7 Powerful Multichannel Marketing Tips for an Ecommerce Store

Ecommerce is booming rapidly and is already worth $3.5 trillion worldwide. It has completely disrupts traditional retail and is expected to grow more than 30% in the coming years. This simply implies that online retail has become the most profitable business, specially if you’ve a powerful marketing strategy.

However, today’s buyers quickly switch from devices and communication channels so giving them a unified experience on all different platforms is a real challenge. As per the survey, more than 70% of consumers say that they would like to connect with brands and businesses through multichannels.

Some of the popular facts in the digital universe are:

• Companies who adopt omnichannel customer engagement strategies can retain more than 89% of their shoppers but more than 56% of organizations have weak omnichannel marketing

• 50% of marketers use 3-4 channels for brand promotion

• According to 90% of retailers, an omnichannel marketing strategy is critical to their success.

But, the important question is how to craft this kind of strategy and keep it running for a long time. In this article, we’ll give you some powerful tips which can improve your eCommerce store’s multichannel marketing strategy.

Tip 1: Use Dynamic Retargeting Across Your Channels

Retargeting is a marketing practice that helps you to display product ads to shoppers who are already on your site. This brings higher conversions compared to other strategies. You can bring down cart abandonment rates by displaying banner ads to visitors.

For example, one of UK’s leading watch store – Watchfinder had implemented retargeting over so many data points and they found out a 1300% ROI from the campaigns with a 13% increase in order values and 34% reduction in acquisition cost.

The same retargeting strategies can be used for facebook to reach more customers who’ve liked your product. You can likewise send emails to remind them to place an order from their wishlist or send them a special discount on a product they liked before. Generally, you need to set up retargeting for every possible channel.

Tip 2: Understand the buyer’s journey

When buyers purchase from you, it takes more than one touchpoint or interaction. If they find out your website via an organic search result, they might leave without purchasing anything. People barely purchase a product the first time they see it. Rather than that, they may go on other sites to compare the product reviews and ratings, ask friends about the product, etc.

To grow and scale your online business, you will require to understand the buyer’s journey. The journey contains four stages: awareness, consideration, decision, and post-purchase.

You can spread awareness of your brand or product through social media. If your posts seem interesting, visitors may visit your website or else they simply ignore it. After that, they may think about buying the product and search for reviews via search engines and popular blogs. If they decide to buy a product then they visit a marketplace or your online store to place an order. Or they simply don’t purchase anything. The buyer’s journey is not just an easy path. In all those stages, buyers may interact with you via 5 to 7 channels. By understanding how your customers interact, you can better plan a superior experience for all channels.

Tip 3: Market to Prospects, Not Channels

Multi-channel marketing is always brings many benefits. After all, it helps you to promote your product on every given channel and drives more new leads for your eCommerce store. However, today’s shoppers are techy and don’t like to be considered as "another lead".

Consider reaching to people as an individual you know rather than just generally promoting your product on all channels. Here you can take benefit of CRM software. CRMs can immediately create user profiles for you as soon as the customer responds on a channel.

The best example is HubSpot Enterprise. They offer CRM data to support multi-channel marketing initiatives. It also helps you to understand conversion paths and give your marketing team a 360 view of customers to launch any targeted campaigns.

Tip 4: Don’t Forget UGC

UGC stands for User-Generated Content and it is a perfect way to blend social proof with customer engagement. You can ask your customers to share their experience across all networks including social media and websites.

Suggest them to make textual comments, GIFs, audio files, images or videos. This will make a UGC campaign more interesting as you’re allowing people to express their creativity while marketing your business. As per the study, UGC posts shared on social channels get a 20% higher engagement rate than standard branding posts.

Tip 5: Leverage Influencer Multi-channel Marketing

Influencer marketing is getting more popular for eCommerce businesses as so many buyers are tired of interrupting ads and have started using ad-blockers.

On the other side, influencers allow you to reach your potential customers without looking unwanted. You can team up with a few influencers available on Instagram, youtube or facebook to promote your brand on different channels. For example, if you’re using yoga leggings, you can team with a popular yoga teacher to promote yoga leggings products. If it’s a protein product, you can ask a well-known fitness model to promote your product.

You can also ask them to take over social media channels for a day or a few minutes. Another good strategy is recording a product video with them or a discussion with you/your team regarding your product. You can also feature them in a product advertisement or product reviews.

Tip 6: Analyze Everything

The last and the most important tip is to measure the results of your marketing activities and campaigns regularly. You can measure results from all your marketing channels be it your website, emails, paid advertising or any other social media accounts. This is one way to figure out how your marketing strategies are performing.

Conclusion

Launching an eCommerce brand is a profitable business opportunity, however only if you can design an excellent multichannel marketing strategy.

A/B testing is needed for whatever strategies or channels you choose to promote your product. It may happen that one strategy work for another brand or campaign does not work for your brand/campaigns. In A/B testing, you will be able to get the details of the particular strategy’s performance and can replan your multichannel strategy.

Make sure that you are monitoring the KPIs which is well-defined in your multichannel marketing plan. Deliver a consistent experience and offer a great value to your customers through your eCommerce store’s marketing strategy.

Binay Jha has more than two decades of experience in the software development industry. Initially in web development later expertized in digital marketing, working for Ait Softwares - offers Website Making