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? 📊 Feel free to contact us. We have created a template in Google Data Studio 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.

Read all about it here  -> ’16 Ways Brands Worldwide convert Online Traffic to In-Store Traffic’. 

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

Let’s dive deeper by approaching the advantages of ROPO from different business angles. 

Management

Bottomline results will only flourish by aligning on- and offline sales and by truly grasping the bigger picture. Management will no longer undervalue the impact of online marketing on offline sales and in turn, they will thus be able to better allocate marketing budgets to gain the highest ROI possible. It also facilitates in the communication of the idea that the online website should not be considered as a direct competitor by store owners/workers. Store owners will be convinced with data that online is not ‘just another store’ and that online stores are also driving a lot of traffic towards their own store. 

“Sales increased immediately when we introduced the omnichannel mindset . All our channels support each other  to ensure that customers buy, regardless of whether this is in our webshop or a physical store.” – Dietrich Thieren (Marketing Manager – Sleepworld)

Marketing Team

Imagine this. You did a great job but got 40 % less credit for it than deserved… Just because you couldn’t show the result of your efforts.

That is unacceptable however that is exactly what happens if you can’t prove the effect of ROPO. Benefits for the online marketing team are numerous.

First off, as mentioned, they can finally justify online budgets by calculating the true return on investment by incorporating offline sales. Secondly, they can use the ROPO effect to properly optimize their campaigns. It might be that certain campaigns/keywords that promote high value products that incite a lot off traffic to brick and mortar stores might be undervalued because you never truly understood the total impact made. The entire ad accounts will need to be re-examined because what did not work in the past might work in the future. Another upside might be that marketers might be able to cross- or upsell certain products if visitors are known to have bought certain products in the offline store. These are just 3 of the enormous amount of possibilities. We have more tricks up our sleeves. 

The Customer

In the end, your customer will also be a big beneficiary because an omnichannel strategy implies that you perfectly cater to their needs and shopping behaviors (which in turn will benefit you). You reduce friction for your customers and that will in turn result in a happier customer.

More concretely, you’re helping customers that might not have confidence in online purchasing, that want to have a product immediately, want to have a good look & feel of the product, etc. Everyone can relate to at least one of these three examples.  

Final Words

Until recently it wasn’t evident to map the impact of online advertising on offline sales. The only way this could be measured was by conducting an exit interview, asking customers when leaving the store: ‘Have you been on the website? And did you see our ad?’. Then Google and Facebook introduced Store Visits, a state of the art solution linking clicks/visits to offline store visits. This new technology has thoroughly impacted the way offline and online sales can be mapped, allowing companies to have a more integrated approach to marketing in an omnichannel world.

But once again to truly make the integration work, you need the right mindset.

Do you work at a company that struggles with the integration of online and offline marketing strategies? Do you want to understand what online behavior can impact offline sales and vice versa? Do you want to really make your company omnichannel?

🔗 Then find out more about our ROPO solutions

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