The term “omnichannel” emerged and was promptly adopted by individuals across the retail landscape – organization leaders, influencers, reporters, and beyond. At this point, however, the word has no place in the industry. Why? Because shopping is a singular experience with various touchpoints. Your customers, in all honesty, don’t care about the concept of omnichannel – they merely want seamlessness.
As organizations grow in size and scale, so do their supply chains. With high product volumes, a huge supplier base and many echelons in the supply network, the problem is nothing but complicated to design a network which is cost effective and with high availability & flexibility.
You’ve got an email from your favorite brand announcing a promotion too good to pass up. You’re on your lunch break, or on the train home, or just chilling on the couch with your smartphone and you click on the link. But you can’t shop. A pop-up obscures the text, the photos are rendered awkwardly, there are too many steps to purchase that are hard to navigate on a small screen. You give up.
Current industry conversations emphasize on retailers’ search for the next competitive edge. Buzzwords ranging from omnichannel to unified commerce to an enhanced in-store experience are presently sending retailers scrambling in all directions to find the perfect solution for consumers’ needs. It’s no secret retailers are in search of the “secret sauce” that will differentiate them among their competitors and leave a positive sentiment in their minds – all while maintaining their bottom line.
Have you heard the true story about today’s online shopper? It’s a tale about a retail milestone with a crazy plot twist that has recently earned countless headlines: online shoppers make more than half of all their retail purchases on the web. But, as the plot thickens, the story continues on to tell us that eCommerce revenues still trail the number of orders by a significant margin.
Wave after disruptive wave of change is washing over the Retail industry. Though E-Commerce is having a large impact on traditional brick and mortar Retail, workforce changes and cost models are about to land the largest change in decades on the Retail world. Rapid, targeted changes in your onboarding and training strategies will substantially reduce the pain.
Judging by the current explosive growth of images on the Internet, a picture may be worth much more than a thousand words. Consider Facebook, the social media giant, which stores more than 250 billion user-generated photos; and the fact that an average web page now contains 60 images. One of the reasons for the growth in images on the web is that users love images; for example, look at the growth of Instagram, it has over 40 billion images shared.
As my colleague pointed out in a recent piece with IRT, technology plays a significant role in the life of a retail associate – beginning at the onboarding phase and extending into the various activities of an everyday shift. And, as a result of changing consumer expectations, the use cases for multiple associate-used technologies are only increasing. For example, mobile POS options and tablets allow associates to better meet shopper needs (e.g., check out rapidly, determine inventory availability) and increase conversion rates. The ability to optimize the queue and sell items not in the physical store is now a necessity to succeed in brick-and-mortar retail.
The rapid advancement of technology, with its inherent connectivity, has dramatically affected individual behavior. One of the instances in which this shift is most evident is in retail. Today, a shopper interacts with a brand in the store and at home, via social media, on his or her mobile phone, and through a store associate. There is no longer an online or an offline experience: engagement is singular. Consequently, retailers are struggling to piece together the omnichannel path to purchase.
When is the last time you took a deep dive into your email metrics? As you prepare for the holidays, perhaps it is time to take another look. Understanding your subscribers is the only way to truly evaluate the performance of your campaigns, making necessary changes to increase subscriber engagement, revenue and ROI.
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