Leveraging Omnichannel Analytics to Optimize Customer Journey

• Marketing Analytics

The two central pillars of modern marketing and omnichannel retail, are technological innovation and customer experience. Brands are on a constant quest to provide the best experience possible to their customers who are engaging with the brand across multiple touchpoints and platforms.

Customers even shift from one touchpoint to another before even a single purchase is complete, making it complicated for the brand to efficiently track the customer journey and offer a great experience.

This is where Omnichannel Analytics has the potential to help your brand offer customers a customized yet seamless retail experience across touchpoints.

Understanding Omnichannel Analytics

It is the process of seamlessly analyzing customer data from across touchpoints, to enhance both business processes and customer experience. Instead of analyzing customer engagement on a single platform or through specific campaign markers such as emails, discounts, and promotional offers, Multichannel Analytics tools take into account all the sources of data. Analysis of this omnichannel data offers a unified view of your brand and your customers.

The data is analyzed in a transparent analytics environment, with efficient targeting and strategic marketing being a few hallmarks of effective analysis. These analytics tools will enable you to make data-driven decisions, optimize your brand’s inventory to match customer demand, customize communication strategies to best approach customers, mitigate organizational challenges to enhance efficiency, and provide a seamless customer journey designed for individual customers. Everyone benefits when your brand runs on efficiency and aims for excellence.

Why is it Important?

Customers often come across a product on a certain social media platform but complete the purchase on a different platform altogether. Potential customers may even view your products but never complete a purchase before they leave your retail platform. This makes it exceedingly difficult for you to keep a track of, and figure out how you can convince them to come back to your platform, complete a purchase, and/or track their journey across touchpoints. Analytics is the answer to figuring out which customer is interested in which products, at which touchpoint they engaged with your brand, and what their experience has been like.

Operational and analytical skills are what are needed to not just know your brand but know your customers as well. Multichannel Analytics thus becomes critical for a brand, especially in retail, for a unified view of the customer across touchpoints. These insights derived in real-time are actionable and are the key to your brand being able to maintain the right inventory, handle product distribution, track customer journey across touchpoints, and even predict customer intention.

When you know what your customer wants, you can manage your inventory accordingly, optimize marketing strategies to target the customer, positively impact sales, improve ROI and ensure customer experience is at its best.

What are the Advantages?

Cross-channel Analytics can help you restructure business operations based on customer journey predictions and ultimately optimize the real customer journey. Effectively deployment affords your brand advantages you need to cash in on by simply modifying your business outlook and processes.

Enhance Customer Engagement

With customers switching between platforms, transactions are often abandoned before completion and without proper analytics tools, you can never track these effectively. And if you cannot track these potential customers, you will not be able to retarget them, get them to come back to your platform, and complete a purchase.

Multichannel Analytics can enable you to track customer journey and satisfaction across platforms with a unified view of their experience and not just improve sales but promote customer loyalty. The analytics data will help your marketing teams to be more aware of market conditions and customer preferences, and empower them to affect the customer’s decision-making and improve customer engagement across touchpoints.

Focus on Customer Journey

It is not just the tracking of customer journey that is essential for marketing teams, but they need to know which part of the journey is important in order to better target the customer and focus their efforts.

Working parallelly with Customer Journey Analytics, it can enable marketers to identify points along the customer’s journey where there has been a failure and where they have experienced success. This is essential for the efficient investment of your brand’s resources and optimizing the returns. Marketers do not need to track the entire journey if analytics can pinpoint specific areas where improvement is needed and resources can be invested accordingly.

Predicting Customer Behavior

Customers today are extremely well informed and know exactly what they want, where they want it from, how much it costs, and what to expect from the product or service. Moreover, every customer has unique choices and preferences. Your brand needs to be able to predict their choices and anticipate their actions in order to connect with the customers better and show them that you not only understand them but that you care. Customers want brands to go the extra mile and make them feel special.

Cross-channel Analytics is the answer to you being able to predict the customer’s behavior based on the analysis of their engagements with your brand. Only then can you suggest products to them that you know they have been looking for, target your marketing strategies better, and derive a better ROI when the satisfied customer completes a transaction. The better the experience you can provide, the better your ROI and customer retention will be. Know your customers in order to recommend the next-best products and effectively take the next-best action to promote conversions and sales.

Creating Personalized Customer Journeys

Predicting customer behavior is an important element in being able to develop a potential customer journey. If your marketing team uses Multichannel Analytics to map out a potential journey for prospective customers, marketing strategies can be specifically designed and resources can be allocated at the right points along the journey, to achieve the desired ROI. The journey may not always be exactly as predicted. But tracking customer journeys across touchpoints can enable your brand to personalize the journey for your customers. Course5 recommendation engine is embedded with collaborative filtering and other ML algorithms for accurate product recommendations and a perfectly customized journey.

Depending on the customer and their behavior across touchpoints, you can target them through emails, offering discounts and promotional offers, and even provide incentives on products and services you know they are interested in. Every customer wants a personalized experience where you are focused on them and their retail journey, and Multichannel Analytics can enable you to personalize the journey according to preferences, optimize the customer experience and maximize customer conversion, satisfaction, and retention.

Managing Inventory

Inventory management is at the core of brands being able to distribute their products and ensure that the customer’s demands can be met. Marketers not only need to know what customers require but must also predict their behavior so that the inventory is not lacking when the demand arises.

This gets even more complicated as each customer is unique, along with variances that occur across locations and platforms, combined with the balance that has to be maintained between production costs and sales. Cross-channel Analytics can enable you to recognize patterns in customer behavior across touchpoints and market conditions so that inventory stocks can be managed accordingly and there is no discrepancy between demand and supply.

If you are setting up or are already operating an omnichannel retail platform, you need to consider Omnichannel Analytics for optimizing your operations. It will enable you to view the customer journey in detail, predict customer behavior and market trends, and optimize marketing investments to deliver the ideal customer experience and maximize customer satisfaction. Analytics will offer actionable insights from all the data that is gathered and aid in better decision-making.

Over time, with more data being ingested, it will only get easier to identify trends and manage business operations with more tact to continue the cyclic process, which directly correlates to a healthier relationship with the customers, improved retention, and optimized ROI.

---