A Five-Point Omnichannel Formula For Retailers

By Christine Kern, contributing writer

While the omnichannel experience is dominating headlines, retailers still lack the tools to leverage it successfully with their customers.  As retailers work to build their omnichannel strategies, RetailPro has developed a new 5-point omnichannel formula as a resource. While omnichannel offerings obviously will vary by company, there are five fundamental pieces that every successful strategy should include.

1. Platform retail management technology. Adopting platform retail management technology is mission-critical to any omnichannel strategy, according to RetailPro.  Such platforms bring together your applications, integrations, and data to help you seamlessly view and manage your business. 
2. Data convergence. Data from every customer, application, integration, channel, and store must merge into a single repository, where it can be viewed holistically.  By seeing the data as a whole, retailers can then approach their business accordingly.  Adopting an omnichannel approaches means that every channel must be seen as a part of the greater whole.
3. Omnichannel selling. This is critical to your retail business.  According to RetailPro, online-only consumers spend 92 percent less than the average onmichannel shopper, and in-store-only shoppers spend 208 percent less. This means that retailers need a way to account for orders that originated in one channel but were completed in another.   Use the data to structure sales attribution accordingly.
4. Flexible fulfillment. One of the best ways to maximize your omnichannel strategy is by creating a flexible, responsive fulfillment process. 
5. Personalized customer service. a 2015 study quoted by Google found that omnichannel shoppers have a 30 percent higher lifetime value than single-channel shoppers, so an important element in your retail strategy should be leveraging data to track shopper behavior across touchpoints.  Use this data to personalize customer service, from e-marketing to the sales floor and beyond.

RetailPro asserts, “with these five pieces in place, you’re well on your way to optimizing how you sell across channels.”