How Can an Omnichannel Strategy Drive Customer Loyalty?
Today's retail customers are more connected than ever before, as they have 24/7 access to information about products and services from any location. As a result, businesses must develop an omnichannel strategy to ensure that they can meet the customers' needs and earn their loyalty.
An omnichannel strategy allows customers to interact with a retail business through multiple channels, such as in-store, online, or via an app. Name a channel, and the retail business is present there to serve its customers.
Such a strong brand presence across channels bolsters customers' confidence and helps them feel appreciated and valued by a business. It allows the retail brands to build a strong bond with these customers, who are more likely to return and do repeat business with the retailer.
Why is Customer Loyalty such a Deep Concern for Retail Brands?
A crucial research report in 2021 found that the pandemic has prompted a surge of new activities, with an astonishing 75% of consumers showing dynamic behaviours in response to economic pressures, store closings, and changing priorities.
The dynamic change in behaviour shattered brand loyalties, with 36% of consumers trying a new brand and 25% incorporating a new private-label brand. Of consumers who have tried different brands, 73% intend to continue incorporating the new brands into their routine.
The research is an eye-opener for retail brands in 2022 that think their customer base is loyal and will stick to their products forever.
How can an Omnichannel Strategy Drive Customer Loyalty?
1) An omnichannel strategy can provide the essential building blocks for seamless experiences
Are you aware that 42% of customers say a seamless customer experience across all devices and channels is a top expectation? A seamless customer experience is essential as it is the most effective & frictionless way to keep a tab on the smallest customer needs and fulfill their shopping needs.
The precise omnichannel strategy provides these vital building blocks for a seamless customer experience.
- A single view of the customer made actionable to decision-makers across the entire enterprise.
- A single view of every customer interaction and order
- A holistic trust and real-time inventory in every channel and location
- An integrated analytics platform
Without these building blocks to seamless experiences, even the most exceptional loyalty programmes would struggle to establish consumer loyalty.
2) It empowers customers to redeem loyalty points across all channels
Look at a multichannel customer shopping at an online retail store. He has earned and amassed massive loyalty points on his online transactions with the retail brand. He visits the physical store of the same retail brand hoping to redeem his loyalty points for shopping but is denied, saying 'loyalty points can only be cashed online."
Such experiences are relatively common and can force a customer to leave the retail brand after being denied redemption of loyalty points on other channels. Three distinct ways in which an Omnichannel strategy has given a new lease of life to customer loyalty:
1) Redeem loyalty points anywhere: Customers can redeem loyalty points on all available channels of an omnichannel brand. This entails transactions and a seamless shopping experience for every customer of the omnichannel retail brand.
2) Get a 360-degree customer profile: Omnichannel retail brands can build and apply 360-degree customer profiles based on the customer's activity at various touchpoints. Retailers can track and manage customers, leveraging the rich data to develop highly tailored, relevant offers and marketing campaigns for each customer segment.
3) Customers get what they desire: An omnichannel strategy provides what the customer wants. Retail customers expect easy, convenient, consistent, and seamless experiences throughout their shopping journeys, from research and browsing to buying and receiving the products.
Fynd’s bulk coupon generator helps retail businesses generate coupons in bulk for sales campaigns for your sales channel. This extension is handy to create user-specific, category-specific, brand-specific, collection-specific and seller-specific coupon sets which can be redeemed across all channels of the retail brand.
3) Rapid transition from a shopping experience to an enthralling brand experience
It's a misconception that customers repeatedly shop because of a fantastic online shopping experience at a retailer's online channel or store. They shop due to the unforgettable brand experience the emotions and moments that make customers remember you for a long time.
Effective brand experience fosters customer loyalty as customers trust retail brands whose experiences are consistent and relevant. That’s the reason omnichannel retail brands offer consistent logos, colour palettes, imagery, taglines, tone of voice, and vocabulary across all touchpoints.
For example, with the arrival of autumn, Starbucks' branding, colour palette, goods, and customer experience are consistent across all channels – whether their website, mobile app, in-store branding, or outdoor advertising. Customers will better comprehend their communication and goals due to this unified experience across media.
4) Intelligent use of data analytics by omnichannel retail brands
These statistics will blow your mind! 58% of enterprises see a significant increase in customer retention and loyalty due to using customer analytics. Omnichannel analytics allows the retailer to apply analytics to every step of the customer journey, from brand discovery, brand awareness to making a sale.
Here is what can be accomplished with data analytics of customers shopping with an omnichannel brand:
A) Get a good understanding of your customers' behaviour: Engaging with customers without understanding their actions and behaviours is like shooting targets aimlessly in the dark. Omnichannel data gives you a single customer view and helps analyze their core activities around touchpoints like.
- When did they use the physical store, online store, and social media channels for purchases?
- What prompted them to shop on these channels special offers, loyalty point redemption, convenience, or free shipping?
- What were the reasons customers were shopping more on one channel and neglecting others?
- What were their favourite products that they liked to shop for most?
- What is the channel-wise shopping history of these customers?
B) Segment & personalized communication to build better brand-customer relationships
To succeed in today's retail environment, you must embrace omni channel communication. By segmenting your customers, tailoring communication, and engaging appropriately, you can begin developing meaningful brand relationships.
Proper customer segmentation
Omnichannel customer segmentation helps retailers run highly targeted and focussed marketing campaigns for every customer, leading to customer loyalty and increasing their lifetime value (CLV).
Retail brands can segment their customers in four ways:
- Geographical (city, state, and country)
- Demographic (gender, age, marital status, income, hobbies)
- Psychographic (buying history and trends, personality type)
- Behavioural (web, offline, and in-store behaviour)
AI-powered engagement automation makes it easier to collect data on your audience, and the segmentation possibilities are practically infinite.
Personalized Communication
By gathering data on customer behaviour, you can enact complex personalization strategies:
• Tailor each upsell offering to the interests and behaviours of each customer.
• Overlay personalized abandoned cart items to assist customers in continuing where they left off.
• When visitors begin to leave the site, offer a time-sensitive deal as an overlay.
If you are looking to personalize communication with customers, in that case, Fynd Store’s clienteling solutions can help you browse through a customer profile and reveal their shopping behaviour, likes, dislikes, interests, product preferences (size, colour, styles), and a lot more.
The solution allows brands to engage with customers in intelligent ways that increase each customer's Average Order Value (AOV). It gives sales associates the power to identify loyal customers and target the servicing of those customers with offers based on a complete understanding of that customer's transaction and engagement with the brand.
Fynd email & SMS marketing tools help retail brands to send intimations to customers during new user signup, for providing order updates, and for notifying returns and refunds, while SMS makes customers aware of the order status. These predefined SMS and email templates make communication transparent for every omnichannel retailing customer.
Conclusion
An omnichannel strategy can drive customer loyalty more refreshingly than the traditional approach. It helps businesses grow their customer base and reap customer loyalty by delivering an outstanding, seamless shopping experience.
At Fynd, we believe that a happy customer is a key to success for a retail brand. Our omnichannel strategy enables retail businesses to offer a seamless online and offline shopping experience.
We make it easy for customers to shop with us on any device, mobile or app, whenever and wherever they want! Book a Demo immediately to learn more about Fynd Omnichannel solutions.
