Do you know 86% of shoppers regularly channel-hop across two channels? Yes, they don’t just hop from one shop to another; they also hop across multiple channels while shopping. Sometimes they end up making online purchases even as they stand in the queue at the physical store or use smartphones as shopping assistants at the stores.

That’s why 87% of retailers recognize that an omnichannel growth marketing strategy as crucial for their business. They realize that if they want to be at the top of their game, they need to offer a consistent experience to customers across different touchpoints. As a retailer, it’s time that you understand the significance of omnichannel marketing on your business and leverage it to create a unique experience for your customers and maximize your ROI.

However, due to the numerous touchpoints, there are a number of complexities that come with trying to create a growth marketing approach for organizations that are also trying to instill an omnichannel framework in their organizations.   However, before we look into this in more depth, let us take a closer look at omnichannel marketing and why it is relevant in today's business context.

What is Omnichannel Marketing?

Omnichannel marketing seamlessly integrates branding, messaging, and online and offline touchpoints as consumers move down the sales funnel, enabling a more impactful customer experience. 

Omnichannel marketing takes a consumer-centric view of marketing tactics. Consumers can now interact with brands on innumerable channels, from social media to customer service hotlines. An omnichannel approach ensures that the consumer has a positive, consistent experience on each channel, by offering a few key elements:

• Consistent, identifiable brand tone and vision

• Personalized messaging based on specific interests 

• Content that is informed by past interactions and the current stage of the buyer’s journey 

An identifiable brand simplifies brand recognition, while personalization based on interests and shopping history makes consumers more likely to interact with branded content across channels.  

Omnichannel marketing is the integration and cooperation of the various channels organizations use to interact with consumers, with the goal of creating a consistent and more importantly, recognizable brand experience. This includes both physical (e.g. storefronts) and digital channels (e.g. websites, apps). The goal of an omnichannel marketing strategy is to create a convenient, seamless user experience for consumers that offers many opportunities for fulfillment.  An omnichannel strategy may give consumers the chance to find and purchase online in-store, or a combination thereof - such as “buy online and pick up in-store”.

Offering a compelling omnichannel experience is no longer considered to be on the cutting edge of retail. It is now simply a requirement for survival. More than one-third of Americans have made omnichannel features such as buying online for in-store pickup part of their regular shopping routine since the pandemic, and nearly two-thirds of those individuals plan to continue. Younger buyers are the most enthusiastic about new ways of shopping, to the point that Gen Z consumers don’t even think in terms of traditional channel boundaries.  In fact, they actually are increasingly evaluating brands and retailers on the seamlessness of their overall experience.  So one can say that this is an ongoing evaluation, that does not end with one experience equalling an overall impression.

But before retailers rush to expand their omnichannel capabilities, they need to step back and consider the underlying drivers of value for their specific business. After all, with numerous approaches and technologies to choose from, retailers can invest in the wrong thing and quickly fall into a downward spiral that can destroy value.

However, before we delve into why a growth marketing framework is difficult to instill in a retail organization trying to properly establish its omnichannel fundamentals, let us reestablish what growth marketing is and just why it is significant.

What is Growth Marketing?

 Growth marketing is a long-term, strategic methodology that works to help brands achieve sustainable, measurable growth. It is a holistic and data-driven approach that leverages end-to-end funnel optimization to find, attract, convert, retain, and grow buyers into loyal brand advocates and evangelists.

However, it is worth noting that just because growth marketing is holistic, in order to be effective that there are a number of tactics that need to be layered in order to get the data needed to learn in order to leverage growth from numerous angles.   It takes the traditional marketing model and adds layers such as A/B testing, value-additive blog posts, data-driven email marketing campaigns, SEO optimization, creative ad copy, and technical analysis of every aspect of a user’s experience. The insights gained from these strategies are quickly implemented in order to achieve robust and, even more importantly, sustainable growth.   

As mentioned, growth marketing goes way beyond the approach of traditional marketing by attracting users, engaging them (ex; with content), getting them to become members or try your services or make a purchase, getting them to keep their subscription or make another purchase, and ultimately if all goes well, getting them to make a testimonial or in other ways become a brand ambassador or champion of your brand ( a process that is hopefully done more than once).  So in many ways, especially given the holistic nature that it needs to be implemented, growth marketing is almost synonymous with an omnichannel approach.  Which then begs the question…given the parallels, why is it so hard for a growth marketing approach/mindset to be instituted within a retail organization working to institute proper omnichannel fundamentals. 

What Prevents a Growth Marketing Framework from being Instilled in Omnichannel Businesses

Unclear understanding of what parts of omnichannel to prioritize. Put simply, far too few retailers have established alignment across their organization on the omnichannel agenda, including the long-term vision and the current status. Without strategic alignment, organizations often end up investing in a scattershot fashion, funding divergent priorities in e-commerce, store operations, supply chain, marketing, and technology.  What this entails can be summarized by 2 different tendencies present within retail businesses tend that cause them to be unable to fully instill a growth-oriented omnichannel focus.

Focus on tech rather than on customer value. Many retailers have leaped to embrace tech-enabled, flashy innovations like smart mirrors, Bluetooth beacons, and in-store kiosks to create differentiation. But without a proper grounding in customer needs or determining how these investments will create and sustain value at scale, retailers sometimes end up with what amounts to shiny objects that drain capital expenditures and provide little customer, and subsequently commercial, value.

Failure to sequence investments in line with the strategy. Many retailers race to advance omnichannel initiatives without doing critical thinking to identify the starting point and the specific capabilities needed to succeed at each step. What tends to drive this is the implicit 

pressure to keep pace with competitors or eagerness to put a compelling idea into action can prompt some companies to plunge in headfirst. But without clearly sequencing the “crawl, walk, run” approach and investing in the right fundamentals, retailers often end up with fragmented investments that destroy value.

Now that we have identified a couple of pitfalls retail businesses need to look out for in terms of creating a true omnichannel-oriented growth marketing framework, it is important to establish why it is important to establish an omnichannel framework, including some benefits of doing just that.

Benefits of Establishing an Omnichannel Growth Marketing Framework

While implementing an omnichannel approach is far from simple, when done properly it offers a host of benefits. Today’s consumers are accustomed to being bombarded with messaging from various brands, and as a result, they have become increasingly selective of which brands they choose to engage with.  So with so much to gain, here are some benefits that businesses should consider.

• A Better Overall User Experience - Since omnichannel focuses on the individual experience across devices instead of focusing on a channel (ex; your business website),, the customer experience (CX) is better.  By focusing on the customer instead of the platform, companies can drive more sales and better retention rates.

• Cohesive Brand Strategy & Identity - Creating a seamless strategy across channels means building an easily identifiable brand image and tone. Organizations should base this image on core audience needs and values. By focusing on the overall experience and working within your brand guidelines to target each channel, you will have a more comprehensive brand strategy that will translate into increased loyalty and more targeted messaging. 

• Increased Revenue - An omnichannel approach encourages customers to engage with a brand across multiple touchpoints and channels. These increased, diverse engagements at each stage of the buyer’s journey can help increase revenue, as research shows that customers that engage with multiple touchpoints tend to be 30 percent more valuable. This more targeted messaging also builds loyalty, making it more likely a customer will purchase from your brand again. Repeat customers on average contribute to 40 percent of revenue, despite being a smaller portion of your consumer base. 

• Better Attribution of Data - Going truly omnichannel should not just extend to a user’s experience with your brand but in terms of how data is analyzed.  By tracking engagements across channels, brands get a better understanding of what the customer journey looks like, when and where consumers prefer to engage, and which campaigns have created the most value. All of this data allows for increasingly more targeted campaigns and efficient customer acquisition efforts. 

Now that we have established the key benefits of establishing an omnichannel growth marketing framework,  let us look at what it takes for an organization to craft an omnichannel growth marketing strategy.

Crafting an Omnichannel-Focused Growth Marketing Strategy.

Paramount in this is understanding that omnichannel marketing is the integration of multiple marketing channels and consumer touchpoints to create a seamless customer experience. These touchpoints can be both online and offline, including websites, social media, email marketing, in-store experiences, and even experiential marketing. As such, what goes without saying is that a successful omnichannel strategy is characterized by a consistent brand voice across channels, personalized messaging, and intelligent content based on a person’s present stage in the buyer journey/funnel.  So here are a few factors that you need to consider in order to succinctly craft an omnichannel growth marketing strategy. 

1. Map Out Your Customer’s Journey: How well do you understand customer personas and what behavior is typical on each available channel? Get a clear picture of how people interact with the brand by observing the patterns, testing the process yourself, and inviting direct feedback.

2. Data Sharing: Breaking down silos is essential to successful omnichannel marketing. Talk to your peers across the company to plan how you will share customer information and insights.

3. Technology Infrastructure: Do you have the right marketing technology stack in place to gather and analyze data across channels and deliver personalized content at scale? A unified platform such as can introduce efficiency by managing the entire customer experience from end to end.

4. Audience Segments: Identify key audience segments for targeted brand messages and study their interests. Then prioritize a few channels and consider starting with a single campaign to test the process.

   
   

   
   

Omnichannel Growth Marketing Tactics that Should Be Part of Your Business Mix.

So now that we have established a few key elements needed to craft an omnichannel growth marketing strategy, here are some growth marketing tactics that perhaps ought to be part of your omnichannel business’ marketing mix.  The key here is to recognize that while there are a number of other tactics which can absolutely be part of your retail business growth marketing strategic mix, the tactics presented here are highlighted just because they are in line with the elements just previously highlighted needed to create that cohesive omnichannel growth marketing strategy.

1. Shoppable Social Media Posts:  Marketers are more than familiar with the phrase “link in bio” for advertising on Instagram. Thankfully, Instagram has added a feature to make its platform more shoppable by integrating ads into your Facebook shop in order to reduce the friction that was previously inherent.

This means businesses can now tag products in their posts and add a dedicated “Shop” tab on their page. Consumers can complete the sales process, from product discovery to checkout, all without leaving the app.

Be sure to check with your eCommerce store builder if you’re able to use this powerful integration. Shopify itself has this application to render posts shoppable. Remember that the easier it is for customers to check out products they like from your social media, the more likely they are to make a purchase right away.

2) Turn Your Invoice Into a Marketing/Sales Opportunity:  Everywhere your customers go online, something is competing for your customer’s attention, so you should use all your channels as much as possible to sell and promote your business. You can also optimize invoices to become useful marketing tools and generate more conversions.  For example, mention any perks you can offer, such as a discount on their next order or an incentive for leaving a product review. Simple tweaks like this can not only elevate brand experiences for your buyers but also provide opportunities for upselling. Professional invoicing software like Wave allows retailers to send customized, branded invoices to their e-commerce customers right after they make a purchase

3) Personalized Recommendations: You can track customer buying or browsing behavior and create a unique fingerprint for each customer.  After doing this, you can provide a personalized experience the next time they engage with your brand. Doing this is essentially a lead nurturing technique. By applying lead nurturing techniques, you can send personalized and relevant content to your leads at different stages in the marketing funnel, even if they haven’t subscribed to your email list or followed your social media accounts.

For example, once you have an idea of and the data about what your customer likes, you can cross-sell products or services to increase sales by suggesting additional related or complementary items.

4) Retargeting at All Phases and All Touchpoints:   On a related note, your loyal customers deserve your reassurance, but you should also pay attention to leads that are yet to convert. l.  Depending on what information you’ve collected from your customer, you can either run retargeting ads on social media and third-party sites or send retargeting emails to try and recover abandoned carts.

5) Push Notifications & SMS:  Push notifications are useful for sending out cart abandonment messages and reminding your customers of an upcoming sale. They are also really useful in bringing customers back to your site or app.  As an example, Joe Coffee is an application that allows independent coffee shops to accept mobile orders and payments at no additional cost.

Furthermore, with its push notifications, Joe delivers a  promo code to hype up one of its merchant's new shops. Promo codes are a classic psychological tactic for creating urgency, and the alert bell in the notification headline reinforces this time-sensitive message. The body copy also conveniently communicates the store’s exact location, making it easy for users to take action on this enticing and appetizing offer.

 A study by the New York Post revealed that on average Americans check their phones every 12 minutes, which is why push notifications are incredibly efficient.

Given how often people check their phones, SMS notifications can be used not just for promotions and cart abandonment but also for things such as::

-Purchase Confirmation-.

-Shipment notification and date of arrival

 -Delivery notification and follow-up - 

-Ask for feedback -

What this does is ensure, a more complete integration of an omnichannel approach throughout your business.

Consistency is Key to Instilling an Omnichannel Growth Marketing Strategy: 

Beyond any sort of specific augmented reality technology or instituting an ability to order online and pick up a customer order in-store, creating an omnichannel growth marketing strategy is about seeing every touchpoint of your entire operations as an opportunity to reach existing and new customers.   What this does is ensure not only potential repeat business but also better brand awareness, brand recall, as well as operational thoroughness and efficiency.

While much can be said about future trends and the technologies needed to be omnichannel compliant (and certainly, we will discuss this in future articles), without the right fundamental approach, your retail business has absolutely no chance to fully benefit from augmented reality, or any other technological implementation.  However, with the help of this article, hopefully, some of those fundamentals are in place to institute not only an omnichannel strategy but a full-fledged growth-marketing-oriented omnichannel approach.