Omnichannel Strategy: How to Achieve Omnichannel Personalization in Retail
Although a top priority for the past few years, many businesses are still struggling with how to craft and implement a successful omnichannel strategy. With challenges around breaking down channel silos, democratizing data, choosing and funding new technologies, allocating resources and in many cases restructuring the entire corporate culture and vision, building the proper infrastructure is no easy feat. And, the infrastructure is only a piece of the puzzle.
How to Create an Omnichannel Strategy
To develop and implement a omnichannel strategy, retailers need to start by first leveraging the data they have to create more personalized interactions. You need data on how personalization makes customers feel like they are receiving a special service – tailored to their needs and interests.
The good news is that a perfect infrastructure does not need to be in place to start creating these personalized and tailored experiences, and in turn position businesses to deliver them across channels. A phased approach to omnichannel personalization empowers retailers to make significant strides toward omnichannel success, while they are sorting out infrastructure requirements.
Approaching Your Omnichannel Retail Strategy
While each phase of an omnichannel personalization strategy will vary depending on objectives, resources, and where a business is in their integration, there are some patterns for how retailers have proceeded with this approach.
1. Start with Web and Email Personalization
Usually the quickest avenue to revenue, web and email personalization are easy to implement, have well-defined key performance indicators, and therefore tend to be the starting point. Implementing product recommendations that best resonate with each customer across site pages is often the main focus, with an emphasis on testing strategies for optimal conversion. Through an email address, loyalty number or other consumer identifier collected via the website, email and web channels can be easily tied together to trigger emails that dynamically deliver product recommendations tailored to individual customer preferences, based on insights gathered from web activity.
2. Targeted Content & Offers and Contextual Segments
With a solid personalized product recommendations strategy, and wider omnichannel strategy, in place, businesses can start looking for ways to engage and retain customers through personalized content.
Content, such as hero shots, videos and blogs, and offers targeted to individual customer interests often come next. In combination with this, leveraging contextual information to segment experiences based on geography, weather and day-parting patterns becomes an interest, to further target content and offers, as well as add another layer to product recommendation personalization.
3. Mobile Personalization
Building on content, offer and product recommendation tactics on the web, implementing mobile and tablet specific personalization strategies that leverage geography to hone the experience for on-the-go shoppers and deliver geo-targeted offers is often a big focus. Utilizing the same identifier captured for web and email will align the mobile channel, allowing data sharing within and across channels for a seamless experience.
4. In-Store Personalization
With a mobile strategy soundly in place, extending personalization in-store is a natural next step. Arming sales associates with tablets for clienteling and introducing kiosks and digital displays is the quickest way to pull personalization into brick-and-mortar locations. Capturing in-store purchase data can be a bit more difficult because POS systems are often not in sync with online channels. It comes back to referencing the same consumer identifier implemented in other channels. Once in place, the interconnection creates a seamless omnichannel personalization experience across off-line and on-line interactions.
5. Contact Center Personalization
Contact centers often come in at this later stage, pulling online and phone-based customer service agents into the mix with a view of offers and product recommendations relevant to each customer.
Personalization Powers a Successful Omnichannel Strategy
Your omnichannel retail strategy should continue to evolve, fueled by shifts in consumer behavior and increasing expectations for more personalized and tailored experiences. These experiences need to be consistent across any and every channel a customer chooses to interact with. Businesses can start delivering on this expectation by determining the channels that are most important to their customers, quickest to revenue, and easiest to implement. Then, it’s easy to kick-off a phased omnichannel personalization strategy that will ultimately deliver on the promise of a seamless customer experience.