Want to make your marketing dollars go further this year? An omnichannel marketing strategy is a must.
A more customer-centric approach to marketing, omnichannel takes the modern customer journey into consideration. This means creating a seamless and integrated shopping experience for customers across all channels and touchpoints—with the ultimate goal of providing a more consistent and personalized shopping experience.
Omnichannel marketing can involve a variety of tactics and channels, such as:
To help you lay the groundwork for an effective omnichannel strategy, look no further. Keep these industry-backed benchmarks on your radar, see how your brand stacks up and get the guidance you need to avoid common “conversion killers.”
Your website is your best salesperson. Are you treating it as such?
When auditing your website, it can feel overwhelming to know where to start, especially for ecomm brands with multiple product detail pages.
A good rule of thumb to prioritize your game plan is to use the “Donkeys vs Unicorns” method.
This method, developed by marketing guru Larry Kim, helps you identify your top performing pages (aka your unicorns), and your worst performing pages (aka your donkeys) to create a high converting optimization plan.
As Kim explains, “The sad story is that 98% of the marketing efforts that we're working so hard on are going nowhere. We spend the majority of our time working on things that will give us a fraction of return - the donkeys. But unicorn content garners an incredible amount of attention and engagement.”
Despite all your efforts to optimize your “unicorns”—you’re only as strong as your weakest link. It’s important to take lessons from the unicorn pages so you can apply them to the donkeys and transform them into unicorns. In fact, you should optimize the worst pages first because they will bring down the bounce rate the most.
Here are a few tips for finding those donkeys (the inverse would be unicorn territory):
Play around with different elements, from copy to imagery, to SEO and CRO. A/B test often and continue to implement new ideas along the way. Remember your website is never “done,” it should always be a fluid, ongoing experiment.
Sources: Get Uplift, Oberlo, Convert Cart
Considering areas like the checkout page convert at nearly 50%, this is another user flow to keep a close eye on. Given the intent of shoppers at this stage, it’s a critical point on the path to purchase. Simple ways to increase conversion at checkout include:
Next up for optimization, consider your product detail pages. Converting at 8%, these pages attract some of your highest intent shoppers. Optimizing your PDPs offer a relatively low cost and low lift tactic and we’ve gathered tons of best practices from high growth DTC brands to help you get started.
Considering 40% of gen-z reports using Tik Tok over Google as their preferred search engine, brands need to explore new methods to reach their shoppers in a hyper-personalized, authentic and engaging way. An omnichannel approach will help you deliver on these expectations and bring more cohesion to your social media marketing efforts.
Omnichannel marketing across social media can offer several benefits for your eCommerce business, including:
Sources: Swipe.io, Entrepreneur.com, Single Grain
Recent trends in the explosion of user generated content and influencer marketing proves what we’ve known all along—your shoppers are your best sellers. As you evaluate and grow your social presence, take these conversion rates into consideration.
Social media platforms may come and go, but email is here to stay. Why?
As you re-evaluate your email channel and uncover new opportunities, use the following benchmarks for prioritization:
Sources: Omnisend, Barilliance, MailMondo
Given these conversion rates, it’s clear that the buyer’s intent has a direct correlation to their odds of converting. Higher intent actions (i.e. emailing a cart) convert much higher than a simple welcome email. As you re-evaluate your marketing strategy, map out the customer journey from an intent standpoint. Break out your shoppers' various actions into low, medium and high intent buckets and optimize the journeys with the highest intent first.
The world of SMS marketing is evolving everyday, as a channel it is becoming one of the most effective ways to engage with customers and drive intent-based sales.
Don’t let these lower conversion rates fool you, SMS is a powerful tool in your omnichannel marketing strategy to engage customers, drive conversions, and build brand loyalty.
Sources: Omnisend, Recart, Postscript
For top of funnel or middle of funnel initiatives, SMS is proving to be a top performer. Focus less on discounts or promotions in these offers and become more intentional with your offers by using your customer data more wisely. DTC brand giants like Doe Lashes have seen major returns by doubling down on their SMS channel by using intent signals at the product level.
Watch out influencer marketing…there’s a new buzzword in town for 2023: intent data marketing.
Intent data marketing is a strategy that involves analyzing and tracking customer behavior to understand their intentions, interests, and needs. This data can then be used to create targeted and personalized marketing campaigns to engage with customers and encourage them to make a purchase.
You’ve already been doing this form of marketing to a degree, most likely on your email channels. A simple example is by segmenting your email lists based on purchase intent (i.e. first time, second time, repeat, subscriber) and honing your offers or messaging accordingly. The downside is that you can only harness this powerful data after they become a customer.
There are different types of intent data that can be collected, the two major players to watch being first party data and zero party data:
The good news is there are tools out there today that are helping brands capture more customer intent across the earlier stages of the customer journey—where you’re losing 98% of your sales. Whym’s Visual Browsing Bookmark and Text Me This Item tools are helping eCommerce brands like Doe Lashes, Sok It and Siete Foods capture more of this high-value data.
Sources: Whym, Octane.ai, Outgrow
Many of these zero party and first party tactics will complement the work you’re doing to optimize your website experience as a whole. As you audit that journey, be sure to keep these conversion points top of mind.
When evaluating omnichannel tactics, optimizing your website is the most valuable place to start. As the data has shown, next to your checkout page, the highest converting journey happens on your product detail page.
Dedicating your time to personalizing your product detail page experience will serve benefits for you and your shoppers by:
If you're considering adopting new tools to enhance your product detail pages, the team at Whym is here to help. Feel free to book time with our team and we’d be happy to audit your current PdP experience and provide suggestions to increase your conversion rates.
ABOUT WHYM
Whym is an intent to buy platform transforming the way we shop and sell online. Brands trust Whym’s tools to capture more first-party data and shopper intent across their selling channels. For shoppers, Whym’s wishlist provides an organized and personalized shopping experience—helping browsers collect, save and rediscover their favorite products anywhere online. No matter how your shoppers find you, Whym makes sure they don’t forget you.
