In the dynamic world of Australian retail, the game has changed. Customers are now more connected, informed, and demanding than ever before. They expect a seamless, personalised experience regardless of whether they’re browsing a website, scrolling through social media, or visiting a physical store.
Omnichannel marketing has never been more important than it is now. In today’s hyper-connected world, omnichannel marketing is not just another advertising gimmick; it’s a strategic approach that’s revolutionising the way retailers engage with their customers.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
- What is Omnichannel Marketing?
- The Importance of Omnichannel Marketing for Australian Retailers
- Omnichannel Marketing Strategies for Australian Retailers
- Best-Use Cases of Omnichannel Marketing in Australia
- Building an Omnichannel-Ready Workforce
- Conclusion: Embracing the Omnichannel Future
As an Australian retailer, you’re likely no stranger to the challenges of keeping up with evolving consumer behaviours and the ever-changing digital landscape. Mastering omnichannel marketing is the key to unlocking your brand’s full potential and staying ahead of the curve.
In this comprehensive guide, we’ll take a dive-deep look into the world of omnichannel marketing, exploring its core elements, best-use cases, and the critical role it plays in the future of Australian retail.
What is Omnichannel Marketing?
As previously mentioned, omnichannel marketing is a strategic approach, not a snake oil sales gimmick. It seamlessly integrates multiple channels and touchpoints to provide customers with a cohesive, personalised experience. But unlike traditional multichannel strategies that operate in silos, omnichannel puts the customer at the centre, ensuring a consistent brand experience regardless of how they choose to engage with the business.
Think of it this way: a customer might discover a brand on social media, browse the website, and then visit the physical store to make a purchase. Omnichannel marketing ensures that throughout this journey, the customer feels valued, recognised, and catered to, with a seamless transition between each touchpoint.
The level of service they receive, the layer of branding they see, the layout of the physical store and the website are visually similar enough to make the customer feel as if their shopping journey is just one extended (and smooth) experience. But… What’s the point of all this?
The Importance of Omnichannel Marketing for Australian Retailers
In today’s always-on, digital-savvy world, omnichannel is a necessity for retailers who want to stay relevant, competitive, and, most importantly, connect with their customers. By embracing this holistic approach, Australian retailers can not only meet the demands of their customers but also gain a significant competitive edge in the market.
The omnichannel environment brings together the various siloed touchpoints in a customer’s shopping journey. And while casual browsers may well be impressed by this whole approach, it’s really your core demographic and loyal customer base that you’re working to retain.
Marketing should never be a hastily-thrown-together campaign that’s just another hack job. It goes without saying that you’ll need to know a whole lot more about who that demographic really is, as well as how your loyal customers align to those demographics.
You’ll need to know what drives them, what influences their spending habits, and which trends they’ve bought into. This is the only way to talk to them on their own level, to truly connect and engage with them in a way that resonates with authenticity, vulnerability, and trust.
This deep understanding of your core demographic and loyal customer base will help you craft personalised messages, recommendations, offers, and bulk deals in a way that appeals to sensibilities, yet also ties in to the whole Shoptimism trend, too. For those retailers who get it right, there are a few key benefits you can expect when using omnichannel marketing as a customer-centric approach.
Benefit #1: It Enhances the Customer Experience
Everything these days is hyper, from connections to personalisation to competitiveness, where the market is the new battleground. Omnichannel marketing allows retailers to deliver a seamless, personalised customer experience across all touchpoints, ensuring customers feel valued, understood, and loyal to the brand.
Benefit #2: It Increases Sales and Revenue
When customers enjoy a positive, consistent experience with a brand, they’re more likely to make repeat purchases, resulting in increased sales and revenue. Omnichannel marketing has been shown to drive a 15-30% increase in average order value and a 30% higher customer retention rate.
Benefit #3: It Improves Customer Insights
By integrating data from multiple channels, omnichannel marketing provides a comprehensive view of customer behaviours, preferences, and pain points. This invaluable information allows retailers to make more informed decisions, tailor their offerings, and deliver hyper-personalised experiences that resonate with the target audience.
Benefit #4: It Provides Competitive Advantages
In the cutthroat Australian retail landscape, embracing omnichannel marketing can give retailers a significant edge over competitors who haven’t yet adopted this approach. By providing a superior customer experience, they can attract and retain more customers, solidifying their position in the market.
Benefit #5: Adaptability to Changing Consumer Behaviours
The pandemic fundamentally altered the way people shop, dramatically accelerating the shift towards e-commerce and contactless shopping. Omnichannel marketing empowers retailers to adapt quickly to these changing consumer behaviours, ensuring they remain relevant and accessible to their customers, no matter the circumstances.
Omnichannel Marketing Strategies for Australian Retailers
For omnichannel marketing to succeed, retailers must use consistent branding and communication strategies to ensure that the brand identity, messaging, and visual elements are visibly recognisable by consumers across all channels, from physical stores to websites and social media platforms. This helps to reinforce the brand’s identity and create a cohesive, recognisable experience for customers.
Here are 6 unconventional ways to leverage an omnichannel environment, with marketing strategies that competitors won’t even see coming.
Strategy #1: Unified Loyalty Programs
Challenge: Traditional loyalty programs are losing their effectiveness in building consumer loyalty to brands. While loyalty is still the #1 priority for retailers, and loyalty programs influence 70% of consumers to visit more often or spend more, this influence is decreasing as consumers tire of standard one-size-fits-all programs with endless discounts and devalued points.
Background: Consumers now want loyalty programs that create a personalised, exciting experience that connects with them emotionally. Using neuroscientific personality profiling like Limbic Insights™ to understand the “why” behind consumer behaviours and emotional needs can increase customer loyalty by 15% by going beyond just points to offer a meaningful return on investment in loyalty programs.
RDG Recommends: To be effective, loyalty programs need to create emotional connections through personalised experiences tailored to consumers’ individual needs and motivations, rather than generic discounts and rewards. Offer a cohesive loyalty program that seamlessly integrates across all channels, from in-store to online to mobile. This not only encourages repeat business but also provides valuable data to personalise the customer experience.
Strategy #2: Click-and-Collect
Challenge: Delivery costs are not always covered in the delivery fees charged to customers. In addition to this, delivery delays may be anywhere between 1 hour and 10 days, depending on a myriad of logistical challenges. In this day and age, consumers are impatient, not prepared to wait that long for an order, and so they’ll switch loyalty to a competitor that delivers faster.
Background: Click & Collect is a hybrid service that includes BOPIS (buy online, pick-up in store) and ROPIS (reserve online, pay in store) options to meet consumers’ needs for convenience and immediacy. It’s also possible for physical stores to act as fulfilment centres for micro enterprises, thereby bringing feet through the door for products that would not normally be found in a retail store.
RDG Recommends: Leverage the convenience of online shopping and in-store pickup by implementing a robust click-and-collect system. This hybrid approach allows customers to browse and purchase products online, then collect their items at a nearby physical location, creating a smooth, hassle-free experience.
Strategy #3: Personalised Recommendations
Challenge: The rise of remote work has led to a new trend of “Hybrid Lifestyles”, where consumers seek a lifestyle that blends work and leisure activities while prioritising wellness and health. This aligns with the growing emphasis on valuing how people spend their time (“Time as a Currency” was a top 2023 trend).
Background: In essence, Australian consumers are seeking products and lifestyles that allow them to seamlessly blend productivity with self-care as hybrid work patterns become more common. Wellness is a high priority alongside work obligations:
- 34% of Australian workers engage in hybrid work, higher than the global average of 29%.
- 84% of Australians prioritise health and wellbeing.
The Hybrid Lifestyles trend is driven by a desire for balance and integrating work into a flexible, health-conscious way of living. This is expected to influence product development, with a demand for versatile, multi-functional products that can cater to both professional needs and personal wellbeing.
RDG Recommends: Utilise the data gathered from omnichannel efforts to provide customers with personalised product recommendations and targeted promotions. This not only enhances the customer experience but also increases the chances of making a sale.
Strategy #4: Social Media Integration
Challenge: Embracing digital technologies has become pivotal for retailers to meet evolving consumer behaviours and preferences around online/mobile shopping, contactless payments, social media engagement, augmented reality (AR), and online research. An integrated digital approach enables competitive advantage by elevating the overall customer experience. This trend is expected to continue way beyond 2024 as pandemic-formed consumer habits continue to take hold and technological advancements continue to grow.
Key statistics show 96.2% internet penetration in Australia with 91% of young adults using social media to interact with retailers. Consumers’ increasing reliance on digital technologies for an enhanced and streamlined purchasing experience indicate that accelerating digital capabilities should be the #1 strategic priority for global retailers.
Background: The impact of Digital Dependency is far-reaching, affecting omnichannel experiences, data-driven insights, supply chain optimisation, and personalised customer engagement. Challenges exist around cybersecurity, legacy system integration, change management, and substantial investment requirements.
Global trends influencing the future include the exponential growth of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, the Metaverse, blockchain for transparency, robotics and automation. Australian retailers must embrace continuous innovation, prioritise workforce training, and put customer experience at the centre of digital transformation initiatives to thrive in the era of Digital Dependency.
RDG Recommends: Harness the power of social media by integrating it into your omnichannel strategy. Encourage customers to share their purchases on social platforms, offer exclusive social media-only deals, and use these channels to provide seamless customer support and engagement.
Strategy #5: Streamlined Inventory Management
Challenge: Customers increasingly view brands holistically rather than separating online/offline channels. As such, retailers must adopt this unified view of their brand to facilitate growth into marketplaces and leverage existing brand trust and relationships. Implementing unified commerce systems is a comprehensive approach to retail that integrates customer and product tracking across multiple platforms in real-time. The goal is to streamline the online and in-store experience, creating a ‘halo effect’ that enhances brand presence and growth in marketplaces.
Background: Retailers who embraced unified commerce in 2022 observed a 7% revenue increase over those who did not. RDG’s recent Consumer and Retail Trends and Predictions for 2024 revealed that over 68% of Australian businesses surveyed are investing or considering investing in unified commerce to maintain competitiveness.
The benefits of unified commerce include providing a seamless customer experience across all channels by consolidating and streamlining inventory management, utilising customer data, and prioritising payment processing methods that allow retailers to anticipate and exceed expectations.
RDG Recommends: Implement a robust inventory management system that allows tracking and optimising product availability across all channels. This ensures that customers can access the items they want – regardless of how they shop or pay.
Strategy #6: Omnichannel Customer Service
Challenge: Impatient consumers want instant gratification. In their busy lives, there’s no time to waste on inefficient interactions. This need for frictionless and simplified purchasing is driven by factors like:
- The rise of frictionless checkout and innovative subscription services that save time.
- The increasing influence of the “TikTok generation” who prioritise immediacy.
Background: These trends cater to the “impatient consumer” by reducing wait times, simplifying processes, enabling voice commerce, and providing personalised subscriptions. Collectively, they indicate a shift towards convenience, speed, and personalisation that have shaped consumers’ impatient expectations.
RDG Recommends: Provide a seamless customer service experience by empowering the team to access and act on customer information from multiple touchpoints. This allows them to offer personalised support and resolve issues efficiently, enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Best-Use Cases of Omnichannel Marketing in Australia
Leveraging advanced technologies and AI-driven systems will become increasingly important for retailers. Personalised interactions are expected to become the standard, enhancing customer experience, conversion rates, and loyalty.
95% of consumer decisions are driven by emotions, which determine personas and behaviours. Leveraging neuroscience to understand consumer emotions can assist in building personalised experiences based not just on past behaviour, but predicted future actions rooted in personality traits.
By utilising AI, consumer data, and psychological insights, retailers can hyper-personalise the entire shopping journey – from product recommendations and marketing to customer service interactions. This provides a competitive edge by exceeding customer expectations.
Data-driven personalisation powered by AI and behavioural science will be critical for delivering stellar customer experiences, maximising conversions, and building loyalty in 2024’s retail landscape. Here’s how Australian retailers have successfully implemented omnichannel marketing strategies to thrive:
Myer: As one of Australia’s leading department store chains, Myer has embraced omnichannel marketing to enhance the customer experience. They’ve implemented click-and-collect services, allowing customers to purchase online and pick up their orders in-store. Additionally, Myer’s loyalty program, MYER one, seamlessly integrates across all channels, rewarding customers for their purchases and engagement.
Coles:The supermarket giant has rolled out a range of omnichannel initiatives to make grocery shopping more convenient for customers. Their Click&Collect service allows customers to order online and pick up their groceries at a designated time, while the Coles Plus loyalty program provides rewards and personalised offers across all channels, including in-store, online, and through the Coles app.
Country Road: This fashion retailer has embraced omnichannel marketing by integrating its online and physical stores. Customers can browse and purchase items online, try them on in-store using virtual fitting rooms, and even have online orders shipped directly to their nearest store for convenient pickup. Country Road’s loyalty program also spans across channels, rewarding customers for their engagement and purchases.
Cotton On: The popular Australian clothing brand has implemented a comprehensive omnichannel strategy that includes a seamless e-commerce platform, a user-friendly mobile app, and a robust social media presence. Customers can browse and purchase products online, check in-store availability, and even earn rewards through the Cotton On loyalty program, which is integrated across all touchpoints.
Rebel Sport: This iconic Australian sports retailer has taken omnichannel marketing to new heights. Customers can browse and purchase products online, reserve items for in-store pickup, and even book appointments with in-store experts for personalised advice. Rebel Sport’s mobile app also provides a seamless experience, allowing customers to access their loyalty rewards, track orders, and receive personalised recommendations.
Building an Omnichannel-Ready Workforce
As the retail landscape continues to evolve, the skills and competencies required of employees are also transforming. To succeed in an omnichannel world, Australian retailers need to cultivate a workforce that’s not only versed in the latest digital tools and technologies but also possesses a deep understanding of the customer journey and the ability to deliver exceptional experiences.
Here are some of the key skills and attributes that will be essential for retail employees of the future:
- Digital Fluency:Employees must be comfortable navigating and leveraging a wide range of digital platforms, from e-commerce platforms and social media to customer relationship management (CRM) systems and data analytics tools.
- Customer-Centricity:Retail staff must be adept at understanding customer needs, preferences, and pain points, and be able to adapt their approach to provide personalised, seamless experiences across all channels.
- Agility and Adaptability:In the ever-changing retail landscape, employees must be able to quickly learn and adapt to new technologies, processes, and customer behaviours, ensuring the business remains responsive and relevant.
- Cross-Functional Collaboration:Omnichannel success requires seamless collaboration between teams and departments, from marketing and sales to IT and operations. Employees must be able to work effectively across functions to deliver a cohesive customer experience.
- Data-Driven Decision Making:Retail staff must be able to collect, analyse, and interpret data from various sources to inform strategic decisions and drive continuous improvement in the customer experience.
To build an omnichannel-ready workforce, Australian retailers must invest in comprehensive training and development programs that equip their employees with the necessary skills and mindset. RDG’s blended tri-skill approach to training offers retailers multifaceted learning programs that include face-to-face, online courses, and webinar sessions that’ll modernise employee omnichannel skills.
Conclusion: Embracing the Omnichannel Future
As consumer expectations continue to evolve, the ability to deliver a seamless, personalised experience across all channels will become a crucial differentiator. Consumers today have higher expectations than ever before, demanding a seamless and personalised experience across all touchpoints, whether they’re browsing online, visiting a physical store, or engaging with a brand through social media or mobile apps.
The future belongs to those who embrace the power of omnichannel marketing. By seamlessly integrating multiple channels, retailers can deliver a cohesive, personalised customer experience that drives engagement, boosts sales, and gives a significant competitive edge. This approach ensures that customer data, preferences, and interactions are synchronised across all channels, allowing retailers to provide a consistent and tailored experience, regardless of how or where the customer chooses to engage with the brand.
Omnichannel marketing allows retailers to meet customers where they are, offering a frictionless journey that fosters deeper engagement and stronger relationships. For instance, a customer may browse products online, add items to their cart, and then visit a physical store to complete their purchase, with their preferences and shopping history seamlessly carried over to the in-store experience. Conversely, they may discover a product in-store, research it further online, and finalise their purchase through a mobile app.
This level of integration not only enhances the customer experience but also provides valuable insights into consumer behaviour and preferences. By leveraging advanced analytics and data-driven decision-making, retailers can gain a comprehensive understanding of their customers, allowing them to tailor their offerings, personalise their marketing efforts, and optimise their operations for maximum efficiency and profitability.
Australian retailers who recognise the significance of omnichannel marketing and take proactive steps to implement it will be well-positioned to thrive in an increasingly competitive landscape. By investing in the right strategies, technologies, and employee training, these forward-thinking businesses can unlock the full potential of omnichannel marketing and future-proof their operations for the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.
Contact the Retail Doctor Group, a retail advisory and consulting practice that builds retail channels and increases the performance of retail and FMCG businesses through our customised & transformative ‘Business Fitness™’ methodologies.
Since 2005 we have partnered with our clients to build powerful, award-winning, sustainable, and “fit” implemented retail. Ensuring our clients consistently achieve above benchmarks, build sales and margin results. We stay with our clients to ensure success.
As the Australian elected member of International Retail Experts, Ebeltoft Group, we have more than 20 years of experience as retailers and consultants in all retail channels, segments and regions. Today, members of the Ebeltoft network advise 80 of the 100 largest retail companies in the world.
Want to know more about the Future of Retail and prepare your retail strategies? Schedule an appointment with our Insights division by e-mailing us at businessfitness@retaildoctor.com.au or calling 02 9460 2882.