With so many channels to interact with in our digital age, marketers have lots of opportunities to engage with customers. Unfortunately, many of these channels are often siloed, making tracking pain points and shopping behavior a complicated process. Meanwhile, customers' expectations for personalized experiences are increasing.  

According to Salesforce’s 8th State of Marketing, 73% of customers expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations across channels. It’s clear that marketers need to implement an omnichannel eCommerce strategy to grow their audience and provide personalized shopping experiences across web, mobile, and social media. To establish an omnichannel experience, you must begin by breaking down information silos.  

How to Enhance the Customer Experience with an Omnichannel eCommerce Strategy

1. Integrate Data Sources Together

Understanding your customers’ preferences is at the heart of an excellent omnichannel shopping experience. But, without a single source of truth for all your customer and marketing data, it will be impossible to gain a realistic picture of your consumers' shopping habits. 

Fortunately, there’s hope with cloud-based, digital experience platforms (DXPs). You probably already have access to a modern DXP, as most marketing suites fall under this umbrella. Digital experience platforms, like Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Adobe Experience Cloud, are technology suites that help marketers manage and deliver digital experiences across multi-experience customer journeys. They are particularly great at making it easier than ever to integrate all your data sources, including your shopping platform (such as Shopify), in one central platform.  

Many of these tech suites also have access to customer data and data intelligence tools, enabling you to integrate customers’ web and purchase history together to create an in-depth profile. For example, with Salesforce CDP (Customer Data Platform), you can combine a single customer’s engagement history, purchasing history, and psychographics into one profile and feed these data points throughout the Salesforce ecosystem. This makes retargeting customers easier by empowering you to segment effectively, send personalized emails, and insert these individuals into specific customer journeys. Though, having your data in one place is only one piece of the omnichannel puzzle. You must also understand what your data is telling you about your customers through consistent analysis.  

2. Analyze Customer and Shopping Behavior Across Channels

You need to understand what your customers genuinely want, and to do that, you need to analyze content performance across different segments.  

To truly comprehend your customers, you should understand: 

• What content they are most likely to engage with across channels  

• The average number of touchpoints it takes for your audience to convert and make a purchase  

• Your best (and worst) performing emails, social posts, and web pages  

This analysis will provide further insight into what content and messaging have been most effective historically in convincing customers to purchase certain products and/or services. Data intelligence and visualization tools can help you determine and drill into these required insights. In fact, we’ve helped many clients build multiple data streams that enable them to view channel performance side-by-side.  

One such client was a national golf and ski resort company. Before reaching out to Lev, they struggled to gain a complete view of their customers and marketing performance. If they needed a certain report, it would take data analysts days to compile reports that were outdated by the time they were created since their data was not built to be reported in real-time.  

We helped them not only implement Salesforce Marketing Cloud Intelligence, but also create relevant reports that empowered them to view ad data, web analytics, and purchasing data side-by-side. Having this data in one place provided a real-time view of their audience and enabled them to create a robust omnichannel marketing strategy built to exceed their customers’ needs.

3. Forget a Batch and Blast Email Strategy 

Without proper email segmentation, it can be tempting to send multiple emails a day to the same recipient lists to increase engagement. This batch and blast approach, while possibly effective in the short term, can have damaging consequences over time. It can lead to many customers unsubscribing, eliminating the chance to re-engage with them in the future.  

A national fashion retailer found themselves in this situation, batch and blasting more than three emails a day to 18 million subscribers, causing a decline in positive sender reputation and subscriber churn. Lev worked with the team to test a subscriber engagement segmentation strategy and found that only 15% of their sender audience contributed over 70% of the revenue. Using Salesforce Marketing Cloud (MC) Engagement, Lev created three exclusive email segments, including new subscribers, active engagers, and the full control group to send more relevant information to these groups. As a result, this retailer was able to maintain their overall revenue goals while sending 60% fewer emails.

4. Prioritize Retargeting

It takes time to nurture potential customers as it often takes up to six to eight engagements before they purchase a product. Plus, acquiring new customers can cost up to five to seven times more than retaining and retargeting your current customers. This is why retargeting is so important.  

There’s many retargeting strategies you could consider to keep encouraging customers to engage with your eCommerce business. You could retarget based on:  

• Behavior—Based on content and/or products they are interacting with online, you could send them personalized content to increase the likelihood of purchasing. 

• Abandoning cart—Depending on where a customer drops off during the checkout process, you could send them an email to remind them that they still have something in their cart along with a discount code. 

• First-time or returning buyers—You could send first-time buyers with either discount or free shipping codes to encourage them to try your products. Alternatively, you could invite returning buyers to subscribe to your newsletter or loyalty program to reward reoccurring engagement.  
  

5. Fully Embrace Personalization

If you're currently using a batch and blast approach or a basic segmentation strategy, you aren’t alone! You still have time to improve your omnichannel eCommerce strategy by sprinkling a little personalization.  

Benefits of Personalization

1.  Provides the ability to create more robust segments. Taking your customer data and campaign metrics into account via MC Intelligence, you can establish a stronger segmentation foundation while using MC Engagement. Once a customer is in a journey, you can send unique emails based on life events, demographics, and specific purchasing behaviors  

2.  Deliver custom content. Some DXPs are incorporating artificial intelligence and machine learning into their marketing platforms. Within Salesforce Marketing Cloud Personalization, you can use Einstein Recipes to deliver custom product recommendations for each customer based on engagement and purchasing history. When strategically placed, whether in the cart or on highly visited webpages, these recommendations will increase cart value and encourage continued engagement  

3.  Send More Relevant Emails. Nothing is more off-putting than being sent an email of a product you’ve already purchased. You can avoid putting your customers through this situation with MC Personalization. Einstein Scoring allows you to better measure what content they are engaging with and then send them to a targeted journey, empowering you to send personalized emails optimized to increase conversion. 

By establishing a single source of truth for customer data, you can begin to personalize their shopping experience across the variety of channels they interact with you. 

6. Track Your Performance Periodically

When introducing new strategies, it’s important to determine whether they are successful. The best way to track the effectiveness of your omnichannel marketing strategy is to track your sales performance and campaigns with a data intelligence platform. Due to the sheer amount of customer and marketing data that exists, data overload is a quite common roadblock that marketers face every day. Fortunately, data intelligence platforms, such as Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud Intelligence, Oracle Analytics Cloud, and Power BI can help you connect all your data sources and present them in a way that is digestible and actionable.  

With access to these platforms, you can begin to build real-time reports that track sales performance and refunds as well as email, ad, and social campaign effectiveness all in one place. If you don’t know where to start, don’t worry - you don’t have to build them alone.  

At Lev, we love helping customers enhance their omnichannel eCommerce strategy and make better business decisions by bringing their data and marketing strategies to life. We’ve helped many clients take their eCommerce strategy to the next level.  

Looking to learn more? Check out our eBook, Next Level Personalization, to discover how we can help you establish a first-party customer and web data strategy to increase personalization throughout your customers’ omnichannel shopping experience, increase sales, and improve retargeting and retention.