Businesses these days operate in a, as it’s dubbed, omnichannel world. Products are sold on multiple platforms, marketing touch points are planted on every (street)corner and consumers’ attention is being caught whenever they’re entering the online or offline world.

Businesses therefore invest heavily in marketing strategies that aim to encompass all these touch points, on all channels.

But despite the intention, the execution of the strategy is hardly ever omnichannel. Too often these strategies are implemented in a single-channel way.

Digital marketers tend to get different  targets for digital campaigns compared to other communication teams. Recent developments by both Facebook & Google allow marketers to measure store visits that originated from digital marketing efforts. But the potential of the tooling is hardly ever understood properly and thus not always used. All too often the ROI of money spent on Google / Facebook Ads etc. gets measured based on online sales without taking offline purchases into consideration.

In short: target setting and evaluation occurs in silos. Retailers that started off offline, have a hard time adjusting their strategy  to encompass both online & offline target setting in one overall approach, and thus the results are often disappointing.

In our experience a so called omnichannel strategy can only be successful and boost results if an organization embraces an omnichannel way of thinking both in strategy & execution. Omnichannel / RoPo – which stands for: research online, purchase offline – should not just be a buzzword floating through the organization, but a mentality implemented from within every layer of the organization.

The question however is: “How do you achieve this?”

Read along & find out.

From Goal to Action 🎯

 

How do you invite your employees to connect more dots, work holistically and instill ‘omnichannel’ into your companies’ DNA?

To embed this new way of working, it’s crucial to see omnichannel as a strategy and have the company as a whole support the conceptual model. If a company embraces omnichannel as a workplace philosophy, a foundation needs to be laid by redefining business goals, KPI’s and targets.

This can be done by inviting (e-)commerce managers to set and merge online and offline targets, and evaluate them in an omnichannel way. How?

 

👉 Step 1: Get support to change targets for digital teams to encompass both online & offline revenue, store visits, average order value, etc.

👉 Step 2: Make sure you can set the correct value for a store visit. This is one of the most important steps since it will change the way you manage campaigns. In other words, what is an offline store visit worth in monetary value?

👉 Step 3: Reset campaign settings on all available platforms (e.g. Facebook, Google Ads, ..) to allow steering on both e-commerce transactions & store visits.  

👉 Step 4: Manage your campaigns on the sum of e-commerce and store revenue.

👉 Step 5: Connect your CRM database to Google Ads, Google Analytics and Facebook to double-check your RoPo measurements.

👉 Step 6: Create data transparency by generating reports that hold both e-commerce & offline revenue and make sure your boss, the boss’s boss and her/ his boss knows, adopts and acts on these reports.

Are you interested in building dashboards like these? 📊 Download our Google Datastudio template that combines on- and offline datasets.

 

👉 Step 7: As an extra, you can check whether your website is actively facilitating clients’ search towards your offline stores by including stuff like store locators, offline store inventory, etc.

Silos should be pulled down, online and offline teams need to merge, and more time should be invested in demonstrating results as a whole. You can move your digital team forward by showing the impact they make both online & offline.

We have investigated how major brands like IKEA, Hema, Sephora, Adidas, etc. tackle this issue and bundled these findings into 1 whitepaper.

 

 

So to wrap up, why would you give a damn?

 

Click the banner below to read our follow up article. We investigate this question from different business angles (management, marketing team & customer).

 

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