The Secret To Being in the Right Place at the Right Time All the Time

Design an omnichannel customer experience that increases engagement and conversion

Kids selling lemonade on a hot summer day at a busy street corner make more money than those who set up shop at a deserted spot on a wintry morning.

And as the saying goes, you don’t sell ice to an Eskimo.

These are simple yet fundamental lessons in sales and marketing—you need to be in the right place at the right time to sell the right product to the right people.

Of course, it’s exponentially more complex in today’s marketplace where consumers are interacting with brands on multiple channels, both online and offline, at various stages of their customer journey.

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Not only do businesses need to design a seamless online experience but they also have to make sure it extends into their brick-and-mortar presence, and vice versa.

To successfully connect all the customer touch points, you need a holistic approach to your marketing and promotion strategies.

Omnichannel Marketing — Putting All the Pieces Together

Omnichannel marketing is a strategy for delivering seamless and consistent customer experience across channels and on different devices so each interaction builds on the previous one to effectively move the audience along the customer journey.  

The key to omnichannel marketing lies in understanding who you’re communicating with across channels (website, emails, social, apps, call center, stores, ads, etc.) and then connecting those channels to give individuals what they want. (Hubspot)

A survey found that 47% of shoppers who engage with a retailer across 10 or more channels make purchases from its website at least once a week, compared to just 21% for those who engage up to four channels.

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In addition, companies with omnichannel customer engagement strategies are able to retain 89% of their customers, compared to 33% for companies with weak customer engagement strategies.

Since omnichannel marketing involves the strategic coordination of multiple customer touch points, you can’t just throw some spaghetti on the wall and hope it will stick.

Here’s how to make omnichannel marketing work for your business:

  • Take stock of all your customer touch points (e.g. website, email, social media, call center, store)  and understand how your audience interacts with each of them (e.g. making a purchase, looking for support, sharing reviews, and comments)
  • Leverage customers’ geographic information to deliver localized content and offers
  • Design personalized promotions based on customers’ past purchases and recent interactions with your brand
  • Develop a consistent brand identity and brand voice to deliver a cohesive user experience across all channels
  • Offer product recommendations based on items customers have viewed or purchased
  • Deliver relevant content to each customer segment based on their preferences and customer journey
  • Keep all your channels active and interact with customers on their preferred platforms
  • Use an omnichannel marketing software to consolidate customer information from all touch points and create a single 360-degree customer profile to inform future interactions
  • Audit your existing systems, such as your POS software, to make sure the data can be integrated into your omnichannel marketing software
  • Provide your salespeople (e.g. in-store, call center, live chat) with access to the master customer profiles so they can have the necessary context to delight your customers. At the same time, ensure that they record their customer interactions onto the centralized platform for future reference

Simply showing up in front of your customers with a mass marketing message is no longer enough in today’s marketplace.

To stay ahead of your competition, you need to deliver the right message that speaks to your customers’ relationship with your brand and where they’re at in the customer journey. Doing so allows you to add value and build trust by being relevant all the time.

How To Augment Customer Experience With Omnichannel Personalization

Omnichannel personalized marketing is no longer just “nice to have” in today’s marketplace, especially with customer experience becoming a key brand differentiator.

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Consumers are now interacting with brands across multiple channels. Not only do they expect relevant content but they also want the ability to “pick up where they left off” when they switch from one channel to another.

Many retailers consider implementing omnichannel personalization as one of the key strategies to generate growth and increase revenue through providing a customer-centric brand experience. In fact, many retailers see an increase in revenue and new customer conversion rate when they start offering personalized customer experience.

A study by Invesp has shown that personalization has been proven to improve customer loyalty and increase conversion:

  • 53% of online shoppers consider customization valuable.
  • 45% of shoppers prefer to shop on sites offering personalized recommendations.
  • Personalized ads have a conversion rate 10 times higher than “one-size-fits-all” ads.

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However, there are many moving pieces to ensure the successful implementation of such strategy, including the collection, integration, and synthesis of a large amount of customer data and the ability to turn it into actionable insights.

Thankfully, there are many tools you can use to help gather customer data and apply them to improve customer experience. Here are a few helpful features to look for:

Customer Data Management (CDM)

Information on your customers’ behaviors and preferences will help you cultivate relationships and increase retention rate. Data collection is the first step to implementing a personalization strategy.

To see CDM in action, look no further than online retail giant Amazon.com. Customer information is collected and utilized for making recommendations that leads to increase in sales, as well as improving customer relationships with more personal services.

To get the most out of your customer data, you should:

  • Decide on the critical data to collect so you don’t end up having to parse through irrelevant information
  • Clean up your data to avoid duplication
  • Funnel all information into one centralized database to construct 360° customer profiles
  • Avoid siloed internal practice and encourage collaboration between departments
  • Make the information and customer profiles easily accessible to sales personnel in the field.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

After you have constructed 360° Customer Profiles that aggregate your customers’ unique preferences, brand interactions, and habits, it’s time to take that information to the next level.

You can leverage the analytics capabilities of your software to make data-backed business decisions based on the level of brand interaction and projected lifetime value of each of your individual customers.

To leverage the power of CRM, follow these best practices:

  • Create targeted content for specific customer segment to help your brand stay relevant and top of mind. For example, P&G developed the Being Girl microsite to share relevant content with a specific customer segment
  • Use geo-location to target customers who are in the vicinity of a physical store
  • Learn customer habits and preferences to create offers and deliver services that are timely, customized, and relevant
  • Implement Omnichannel marketing and customer care to deliver a seamless customer experience across all touch points

Automated Personalization

You can also leverage the information about your customers to create personalized campaigns and communications that help you deliver the most relevant information to specific customer segments in a timely manner.

This will not only allow you to nurture customer relationships and improve retention rate but also entice new customers to engage with your business by sending out highly relevant offers at the critical moments of their customer journey.

These are some of the ways you can leverage automated personalization to increase sales:

  • Segment and target high-quality leads that are likely to convert
  • Implement personalized lead nurturing campaigns to deliver the most relevant content and offers
  • Increase customer lifetime value by improving customer satisfaction and loyalty with relevant offers
  • Leverage your social media presence to deliver a seamless experience that moves customer along their purchasing path

The Best Marketing Speaks To What Makes Your Customers Tick

The effectiveness of one-size-fits-all marketing messages is plummeting as consumers are becoming increasingly savvy and expect for customized content and offers from brands.

As a marketer, you need to deliver a personalized customer experience across all channels and make sure your copy, content, and offer are highly relevant while appearing in front of your audience in the right place at the right time to get the highest ROI on your marketing budget.

I’ve Got the Customer Data…. Now What?

Leverage big data for your omnichannel marketing strategies

Big data is everywhere, but do you know what to do with it?

Marketers are tapping into customer data to generate insights that have never been available before.

If you aren’t leveraging this gold mine of information, you’re missing out on a vast opportunity to surprise and delight your prospects and customers.

The problem for most marketers isn’t the lack of such data.

In fact, you’re probably sitting on a large amount of information gathered from various customer touch points—website, email, social media, call center, live chat, or in-store interactions.

All this information can be very overwhelming if you don’t have a plan to utilize it for your business.

What can you do with this data to advance your marketing and sales efforts?

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Optimize Pricing at Customer-Product Level

McKinsey has found that on average, a 1 percent price increase translates into an 8.7 percent rise in operating profits.

Yet up to 30 percent of all pricing decisions made by companies fail to deliver the best price.

The ability to analyze customer preferences and behaviors can help you fine-tune pricing of each product for individual customers to maximize profit.

Attain Greater Customer Responsiveness With Relationship-Driven Strategies

A Forrester study found that 36% of B2C marketers are actively using analytics and data mining to plan relationship-driven strategies.

These strategies have been found to increase customer acquisition, reduce customer churn, and improve existing products for more sales.

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You can leverage data and implement the insights with a robust customer relationship management (CRM) platform to build relationships with your customers. The key is to give them what they want when they want it to increase engagement, loyalty, and customer lifetime value.

Embed Intelligence Into Contextual Marketing

By bringing together evolving customer preferences and interactions across channels, marketers can now take contextual marketing to the next level.

When a customer enters a search term on your website or app, you can combine the search term with the customer’s purchasing history to improve the relevance of the search results and product recommendations.

Develop Customer-Centric Strategies

The use of customer data and single customer view  turns the focus from executing discrete campaigns to managing customer lifecycle.

Through improving customer experience across all touch points, companies are better positioned to cultivate long-term relationships that lead to greater customer loyalty and lifetime value.

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Optimize Go-To Market Plans Using Geoanalytics

Customer data can show you how demand differs across geographic regions.

Using this insight, you can align your sales and go-to-market strategies with territories that have the greatest sales potential to increase sales, improve supply chain efficiency, and reduce cost.

Identify VIP Buyers To Increase Sales

By analyzing average purchase amount, lifetime value, acquisition cost, and retention, you can identify your “VIP” customers that are of highest value to your business.

You can then focus your customer care efforts to nurture relationships with this segment with a personalized shopping experience and targeted content or offers to increase engagement and loyalty.

Deliver Consistent Omnichannel Customer Experience

The use of robust Customer Data Management (CDM) technologies is making it possible for businesses to orchestrate excellent omnichannel customer experiences across a selling network.

This allows you to effectively move prospects along the buyer’s journey to engage with and purchase from your brand.

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The technologies for tapping into the power of customer data are now available at your fingertips.

You can finally collect data, collate information, generate insights, and turn them into implementable strategies that will dramatically increase your marketing ROI.

Discover how NectarOm’s suite of tools can help you leverage customer data and take your marketing to the next level.

Single Customer View Increases Effectiveness of Omnichannel Marketing

Imagine your customer got an email from your company with a coupon code for your online store. She decided to head over to the retail location a few miles away so she could get the product on the spot.

Unfortunately, when she arrived at the store, she was informed that the in-store system doesn’t have her information and she wasn’t able to redeem her discount.

Not only was she left unsatisfied with your brand but she’ll also be less likely to return to make a purchase. In addition, it’s very likely that she’d get sidetracked and never purchase the item.

This and similar scenarios aren’t uncommon these days when customers are interacting with brands via multiple touch points. They expect to move among them seamlessly – able to “pick up where they left off” on the previous channel.

For the past decade, retailers have been focusing on establishing a presence in a variety of channels, such as online, in-app, social media, phone, and in-store. However, such siloed customer experience is no longer sufficient.

Customers not only want to interact with a brand and make purchases on all channels but also have all their information accessible via all touch points so they don’t have to go back to square one when they switch channels.

Onmichannel customer experience integrates all customer interaction in one single database. This means customers can seamlessly move from channel to channel when interacting with a brand. By providing such a customer experience, you will be able to:

  • Move customers along their purchasing journey faster and increase your conversion rate
  • Nurture leads more effectively by augmenting the quality and relevance of your communications
  • Effectively provide customer support to increase customer satisfaction and reduce cost
  • Cultivate customer loyalty and increase retention rate

In order to create such an experience, businesses need to switch their fundamental approach to marketing. Instead of focusing on disparate strategy for each channel, you need to turn the attention to the customer.

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Customer Centric Marketing Starts With Single Customer View

The creation of a 360° profile of a customer is the foundational element of customer-centric marketing.

This profile is created by gathering information from multiple data sources and moving it into one centralized location so it can be further analyzed and utilized.

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The use of a single customer view allows you to:

  • Turn your focus on each individual customer to create targeted messaging and offering that will increase conversion and loyalty
  • Better predict customer behaviors and be more responsive to market trends and consumer demands
  • Make better decisions in choosing new promotional channels
  • Use marketing automation more effectively

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Going back to our frustrated customer at the beginning of this article, this means she would be able to get an email about a discount and apply it to any retail channel, including online and in-store. She would be able to apply the promotion at the retail location, get the item she wants, and, in turn, be more likely to purchase from the brand again.

Single customer view has been applied by many brands successfully to boost campaign ROI and increase sales. For instance, since implementing the strategy, Speciality Fashion Group’s most recent 200 EDM campaigns have delivered an ROI of 2,200%. Clarins have used a similar strategy to identify VIP and create a sense of exclusivity that makes a selected customer feel special and valued.

Overcoming the Challenges Of Implementing Single Customer View

It’s not always easy to implement single customer view. Consolidating all customer data from multiple channels is one of the biggest challenges faced when implementing omnichannel marketing strategies.

If you have been in business for a while, you know how challenging it is to integrate fragmented customer data collected from different touch points over time to get a complete cross-channel view.

The key to overcoming such data gaps is technology integration, which will give you the ability to collect a cohesive set of data for each individual customer and make it available for further analytics and utilization.

Instead of having to cobble together data from different sources, omnichannel marketers can now bring together all customer information to create a master customer profile with tools such as NectorOM’s suite of solutions to get the most out of their customer information with functions such as data management, customer relationship management, personalization automation, omnichannel hyper-personalization.

[Case Study] Successful Application Of Omnichannel Personalization To the Restaurant Industry

How can restaurants, which primarily offer an in-store service, extend the brand experience to digital media where customers are spending most of their time?

As your customers are inseparable from their smartphones and eCommerce has become an integral part of most people’s lives, what can restaurants do to drive brand awareness, cultivate customer relationships, and drive more sales?

To stay relevant, restaurants need to meet their customers where they’re at, using technology to bridge online with offline commerce by creating a personalized omnichannel customer experience.

In the casual dining segment, which saw a 4 percent drop in early 2017, TGI Fridays stood out with its many initiatives that aimed to increase sales through online channels.

Click here to download the TGI Fridays case study to learn how they increased their conversion rate by 35%. 

The restaurant chain is using mobile commerce to provide personalized service to guests online, just as they would in their physical locations.

Their strategy combines omnichannel personalization with mobile technology to bring together a seamless online and offline experience, turning the brand into both digital and in-store destinations:

Enhance Customer Experience Through Digital Channels

TGI Fridays is showing up in channels where their customers are already spending their time, delivering targeted messages in the right place at the right time.

Open Table

In February 2017, the company joined Open Table to allow consumers who use the app to look for dining options to make a reservation with just a few taps on their phones.

Twitter

TGI Fridays implemented a chatbot technology that allows guests to have one-on-one interactions, get information on nearby restaurant locations, place orders for takeouts, and more via Twitter.

FandangoNOW

The restaurant chain has partnered with FandangoNOW to offer a dinner and movie deal, a promotion through which consumers can get one free HD movie rental when they place an order online.

Create Deals And Promotions To Encourage Omnichannel Interactions

TGI Fridays also launched a series of promotions that encourage customers to interact with the brand both online and offline.

Some of these promotions include a $30 Valentine’s Day dinner deal in conjunction with their partnership with Open Table, Endless Appetizers and March Madness promotions to encourage customers to stick around (which help them cultivate customer relationships and brand loyalty), the Twitter promotion during Super Bowl, and takeout options that help customers recreate the restaurant or bar experience at home.

Use Omnichannel Personalization To Augment Customer Experience

To further enhance consumers’ experience with the brand, TGI Fridays introduced an omnichannel personalization strategy that turns disparate customer data collected from different channels into one master guest profile.

The information allows the brand to serve individual customers personalized offers most relevant to their preferences and locations via multiple channels. This approach encourages not only in-store consumption but also online orders.

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Using an onmichannel marketing and personalization platform, TGI Fridays is able to leverage customer data from digital, social, mobile, paid, traditional, and other sources to deliver personalized online, in-app, in-person, and take-home experiences.

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But TGI Fridays is not the only one! Restaurants everywhere are benefiting from integrating online and offline channels to augment their brand experience and increase their conversion rate while lowering cost.

Find out how to make omnichannel personalization work for your business.

Hyper-Personalization — the Catalyst In Revolutionalizating the Grocery Industry

Even though eGrocery is growing in popularity, 97% of groceries are still purchased in-store.

Still, digital channels allow consumers to research and gather information during the pre-shopping and planning stages. They also offer tremendous opportunities for grocery retailers to attract customers and increase loyalty.

To get the most out of these digital channels, grocery retailers need to become aware of customers’ expectations as they interact with brands.

Consumers are looking for relevance and personalization everywhere. They don’t have the patience for one-size-fits-all messages that don’t speak to their needs or their relationship with the brand.

The trends that are driving the grocery industry, which include the convergence of online and offline channels, the increase use of social media to connect with customers, the focus on customer experience over price, the empowerment of frontline employees, and the increasing availability of big data — all point to the need for providing a highly-personalized shopping experience.

Grocery retail chains, such as Walmart and Albertson, have been implementing personalization strategies to successfully generate growth and revenue.

In order to stay ahead of your competitors, you need to implement a hyper-personalization strategy that delivers personalized content and offers to your customers as part of a omnichannel marketing strategy.

Single Customer View – The Foundation of Omnichannel Marketing

Many grocery chains already have loyalty programs which allow them to collect a large amount of customer data.

The challenge is to integrate this information with other customer data collected from other channels and compile it all into a 360° customer profile that will allow retailers to deliver targeted messaging and relevant offers.

With this single customer view, technologies, such as machine learning, can be further utilized to analyze the data and apply the insights to inform marketing strategies.

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Hyper-Personalization Will Drive Grocery Retailing

Grocery retailers can augment the power of single customer view with hyper-personalization.

Hyper-personalization refers to the use of data to serve up customized content, products, or promotions based on the preferences and shopping behaviors of individual customers. It helps grocery retailers deliver the right message or offers to their customers in the right place, and at the right time.

With hyper-personalization, you can deliver a seamless shopping experience–whether a customer is shopping online or in-store, looking for a particular list of items or hunting for deals–to increase the relevance and timeliness of your marketing message and promotions.

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How Grocery Retailers Can Use Hyper-Personalization

Grocery retailers can now use omnichannel marketing software to tap into the power of hyper-personalization.

Here’s how to get the most out of your customer data:

1. Create Nimble Personalized Campaigns Backed By Analytics

Replace large-scale, one-size-fits-all marketing campaigns with more frequent small-scale ones to deliver a personal touch. You can analyze customer data to optimize the timing of the messages, offers, and product recommendations for each customer segment.

2. Leverage Real-Time Data

Shorter campaigns allow retailers to react faster to real-time information gathered from customers’ responses to the content and promotions.

By using omnichannel marketing software to gather customer information in real-time, you can personalize customers’ experiences to involve multiple platforms and digital channels. For example, you can use customers’ real-time location and response to pricing to determine the best promotion and offer.

3. Target Advertising Message And Track Results

With the help of omnichannel marketing and personalization software, we may be able to retire the famous saying by John Wanamaker, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”

You can now tailor marketing messages to mirror the key elements in the acquisition funnel and create advertising messages that speak to individual customers to move them toward purchasing.

In turn, the effectiveness of these offers and messages can be measured so you can determine what’s working for your audience and make improvements to increase sales for your grocery business and increase ROI.

To fully utilize your customer data and deliver a hyper-personalized customer experience, you need an omnichannel marketing software that brings all the pieces together in one centralized location.

Doing so will help you design a 360-degree customer experience and meet customer expectation so you can tap into the opportunity offered by digital channels to collect and collate relevant data, enhance customer relationships, and increase sales.

Get Ready: 3 Customer Personalization Trends to Look Out For

When it comes to a brand’s relationship with its audience, it’s all about customer personalization. Customer personalization allows companies to better relate to their customer’s needs and give them a deeper connection to a company. Customer personalization bridges the gap between online experiences and in-person interactions with customers.

Consumers are looking for more ways to connect with a brand, and companies are looking for more ways to increase revenue and track marketing efforts. This makes 2017 the year to focus on personalization. Here are a few customer personalization trends guiding the online experience in 2017:

 

Enhancing Online Brand Experience

Online shopping is by no means a new concept, but brands are currently working to better connect with consumers online. Common ways to personalize, and therefore enhance, the online brand experience include dynamic content and personalized recommendations. By tracking what consumers look for on a site, companies can personalize the way their site interacts with each customer. This gives everyone a unique experience and encourages them to come back.

One prime example of a personalized online consumer experience is Amazon. Each time a shopper looks at one product, they are then showed similar products, things people have bought, and more. This is all done with the intent of guiding a customer to make a more informed decision.

 

Optimized Messaging with Customer Data

The average person spends just a few seconds on a page before they decide whether or not to stay. This short attention span makes the content you show them that much more crucial. It’s in those few milliseconds that personalization can make a huge impact.

To do this, companies need to gather the right information about each person who visits their site, so they can better target their efforts to catch that person’s eye. There are multiple methods companies can use to gather data to help with customer personalization. This includes proprietary scoring, targeting algorithms, and more. These processes can help track a person’s every interaction with your brand other similar online brands to provide a personalized experience. Even if someone is a new user to a site, companies with the proper algorithms in place can look at their personal history to improve the content it shows.

Companies such as NectarOM simplify the data collection process to help companies better target messaging and in turn see higher customer engagement that increases overall sales.

 

Geo-Targeting Marketing

We as a culture are constantly sharing information online, and brands need to take advantage of it. More and more people are becoming comfortable sharing their location online. This allows companies to target content based on a person’s location. Geo-targeted marketing – also referred to as proximity marketing – allows companies to combine online and offline for an improved, cohesive customer experience.

Proximity marketing allows a company to feed the customer their message at a time when they are most likely to take action, based on their location. Proximity marketing uses technology such as chips in products, enabled location services on a smartphone, and in-store WiFi to better reach its customers.

Personalization is imperative for any company that wants to reach its customers online. People aren’t looking for a company that just shows them what they have to offer. Instead, people want to buy from brands that pay attention to them and provide them with custom-tailored content. When it comes to personalization across all channels, companies like NectarOM make simpler to reach customers and increase revenue.

How 3 Top Brands are Using Personalization

These days, customers want to feel that they’re being heard and understood by their favorite brands. In fact, 73% of consumers want a more personalized shopping experience. Personalization allows brands to create a unique experience for their customers — in turn, demonstrating that they are being heard, and hopefully contribute to increased sales volume.

And, it is working. According to a study done by Infosys, 86% of consumers are influenced by personalization when making shopping decisions. Consumers are motivated to purchase more when they are made to feel relevant.

Thus, personalization has become increasingly important for brands and their success. Let’s take a look at three brands that are succeeding by bringing personalization into the consumer journey.

Burberry

This 156-year-old brand has pioneered a different kind of personalization for customers. Partnering up with Pinterest, Burberry has given customers a way to build personalized boards with product content provided by Burberry.

The “Cat Lashes” promo initiative offers a personalized experience for customers based on their makeup preferences. Users take a quick questionnaire and get personalized makeup looks and tips through a personalized Pinterest board. Burberry promotes their Cat Lashes Mascara through the Pinterest boards. The personalized boards also offer tips on how to create relevant looks for each customer while also using the Cat Lashes Mascara.

According to an internal study, 42% of consumers have bought products based on promoted pins they saw on Pinterest. Burberry’s “Cat Lashes” initiative is, therefore, capitalizing on Pinterest’s broad consumer base. The personalized boards serve as a promotional hub for the Cat Lashes Mascara, as well as related and relevant Burberry products.

GILT

Gilt.com was listed in Fast Company’s Top 25 Innovative Companies in 2010and ranked first in fashion that year. How did a company, which launched in 2007, garner so much success in just five years? The reason is that the online retailer personalizes sales and promotions for each customer and app user.

The luxury flash sales site has installed a personalized user page online and on the mobile app. This personalization feature is called “Your Personal Sale,” and goes beyond the daily e-mails a shopper receives. The personalized sales, generated by an algorithm, takes into consideration a customer’s entire shopping experience. Based on factors such as purchase history, geographic location, browsing behavior, and personal preferences, “Your Personal Sale” finds fresh items and deals daily. Personalization goes one step further, with Gilt.com also considering size, categories, and brands that customers frequently engage with. Each personalized sale lasts 24 hours, after which a new set of deals and sales are presented. According to CIO Steve Jacobs, personalized sales are “the next phase of the flash sale model.” The company leverages the sense of discovery the app provides, “tailoring [the] shopping experience just for them.”

Gilt.com brings personalization to the online fashion and retail platform and makes a conscious effort to tailor products to its customers. According to  Jacobs, “people are coming back more frequently, and they’re excited to see what’s in their sale tomorrow.” Personalized sales pushed the online retailer to be valued at roughly $1 billion just after five years of launching. Gilt’s personalization strategy has propelled the e-commerce company to enormous success.

Spotify

The online music platform Spotify is the leading music streaming host, despite competitors like iTunes and Google Play.

The introduction of personalized playlists has distinguished Spotify from other streaming sources.

One of these personalized playlist functions is “Discover Weekly.” Discover Weekly is a service which personalizes to each listener’s taste across a variety of genres. A personal playlist of 30 songs is curated and released each Monday based on listening habits. The music streaming service has also launched the “Release Radar” feature. Every Friday, the two-hour playlist is updated with newly released music from artists and bands a listener frequents. In addition, listeners who curate their playlists receive personalized suggestions on their playlists as well. The streaming service learns from personal preferences, songs skipped and replayed, and even looks at micro-genre music preferences to curate the best suggestions for each listener.

Spotify’s lead engineer and algorithm creator Edward Newett says, “we’re trying to show that Spotify understands users better than anyone else.” Within the first 10 months of launching, Discover Weekly saw 5 billion song plays. Senior product owner Matt Ogle says Discover Weekly’s success has “completely changed” the way Spotify interacts with consumers. The great success with user personalization has also increased consumer loyalty. Spotify boasts 40 million paid subscribers, compared to Apple Music’s 20 million paid subscribers.

Personalization is key to a brand’s success and transforms the customer experience. The focus on personalization allows many of these companies to grow as customers engage with brands more and more. With personalization on the rise, it will be interesting to see how industries implement various personalization tactics into their customers’ experiences.

Serving Up Omnichannel Success

Lessons Learned From Omnichannel Dynamo Chili’s

With different mediums of shopping, companies have to create a seamless shopping experience across the board. As a result, every aspect of the consumer journey, from browsing to purchasing, has to be a smooth transition, both online and offline. People demand an omnichannel experience that is social, quick, easy to use, and valuable to the consumer.

Technological creativity seems to have more of an impact than a brand name. Customers are no longer impressed by a shiny new app of their name being personalized in an email. The 21st-century customer expects brands to create an omnichannel shopping experience that encompasses all online and offline interactions. 

Let’s take a look at how Chili’s is using omnichannel and a little technical creativity to create the ultimate dining experience

Wait in line….from home

Gone are the days of waiting in line at Chili’s to get a table. The casual dining restaurant has partnered with NoWait to power their new mobile waitlisting feature on the Chili’s app.  Through the use of the app, Chili’s can provide an enhanced dining experience. For diners who wish to enjoy their favorite menu items during peak hours. With the waitlisting feature, diners can reserve a spot in line and check up on wait times from any location or mobile device.

The waitlisting capability has given Chili’s an advantage in restaurant-diner relations. By combining the mobile and in-restaurant experience, diners have convenience and speed at their fingertips. The wait listing feature allows Chili’s to have faster table turnover and accurate estimates for wait times.  Guests can not only check up on wait times but can also go ahead and order what they would like while still “waiting in line” while in the app. With combo offers and other special menu offers, Chili’s now gives diners a way to get their food without waiting in line and with little preparation time. Chili’s use of the waitlisting feature creativity uses mobile to optimizing the in-store dining experience.

 

Social Media Embrace Social Media 

Across social media platforms, food and beverage mentions are the most popular. The way customers review restaurants on social media fundamentally changes the way restaurants are approaching social media. According to a Netbase report , Chili’s is one of the most popular brands on social media.

So what did Chili’s do right to make them among the top 15 most popular social media brands?

Chili’s embraces the way food and beverages are consumed from a social media perspective. It is no longer enough for a restaurant to have great written reviews. Presentation and picture quality is the new buzz in food reviews. Because of this shift, Chili’s has made changes to the brick and mortar restaurant to garner positivity on the digital landscape. Even the way food is prepared is being changed to be more appealing in photos. For example, French fries are served in stainless steel bins, ribs are neatly placed on plates, and even the plates themselves have been revamped to be prettier in photos.

The goal is to make menu items look more tempting in pictures, increasing the number of mentions and shares online. This improves Chili’s online presence and visibility on high traffic platforms like Instagram.

Tabletop tablets 

Smartphones and tablets have made access to information and services available at our fingertips. The demand for convenience and speed has started shaping the way restaurants are tackling food service. While online ordering and delivery have made the eating-out experience easier, customers lose the dining experience. As a result, sit down restaurants are now introducing the tabletop tablet. This system allows diners to place food and drink orders through a provided tablet. Diners now have control of their dining experience. These tablets streamline food service without replacing the personal interactions with servers. With the tap of the finger, dinner guests can now input orders and requests such as waiter service, beverage refills, and chats with the chef.

This year, Chili’s implemented over 70,000 tablets across its restaurants to provide a smooth, reliable dining experience. The smart table top option is tightly integrated with the Chili’s ordering system, ensuring that everything is up to date. The tablet displays the most relevant and updated menu items, prices, and descriptions and can even show customized consumer reviews of the items that you have ordered.

The ability to omnichannel approach to ordering and paying for food through a tablet has boosted the volume of orders. The speed with which customers can pay with the tablet has also increased table turnover. As a result, Chili’s can seat more customers than before.

Chili’s has done a fantastic job of leveraging technological creativity to create omnichannel success.  Have you seen other restaurant brands using omnichannel to enhance their customer experience? Let me know in the comment section below.

How Omnichannel Retailers Are Changing the Marketing Game

Starbucks, Sephora, and Disney’s Omnichannel Approach

 

The good old days of customers coming from one channel are over.  With the rapid rise of social and mobile channels as valuable marketing platforms, omnichannel business strategy has become necessary approach for a successful brand.  While it is easy to understand “Why?” the “How?” is less clear.

Before we can discuss what techniques are being used to optimize omnichannel marketing, we need to take a look at what omnichannel marketing really means. Omnichannel is an approach to sales that utilizes multiple channels and outlets of shopping. The primary goal is to create a seamless customer shopping experience, whether the individual is shopping on a mobile device, desktop, or in a physical store. 

Now that we have established a what omnichannel is, let’s take a look at how three companies use it to their advantage.

Starbucks

Starbucks is an omnichannel expert

The Starbucks Rewards program is a perfect example of omnichannel marketing in practice. Starbucks is one of the biggest coffee retailers in the world. Their market reach is incredible, and they have harnessed the power of omnichannel to leverage that huge customer base. The Starbucks Rewards system uses an omnichannel approach to make the coffee buying experience more convenient for customers.  Customers can use the rewards card to make purchases without taking out their wallets and to also reload the rewards balance online, in-store, by telephone, or by mobile app. All changes to rewards accounts immediately update across all channels.  Thanks to the omnichannel approach, Starbucks customers can satisfy their caffeine cravings at any time, on any channel.

 

Online bags can become actual bags when purchasing in-store

Sephora

The makeup retailer has also changed the way consumers interact with products. Sephora utilizes the omnichannel shopping process to create an enjoyable experience for customers. Sephora has implemented the “My Beauty Bag” program to allow customers to manage their beauty products and see purchase history. The “My Beauty Bag” program makes it easy and accessible for Sephora customers to add items to their shopping carts, peruse their browsing history, make savings on purchases, and re-order items. Sephora’s rewards program also allows members to use their Beauty Bags on their mobile device, computer, and send digital gifts.

While making in-store purchases, customers can use the Sephora app to complement the brick and mortar shopping experience. Sephora is also changing the in-store experience as well, by introducing the Beauty Tip Workshop. Customers now have the opportunity to access their Beauty Bags, see recommended items and looks, and make purchases based on the items shown in the store. Sephora is expertly using omnichannel to revolutionize the cosmetic shopping experience.

Disney

Disney brings omnichannel to the world on tourism and retail. The magic of Disney is brought to multiple channels thanks to their approach. Disney’s process pays attention to even the smallest of details to make a flawless and consistent shopping environment across channels. When booking a trip through Disney’s website or app, customers have access to the My Disney Experience tool to help plan the logistics of the trip. From dining options, to park attractions, to securing passes, the My Disney tool helps customers plan for the entire trip. Once customers get to the amusement park, the Disney mobile app can locate the attractions and performances across the park and gives an estimated waiting time for each attraction and show.

Disney takes the magic even further with the implementation of the Magic Band program. These wristbands not only act as theme park entrance passes, but also act as hotel room keys, Fast Pass check in, food ordering tools, and photo storage devices. These wristbands also include personalized surprises for each band holder. Disney uses omnichannel to make traveling a connected, all-in-one experience.

 

Omnichannel initiatives like these enable brands to create the ideal customer experience across all channels. Starbucks, Sephora, and Disney approaches are great examples of brand’s solving for the ever-evolving needs of the digital age.