What is Omnichannel Marketing and How Can Neuromarketing Help You Perfect it?

As consumers, we can be more difficult to impress than an overprotective mother-in-law. We know what we want, we want it easily and we want it now. Thanks to consistent advances in tech and its integration into every aspect of our daily lives, our “on demand”standards are only getting higher. We also expect to be able to move from channel to channel, between both our online and offline worlds, swiftly and effortlessly.

Brands need to constantly adapt and react to keep up with this. If you’re thinking about your online brand experiences on smart watch, mobile, desktop or tablet and your offline ones in the physical world as separate, individual experiences, you’ve already missed the boat.

A single, holistic approach, i.e. an omnichannel experience, is what we consumers have come to expect, and we can be unforgiving if you get it wrong.

What is an omnichannel experience?

Omnichannel is defined as integrating all of the touch points or channels that your consumers use to interact with your brand. Omnichannel marketing is different from a standard multichannel experience in that it is much more integrated and seamless.

Even if your brand has state of the art stores, a beautifully designed website and genius marketing campaigns, it’s not omnichannel if they don’t all work together, delivering one seamless customer experience. Your customers should be getting a similar experience across all of these channels, with access to the same options, information and quality of service.

A truly omnichannel experience is a great way of making sure your customers have a positive image of your brand, and an effortless customer journey that will keep them coming back for more.

A local example

Yuppiechef, an online premium kitchenware store, has won numerous awards for being South Africa’s best eCommerce store.

YuppieChef made the leap to opening its first physical store in 2016. Aware that trends were increasing towards the digital space (which they had already dominated in their field) rather than brick and mortar stores, one might assume that this was a strategic step backwards for the company as opposed to a giant leap forward. However, they focused on making the transition between online and physical as painless and intuitive as possible for their customer base and their offline offering simply became an extension of their online one.

Much like their website, their real-world store layout is clean and uncluttered, with well-lit displays. Computers are interspersed among the products, allowing customers to search for a specific item online, and even order it for delivery to their home. Each product on the shelf has a customer rating out of five stars (based on online data) as well as a QR code one can scan for more information. The friendly staff all have experience in restaurants or hospitality and are trained in how to use each product.

Customers can pay through a wide variety of methods, including card, cash, SnapScan and Zapper. YuppieChef even developed their own in-store software for hand-held payment devices that can also give the customers more information about the products and provide the option of having their receipt emailed to them instead of printed.

The main takeaway from this is that YuppieChef used digital solutions to address some of the existing “brick and mortar” retail pain points to make sure that their in-store experience was just as convenient and informative as their online one, with the added benefits of being able to chat to informed staff face-to-face and physically interact with their products. The transition between shopping online and in-store feels intuitive and continuous.

How can neuromarketing help your brand do omnichannel marketing better?

Neuromarketing can give you insights into the ways your customers currently navigate different touchpoints. Using eye tracking (to measure attention), galvanic skin response (to measure emotional arousal), facial coding (to track emotions) and EEG (to measure cognitive and motivational processes), Neuromarketers can identify pain points and areas for improvement on a website, app, point of sale or shopper journey.

Neuromarketers can also join you on your journey as you develop your omnichannel strategy, testing the different ideas you might have for the layout, copy, imagery, message, etc. of all communication touchpoints to get you the best possible omnichannel marketing experience for your customers.