve Customer Insights
By tracking customers across multiple channels, businesses can gain a better understanding of their customers and their preferences. This information can then be used to tailor product offerings, create personalized content, and offer certain promotions to specific customer segments. The insights you gain from engaging with customers on multiple channels will help your brand make data-driven decisions that can allow you to grow your business and make your products and services more relevant to your audience.
Bolster Your Omnichannel Strategy With Automation and Fulfillment Tools
Automation and fulfillment tools can help you keep track of customers, orders, and inventory when your brand is spread out across multiple channels. When it comes to automation, the Square Future of Retail Report indicates that 41% of businesses are planning to automate certain operations to increase staff efficiency, while 42% of them are also turning to automation to help them maintain inventory levels.
Fulfillment is just as important as automation when it comes to building an omnichannel strategy. 38% of customers will abandon an order if shipping takes more than a week, demonstrating how important it is to use a reliable fulfillment platform to ship orders quickly and securely.
Cymbio and Distribution Management are two platforms that allow e-commerce businesses to automate and scale their multichannel sales. With Cymbio, brands can put manual, time-consuming tasks such as order management, inventory syncing, and payment reconciliation on auto-pilot. Distribution Management helps brands simplify channel expansion and speed up delivery for faster fulfillment. When used together, both platforms can help a brand bulk out its omnichannel strategy by connecting with new retailer and marketplace channels, improving the customer experience, and minimizing the budget and resources needed to scale.
Cymbio & Distribution Management: Helping You Scale Your Omnichannel Strategy
Turning to automation and fulfillment platforms when it comes to your e-commerce business is essential for not only growing your brand and sales but for delivering the most consistent customer experience across all channels. Cymbio and Distribution Management help you do just that by taking charge of time-consuming tasks and eliminating operational overhead as well as minimizing human errors caused by manually overviewing things like inventory, order management, and shipments. With Cymbio and Distribution Management taking care of manual tasks, brands have a lot more time and resources available to focus on other aspects of growing their businesses, such as running campaigns, launching products, and engaging new customers.