by Camille Chin | September 1, 2020
According to the Adobe Digital Economy Index, the pandemic has resulted in an extra US$94 billion spent online since March 2020. In July 2020, online sales increased 55% year-over-year. At current growth levels, Adobe expects online sales in 2020 to surpass the total online sales in 2019 by October 5th.
By now we all know that the COVID-19 pandemic has shuttered thousands of brick-and-mortar stores and turbocharged the need for omnichannel services, but before running wild and implementing all things omni, businesses need to carefully identify the products that will uniquely benefit them in the future. Here are five ways that Jesta’s unified commerce solutions can help.
Omnichannel Business Decisions
Inditex, the owner of Zara and one of the world’s largest retailers, has started the rollout of its plan to close 1200 stores around the world. Its founder, Amancio Ortega, plans to spend €1 billion on improving its online services by 2022; another €1.7 billion will ensure that stores are well integrated with websites for faster deliveries and real-time tracking of merchandise.
Closing some of your brick-and-mortar stores willy-nilly in favour of an augmented online strategy can be dangerous. No one wants to close one of their most successful stores unknowingly. Before taking action, businesses need performance metrics.
Jesta’s CRM software delivers easy-to-consume, AI-powered visual analytics via UI/UX-optimized dashboards. Pre-built, enterprise-wide snapshots quickly communicate which channels, locations, stores, departments and products are resonating with shoppers, and which months and days receive the most activity. These metrics expose where profitable changes can be made. They can also reveal the quieter moments when your larger stores may be able to double as fulfillment sites.
Consider this: Target’s online sales grew by 141% in the first quarter of 2020. Its 1900 US stores double as order fulfillment sites and fulfilled nearly 80% of their first-quarter digital sales.
Omnichannel Customer Engagement
Jesta’s CRM software also gives retailers the ability to create, edit and refine advanced, multi-channel, business-specific customer segments. Jesta’s CRM comes with pre-built segments based on industry-standard criteria, including recency, frequency and monetary measures, for immediate, out-of-the-box customer insights.
The pre-built segments automatically identify your cross-platform shoppers as Champion, Loyal, About to Sleep, At Risk and more, and provides Customer Lifetime Values (CLVs) for each shopper. Knowing how much a customer is worth enables you to make smart investments in your relationships, rather than spending money everywhere and on everyone.
Jesta’s CRM improves marketing ROI by identifying your most profitable customers for marketing incentives and upselling opportunities, and lost leads for reengagement.
Omnichannel-Enabled Employees
Modifying a customer’s gift card and loyalty memberships should be easy. The same goes for initiating a channel-based survey and promotion. Jesta’s Back Office Management Portal empowers head-office and in-store staff with cross-channel implementation abilities so your business can easily and proactively stay ahead of evolving omnichannel trends.
Remember: changing work situations and decreased discretionary incomes mean that consumers spend cautiously during uncertain times. Discounts and promotions will have to be routine and significant to get consumers to open their wallets post-pandemic. Back Office Management Portal was designed to enable POS agility during good times and bad.
(Endless) Omnichannel Inventory
In a May 2020 blog entitled The Benefits of Virtual Shelves Beyond Endless Inventory, we detailed five advantages of accessing inventory from your vendors worldwide via an Endless Aisle-type solution. But Endless Aisle products don’t stop there: they also give associates and shoppers access to enterprise merchandise in warehouses, online sites and other stores.
The ability to offer shoppers an almost limitless digital selection, and move merchandise beyond your enterprise walls is integral to becoming a true omnichannel retailer. An Endless Aisle vastly improves a brand’s ability to satisfy their customers’ needs and shopping experiences, and decreases the chance that shoppers will go elsewhere to spend their money.
Fact: Amazon Prime members are 52 percent more likely than other shoppers to take out their phones and buy what they need from online stores when they can’t find it in physical stores.
Omnichannel Order Management
Omnichannel Order Management and Order Fulfillment is so important nowadays that some retail stores are already expanding their backrooms so they’ll have more space for order staging and fulfillment. Many are also creating drive-thru pickup depots in their parking lots. Automated pickup lockers are also popular.
Jesta’s Vision Unified Omni is the launching pad for intelligent, rule-based order fulfillment. Businesses specify their fulfillment rules (based on proximity, inventory levels or sales velocity, for instance) and then the system carefully assigns all enterprise-wide omnichannel orders to that business’s most optimal fulfillment site. Shoppers get accurate orders, fast. What’s more, customer service representatives (or CSRs) are empowered with 360-degree views of order journeys so they can provide seamless post-delivery customer experiences, and order management including inventory returns and disposition.
Want to strengthen your business’s omnichannel strategy? Contact us or request a demo.
