4 Best Practices for Omnichannel Brands

At SmartCommerce, we love to create solutions for growth-obsessed marketers! And at the heart of everything we do, is a deep drive to get the most products into carts we can.

Since we always want to help you increase your sales, we’ve identified 4 best practices for omnichannel brands. These are our guideposts to help you win in this ever changing space. We’ve broken it down for you here (and included a handy infographic above to pin to your wall).

1. Incorporate frictionless commerce across all digital touchpoints:

Bypass the PDP and get your items directly into carts with just one click. Having direct carting capabilities at a vast number of retailers (ours happens to be the most robust on the market) is the “gift that keeps on giving” for brands – here’s why:

• Don’t lose sales to competitors: Shoppers don’t see competing products when an item is placed directly in the cart, so that risk is taken off the table. 

• Straight to cart, no detours: Taking shoppers to a PDP page leaves you vulnerable to fall-off, but going directly to cart, you avoid this from potentially happening. 

• Add to cart, add to list (same, same): More than 60% of consumers use their online cart as an in-store shopping list, so being in there keeps your items top-of-mind.

• Reap those retargeting benefits: Being in the cart means you automatically enjoy retailer perks (think product reminder emails and brand recommendation emails - hello fireworks!), without lifting a finger. 

2. Drive more efficient ad spend with real-time inventory aware solutions: Avoiding out-of-stock situations makes a BIG difference when it comes to the effectiveness and ROI on a campaign – here’s the deal:

Fact: Nearly 30% of all retail product links result in an out-of-stock, creating a dead-end for shoppers and missed sales opportunities for brands. Nobody wants that!   MOE (our proprietary machine learning engine) tracks stock status in real-time (as in up-to-the-minute) and requires no spreadsheets or data from clients. And furthermore, when an item is OOS, MOE instantaneously substitutes it for one that is available, so you don’t miss out on sales.

3. Customize your digital commerce experiences whenever possible: There’s no one-size-fits-all advertising solution anymore. Brands need to be able to customize their user experience to optimize for their specific campaign objectives and goals. For this reason, Shopper’s Choice links have moved toward more customization, so you can choose from any (or all) of the below to optimize for your unique needs:

• UX Customization: Tailor your campaign with the style and functionality that’ll help you meet your goals faster.

→ Bundles, recipes, or single products

→ Single or multiple retailers

→ Size or other variants

→ Enable capability to share with friends and/or save for later

→ Enable a product locator map to promote online and offline availability 

• Creative Customization: Brand your campaign all the way to the cart with hero images, colors, fonts, copy, extra content and background visuals.

• Retailer Customization: You choose the number of retailers, specifically which ones, and how they’re displayed so you can control and optimize your sales by retailer. 

• Tracking Customization: You have options here too – GTMs, UTMs, plus custom pixels with partners (and access to their dashboards) that add insights to optimize future campaigns.

4. Seek out transparent data and analytics to reach more shoppers:

Having access to valuable data and insights allows you to be smarter and run more effective campaigns – here’s how this gives you a leg up:  

See a wide variety of metrics, benchmarks, and audience insights, all with significant filtering and report-generating options. Carting and substitution metrics are exclusive to SmartCommerce, and the sales insights are super transparent and customizable, based on closed-loop sales data (you won’t find this anywhere else either). Combined, this valuable data enables campaign optimization, predictive analytics, demand forecasting, and real-time inventory optimization.

Want to incorporate these best practices into your upcoming campaigns? Let’s schedule a demo!