How To Start Omnichannel Marketing With WooCommerce?

Omnichannel marketing in eCommerce is very crucial to boost your profits. 67% of the retail and brand owners agreed that omnichannel marketing is either critical or important for their success, states Statista.

Omnichannel eCommerce empowers the customer throughout their decision-making process. You, as a business owner, can arrange for a smooth experience for your customers whether they visit your store physically or explore your online store.

Do you still have double thoughts about expanding your business to the online channel? Well, it is high time that you make the decision and rely on WooCommerce to get going with your omnichannel strategy.

Let me introduce you to the weight that it carries before I define omnichannel marketing… When omnichannel business came into being, it was regarded merely as a buzzword. But, since 2013, omnichannel marketing has come a long way and has become indispensable for many businesses.

After using the omnichannel strategy as jargon several times, maybe in your ideation meetings, are you now considering implementing it? Read along to understand what exactly is omnichannel marketing and the potential it has- to give an exponential boost to your revenue. Features and advantages are not all that I will leave you with about WooCommerce omnichannel marketing. You will also get acquainted with how you can start your own omnichannel business with WooCommerce.

What Is Omnichannel Business?

An omnichannel business integrates all the touchpoints that a customer walks across throughout their customer journey. This, in turn, provides a seamless experience for the customers and better management for the business.

Take, for instance, I ordered a pair of jeans twice, BY MISTAKE, from a particular brand. Now, they did not provide the ‘Cancel Order’ button on their website. I went to the store later, for a return or exchange. To my surprise, I was denied the return service by the offline store. So, I had to mail and wait for several days for them to process my request. The refund still remains pending! I am never buying apparel from them again after so much trouble.

This is where the role of Omnichannel Marketing comes into play. In this particular case, had there been an integration of my interaction with the brand- they could have saved a lot of time and energy (besides, taking care of their customer experience).

Why Omnichannel If We Have Customer Relationship Management (CRM)?

You might also assume that there is not much difference between CRM and Omnichannel eCommerce. But that is not the case- While CRM facilitates how you carry your business, an Omnichannel Marketing strategy will focus on empowering your customers.

Let me put it in another way, how an omnichannel approach can help you in view of enhancing your customer experience. Your presence on the billboards, on social media, maybe your WooCommerce store, and in customer’s proximity (through your brick and mortar store) might work well for your brand awareness. Now, when you unify all these channels of customer interaction, you can micromanage their needs. And such an approach will not only make your leads pay you for a wonderful shopping experience but also become your promoter over time.

So, what you are telling them with your omnichannel strategy is that- it will be a place of your choice and we would love to help you figure out your needs in YOUR comfort zone!

The marketing expert- Karthik, expressed his eCommerce buyer’s remorse experience while buying a couch for his living room in the aptest manner. An excellent example of addressing the furniture challenge is the home furnishings companies- Pepperfry and Ikea store.

These stores let you see the furniture in 3D format. They have put in efforts to save their customers from buyer’s remorse by letting the customers visit the store in person. This reduces the friction between their customers and the sales team by cutting off the pressure from their customers to make the purchase inside the store.

What Are The Benefits Of An Omnichannel Strategy?

Before we step ahead, it is essential to understand the difference between omnichannel and multichannel business.

In a multichannel approach, you increase your reach to your potential or existing customers through a number of channels. These channels may include social media (LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, and so on, depending on the demand of your business), your brick-and-mortar store, customer service, or even billboards.

In the omnichannel approach, you let your customers make their final decision in their comfort zone without the pressure of the sales team. You let them explore all your products through different channels and still offer them a unified experience. You can achieve this by creating an integrated individual experience through interlinking all the channels.

Unlike multichannel marketing, omnichannel marketing in eCommerce is the trick that has its major focus on providing an uninterrupted flow of the customer cycle.

Now that we have understood the meaning of an omnichannel business, we are ready to dive into knowing the benefits of the same. This will help us answer why we even need an omnichannel approach for our WooCommerce stores.

1. Communication Is A Two-Way Street…

With your omnichannel business, presenting your catalog is not the only tool for delivering information. Your customers can reach out to you in ways most convenient to them. And, so the product browsing task becomes more exciting for your customer when they can ask questions and actually have someone responding to them, no matter where they are!

2. Omnichannel Is A Marketing Hit…

Omnichannel is not just a term in fad. It is a revolutionary technique to invest in. And it will stay because it will not only help you in reaching out to every lead who is using at least one of your channels but also micromanage them effectively to let them have their ‘happy shopping time’ with your responsive services.

3. Increase Your Sales…

With exponential growth in the number of your leads, visible revenue growth is a sure shot. I am not even exaggerating- Retaildive reported a 250% increase in the purchase rate via omnichannel campaigns in comparison to single-channel campaigns.

4. Efficient Communication…

Once you establish communication with your customer, it is important to make it an impactful one. This will happen only when you have the appropriate behavioral analysis of your customer. The analysis helps in efficient segmentation taking into account all your channels. This detailed segmentation helps in having meaningful conversations leading to conversions.

5. Establishing Your Brand…

With an enriching experience, your customers will want to return to you. They might bring their friends along. And their friends might bring their friends along. What you will do is enable them to have an exquisite shopping experience. And I think, customer retention is the most important step in establishing yourself as a customer-centric brand.

6. Percentage Growth In Different Metrics…

Retaildive reports a significant increase in the metrics that are worth monitoring. They found out a higher purchase rate, engagement rate, and even higher average order value (AOV) through omnichannel businesses in comparison with single-channel campaigns.

Why Should You Choose WooCommerce For Omnichannel Marketing?

Once you are aware of the potential that the omnichannel approach has to boost your numbers, you need to equip yourself with the right tools. All I can tell you is that WooCommerce would make one reliable partner with respect to your omnichannel needs.

How? That you will learn here, after knowing what WooCommerce has to offer to your store!

1. Simplified Analytics

You might have a slight resistance to implementing your omnichannel strategy thinking about the tonnes of effort that goes into making it work. But, let me assure you that WooCommerce will only reduce the trouble and help you share the load effortlessly.

It is so because WooCommerce allows easy integration with Google Analytics and thus, you can produce the right campaign for the right audience.

2. Custom Features And Empowering Extensions

The open-source WooCommerce plugin has a lot to offer to enable you, to implement your omnichannel strategy effectively. You can add a few solid plugins to facilitate the management of your multichannel approach from one place. Hence, ensuring a seamless experience for your customers.

You can easily find fully-featured multichannel extensions that will allow you to not just list your products on Google, Amazon, and eBay but also will let you manage your inventory and orders directly from WooCommerce.

3. Infallible Support

One of the best things we get with WooCommerce is its dependable open-source support system!

For omnichannel marketing is something a lot of people are experimenting with and brainstorming about, we need to hear their solutions to our issues. Thus, WooCommerce provides for an unlimited scope of up-gradation and improvement.

4. Improved SERP Ranking

WooCommerce provides tools that will help you achieve a high degree of search engine optimization. Otherwise, what is the point of investing in an omnichannel strategy if your customers would not be able to discover you?

WooCommerce provides syncing with must-have plugins like Yoast. Kinsta proved the importance of SEO by growing its reach by more than 100% from 2019 to 2021.

5. Responsiveness

Multiple channels would mean multiple devices. It is more than necessary to have your online store respond to different devices in an uninterrupted manner. If you fail on that front, there is a high probability that you will lose a large number of customers. In short, be it multichannel or omnichannel- nothing will work if your eCommerce store ain’t responsive.

WooCommerce provides for responsiveness. Period. Well, you just need to define viewports and all or maybe choose a responsive theme. Your omnichannel marketing strategy will give the best results if you integrate all your channels into the WooCommerce store.

6. Delivery Has To Be The Final Step

Once you make a successful conversion, you have to make sure your customers come back to you and bring their friends along! WooCommerce allows you to manage inventory effectively. So, the role WooCommerce can play is to enable in-store pickup or provide seamless transactions through different payment methods.

You may also add many custom solutions to make your omnichannel business efficient depending upon the demographics and geography of your customer base.

How To Build An Omnichannel Strategy For Your WooCommerce Store?

Because you are still reading, I will assume that you have made up your mind to transition from a single or multi-channel business to an omnichannel business model.

Here is a step-by-step guide on how you can actually make your eCommerce omnichannel business come into being after your never-ending brainstorming sessions.

1. Identify Your Target Audience And Worthy Channels

You cannot go on choosing all the social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Medium, LinkedIn, and so on) impulsively just because they exist. You do not want to get your time and energy wasted on the channels where your customers are not present. To tap most customers, you need to analyze where they are.

Hence, the first step for building an omnichannel business is to identify the channels that have the potential to impact your business most efficiently (in consideration of your target audience, obviously).

2. Build Customer Journey For Your Omnichannel Strategy

The customer journey will help you formulate your marketing strategy and select the respective plugins for it. You may make a map of your customers’ journey and accordingly build your upsell or cross-sell strategy, or maybe your strategy to convert the customers who abandoned the cart.

There are many success stories that got a kickstart by (a.) acknowledging the challenges (b.) creating the right strategy (c.) implementing it effectively. Following a defined customer journey (awareness, consideration, and decision stages) will help you make a success story of your own.

3. Conduct A Content Audit For Different Channels

It is important to use the appropriate content for the channel you use. It is better to publish a blog for long-form content or publish pictures and short videos on Instagram-type social media platforms. You should know how to redirect your leads to the right place at the right time. For this to happen, the content will serve as your magic wand. And it is no secret that the wand chooses the wizard, that is, your customer.

4. Segmentation

If the content is one pillar of your omnichannel marketing strategy, segmentation is another. Depending on your type of business, you can segment your audience according to their location, age, gender, and the list is endless. Do not forget to test shoppable posts on Instagram, Facebook, and Tiktok for your segmented lists.

For instance, MakeWebBetter has developed a powerful and user-friendly integration with HubSpot to help you manage your customers to the last touchpoint.

5. Cross-channel Customer Service

This is one of the most important elements to be taken care of, in your omnichannel business. Salesforce reports that 89% of the customers make another purchase if they are happy with the customer service. Omnichannel strategy integrates all the channels where you conduct your business making it seamless. It also empowers your customers to make the right choice. Read how!

Now, this might get tricky if you have not prepared your support staff in advance. You have to be sure that you can handle the traffic that will come your way. Prepare your workforce accordingly for different channels. Using CRM tools like HubSpot can help you with the same.

6. Rely On Testing

When you have your mansion ready, it is necessary to place your furniture in ways that are most convenient for you. Same way, you need to make sure you place relevant ads and content for your customers.

The best way to discover what is best for you is to employ A/B testing best practices for different lists and campaigns. Make it a part of your sprinting routine. This will eventually help you evolve as a marketing team.

The scope of the omnichannel business is vast. There will always remain an idea or more to be tamed. But one thing is for sure, these untraveled roads will be easier to explore when you have your backend secured with WooCommerce. And as Robert Frost said,

Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference

Trust me when I say- you choosing the omnichannel approach with WooCommerce will indeed make all the difference.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is an omnichannel marketing strategy?

Omnichannel marketing is the integration of multiple touchpoints at all your channels. This provides a seamless and comfortable experience for all your customers to choose what is best for them.

2. What are the different channels in omnichannel eCommerce?

Your organic SERP ranking, e-mail, social media, paid search, affiliate programs, referrals, etc. are all different channels of eCommerce.

3. What is WooCommerce omnichannel?

The backend of WooCommerce facilitates omnichannel business in a number of ways. You can add many plugins for a multichannel approach and even integrate your WooCommerce store with effective CRM software such as HubSpot.

4. What is an omnichannel example?

There are several popular examples of omnichannel business:
a. The Starbucks mobile application and rewards integration.
b. The London Fashion Week by Topshop. They integrated the Twitter hashtag- #LFW with live billboards to facilitate customer engagement.
c. Pepperfry, an Indian home furnishing brand provides for in-store viewing besides providing a 3-D view of their products to help the customers at the decision-making stage.