/ Omnichannel

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/ Omnichannel

Table of contents

03 WTF is omnichannel?

04 The evolution of omnichannel

06 Multichannel emerges

07 Omnichannel and the return of brick-and-mortar

08 The mobile movement connects the dots

11 Almost there: Four omnichannel challenges

15 Realizing our omnichannel dream

02

/ Omnichannel

Wait, weren’t we just getting the hang of multichannel marketing? Pitching consumers on their winding, multidevice, multiplatform digital paths to purchase was complicated enough. Now comes omnichannel– marketing’s newest, most superlative buzzword.

At first glance, “omnichannel” appears to be a game of marketer’s one-upsmanship. Indeed, the Latin prefix “omni” is misleading. Taken literally, “omnichannel” can mean “all channels.” But there is another, more relevant definition of omni, and that’s the one we’re considering here: “without boundaries.”

Here, digital media is only one piece of the equation. Omnichannel marketing integrates digital with all the enduring analog stuff that consumers still cling to: the brick-and-mortar store, print catalogs and telephone helplines, not to mention offline ad efforts.

In a perfect omnichannel world, the budgeting siloes, the walled gardens, the culs-de-sac and the data

fragmentation fade away, eroded by the smooth flow of superior integrative tech. It all starts with establishing customer identity in a way that helps marketers deliver not just relevant advertising, but personalized service and a frictionless path to purchase—regardless of where that purchase is made.

Simply put, omnichannel is a marketing strategy that aims to:

Stitch together a complete profile of each consumer, carry that consistent identity across all channels both online and off and use it to create tailored marketing experiences that move sales.

As always, there are hurdles—cost, complexity, data and delivery—but we’re not starting from scratch. The seeds of omnichannel can be found from the earliest days of organized marketing.

Lend us your ear, and we’ll explain.

03

WTF is omnichannel?

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/ Omnichannel

Back in the day the objective was simple. TV, radio, outdoor and print campaigns shouted a single broad message to herd folks into stores and toward the register.

“The consumer is not an idiot, she is your wife,”—Thanks, David Ogilvy— is about as close the industry got to targeting their sweeping brand messages.

Driving foot traffic was relegated to below-the-line efforts like coupons, newspaper circulars and, later, local TV ads. Big time agencies may have delegated these to juniors, but it was these less-than-glamorous executions that provided a modicum of usable measurement. Still, once that register rang, all marketers could do was bid the customer goodbye and wait to measure sales lift. Who bought what and why? Who knows? Sales were up and bosses were happy.

Omnichannel status: Marketers create messages that move sales.

The evolution of omnichannel

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To hunt this elusive prey, marketers whittled a few reliable arrows for their quivers

Targeting For the first time, the consumer was an individual. Specific de-mographic attributes and psychographic characteristics allowed marketers to see the man through the mob and to target offers tailored to him.

Segmenting Of course, there were still groups, but data allowed the massive consumer herds to give way to countless market segments repre-senting specific types—Tinier herds that were easier to steer and customize for.

Sequencing Continuous data collection meant that every message wasn’t assumed to be a first contact. Each interaction was logged and informed the next as the consumer moved toward purchase.

Retargeting If the consumer’s journey ended just short of the register, a second line of offers could nudge them back into buy mode. According to eMarketer, over 72 percent of consumers can be swayed by these ghosts of their unfulfilled buying impulses.

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Digital shoppers now helmed their own consumer journey, and marketers had to keep up. The cooperative couch potatoes of yesteryear, who would willingly absorb a 30- or (gasp!) 60-second TV spot gave way to ADD-addled shoppers running wild on the Web.

Cookies and click-throughs shed some light on the opaque shopper’s journey. It wasn’t yet possible to connect a brick-and-mortar customer to their online counterpart, but marketers began building bridges to connect the two worlds, measuring the effectiveness of digital campaigns in getting folks into the store and up to the register.

Omnichannel status: Marketers create messages create tailored marketing experiences that move sales.

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Digital marketing promised a transparent path to clear ROI, but never quite delivered. Instead, marketers came down with a wicked case of shiny-object syndrome, hurling experimental messages down emerging social channels.

Look no further than the stampede of brands and publishers jumping onto emerging social app Peach without any promise of ROI. Likewise, Sprite’s Snapchat campaign last year earned good press and 2.3 million impressions in Brazil. But did it move soda pop? If you don’t know, you’re not omnichannel.

Digital and offline efforts were made in tandem, but the conversation between them was usually stilted or altogether silent. Legacy structures put pressure on isolated departments to throw efforts at ever more targets with limited data crossing the divide. A 2014 survey by eMarketer found that only 30 percent of brands surveyed had an integrated marketing team

and only one in five felt they could measure how effective their campaigns were in a holistic way.

The inability to carry identity seamlessly to a physical location, or even across to other devices and platforms, is more than a missed opportunity. Consumers expect integrated service in an increasingly connected world.

Omnichannel status: Marketers create messages across all channels both online and off that move sales.

This is where omnichannel comes in, to finish the job digital started by merging the customer’s experience online and offline to create what Sam Huston, CSO of iProspect, describes as an “omnistore approach, so we turn every touchpoint into a single universal experience.”

Multichannel emerges

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Omnichannel isn’t about being everywhere at once, nor is it simply multichannel on steroids. It’s recognizing every individual customer whether they’re shopping online, offline, or both. To do so, marketers must forge individual consumer profiles.

More than ever, today’s shopper begins by researching a product, whether they intend to purchase it online or off. (According to Google, 42 percent of in-store consumers research their purchases online.)

This fact finding pulls consumers back and forth across the digital/in-store divide, including everything from an online search for a local store to the ability to digitally check in-store inventory. And now, online purchases can be picked up and returned in-store. Once the shopper is in the door, the shopping resumes (and might go right back online). Nordstrom Rack acknowledged this phenomenon with its initiative to allow e-commerce returns in-store: “It’s a Trojan horse to get people into stores,” David Randolph,

senior vp of retail and e-commerce at 360i told Digiday. “It creates a good atmosphere. If you return something, you’re more likely to walk around, shop and buy something else.”

A 2014 report by ICSC confirms the sentiment: Retailers that offer both in-store pick up and returns in-store earn more. Shoppers who return items in-store generally walk out the door having spent 7 percent more than they did online.

Overall, omnichannel shoppers are more valuable. Those willing to merge their online and offline buying habits have a 30 percent higher lifetime value than others, according to a 2015 IDC study.

Omnichannel status: Marketers create messages that carry a consistent identity across all channels both online and off and use it to create tailored marketing experiences that move sales.

Omnichannel and the return of brick-and-mortar

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The ability to track individual consumers’ actions as they left their PCs and headed to the store was the missing data link that would finally unite the digital shopping experience with the physical one. Only about 4 percent of marketers are able to use mobile shopping data to draw unified conclusions about their customers.

Of the $22 trillion in worldwide e-commerce sales that were made in 2014, 30 percent of those came from mobile transactions. But marketers still need to keep their eyes on the ball: 94 percent of these consumers’ spending still takes place in-store.

The mobile movement connects the dots

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To consecrate the marriage of physical and digital, marketers invoke new technologies that bend the boundaries between in-store shopping and online browsing

Geolocation Customers who share their geolocation can be targeted with offers when they’re in or near a store and more likely to casually drop in.

Beaconing Customers that opt in to beaconed Wi-Fi networks become trackable, sharing data that can be resolved to their customer profile via a device ID.

/ Omnichannel 09

Thanks to mobile in-store technologies, retailers can now see just what happens in-between. Brett Leary, at DigitasLBi told Digiday, “They [retailers] are leveraging the ability of mobile devices to give off signals about who a shopper is or signals of intent.”

If you walk into Target and connect to their Wi-Fi, we now have an identifier. We may not know who you are if you haven’t authenticated yourself, but we can see the sites you might be going to. Are you comparison shopping, connect to your offline activities?”

Mobile opens the door to omnichannel, by putting individual-level data about in-store consumers at marketers fingertips, but the circuit isn’t closed quite yet.

Omnichannel status: Marketers attempt to stitch together a complete profile of each consumer, carry that consistent identity across all channels both online and off and use it to create tailored marketing experiences that move sales.

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/ Omnichannel 14LET’S RUMBLE. IN THE OMNICHANNEL JUNGLE.

©2016 Neustar, Inc.

Any consumer information is compiled at the household level using Neustar’s products and services and is not based on actual online behavioral data. All characters appearing in this advertisement are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

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/ Omnichannel

Problem: Establishing identities

Technology has made it easy (many say too easy) for marketers to gather data. The hard part is organizing that data into something useful. Marketers need to index consumer attributes, preferences, behaviors and more from a wide variety of sources: digital, social, mobile and in-store. This data is likely to be riddled with inaccuracies and redundancies. Why? Consumers log in with different names and email addresses, change their handles, use different addresses and then relocate to multiple devices, many of them mobile. Matching a slew of device IDs to a given user is rough.

This hurts marketers’ ability to target, but more importantly, it eats away at their credibility. No one likes to receive an offer under the wrong name or to the wrong address, and these fails damage the brand.

A siloed approach to marketing data doesn’t help, but breaking those silos dramatically increases the threat of data leakage. Brands fear that shared data and consumer insights could be used by agencies and other third-parties to assist other clients or even competitors.

Solution: Merging data across channels and stitching it into unique profiles is a re-quirement for omnichannel execution. Brands need to be aggressive about refining and refreshing those profiles to keep them current.

Controlling data leakage, on the other hand, requires relationship management between brands and their partners. Sam Huston of iProspect says that, with a bit of precaution, the fear is unfounded. “Data leakage is a challenge but it’s also the eas-iest thing to overcome. Most agencies recognize the need to handle data ethically and have proprietary data responsibilities built into their contracts.”

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Almost there: Four omnichannel challenges

/ Omnichannel

Problem: Creating experiences that cross borders

Creating that ever-evolving customer profile is only half the battle. The ability to match it to individual customers across multiple channels and touchpoints is the holy grail of an omnichannel strategy and one of the hardest to execute. According to Deloitte, only 40 percent of retailers report the ability to accurately identify their customers across all channels. As customers hop from device to device and dodge in and out of stores, the complications of cross device tracking becomes acutely felt.

Solution: A persistent ID knits together all the data brands are able to collect about their customer and distills it into a single profile. Ad tech providers offer solutions that create and maintain these persistent IDs by algorithmically eliminating outdated or erroneous information (name changes, old addresses, outdated geolocation, disparate device IDs etc.). Mobile devices and social logins like Facebook then stretch that profile across all (or a majority of) a consumer’s interactions with a brand, both online and in-store.

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Almost there: Four omnichannel challenges

/ Omnichannel

Problem: The in-store experience has gone cyborg

Digital shopping is ubiquitous, but syncing up these interactions with brick-and-mortar stores is still a challenge. Marketers and retailers accustomed to a traditional siloed approach to online and offline marketing need to find ways to break down barriers. That means implementing more technology in stores and giving associates the training and tools they need to access and act on online customer data.

Jon Reily, vp of commerce strategy at Razorfish points to coffee king Starbucks as a perfect example of harmony between physical and digital. “Their mobile app is not only well-designed but does a choice few things very well, leaving it streamlined and elegant while still functional. The ability to load your Starbucks card via any medium (phone, web, app or in store) makes it the epitome of what omnichannel should be: seamless commerce.”

Solution: Retailers are gearing up with new tools to target mobile-savvy shoppers. Brands like Neiman Marcus have put tablets in the hands of associates, allowing them to access customer profiles and data on the fly. Training brick-and-mortar sales teams to act on digital data the same way digital marketers do makes it easier to deliver a smart offer face-to-face.

This process also feeds holistically back into the digital side. Deloitte estimates that retailers will have deployed as many as 2 million in-store tablets by the end of 2016 serving as both customer service and payment terminals. Data collected in the store can also be fed directly back into a customer’s profile.

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Almost there: Four omnichannel challenges

/ Omnichannel

Problem: If a beacon sends a coupon, does it make a sale?

The flip side of the identity problem is attribution, knowing which effort or efforts really made a difference to which consumers. The problem has barely been solved for digital, and now it has to account for in-store and other offline touchpoints. In the old days digital marketers relied on the lowly last click for attribution, assuming that the last thing a shopper saw was the thing that changed their mind. Then came click-through attribution, which assigns value to the efforts with the highest clickthrough rates. Neither metric tells us anything about what works for the complex, multiply influenced consumer of omnichannel’s future.

Solution: The mistake of previous attribution methods was trying to assign all the credit for a purchase to one channel. But a fractional attribution model better captures the holistic spirit of omnichannel, assigning partial credit to each touchpoint along the way to a sale. Omnichannel consumers are hybrid animals by nature, exposed on by both online and offline factors. By giving specific weight to all the appeals the customer touches on their way to the register, this method creates a personalized recipe for converting that individual again the next time around.

An approach along the line of Nordstrom’s and Macy’s in-store return policy for online purchases pulls more value from the individual consumer than a strategy that draws sharp lines between channels.

Almost there: Four omnichannel challenges

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Omnichannel might feel more like a platonic ideal than a practical reality, but brands are making serious strides toward achieving a working model. While only a small fraction (14 percent according to L2) claim the ability to track customers across channels and act on the data they glean from those interactions, a growing number have executed a partial omnichannel approach.

While Starbucks can’t claim to universally recognize its customers anywhere and everywhere, they can trace consumers carrying Starbucks cards across their digital devices and in-store visits, making card ownership not just an asset to the consumer, but a way for marketers to tailor channel-spanning campaigns to identified prospects.

As physical and digital shopping experiences continue to collide and merge, an omnichannel strategy will shift marketers from an attempt to be everywhere to a mindset toward being everywhere that matters. Further, combining a digital approach with the brick-and-mortar shopping experience creates the optimal hybrid environment in which today’s consumers can spend as they please.

Transcending to omnichannel means that marketers can finally stitch together a complete profile of each consumer, carry that consistent identity across all channels both online and off and use it to create tailored marketing experiences that move sales.

And really, hasn’t that been the dream all along?

Realizing our omnichannel dream

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