Straight To The Source: Omnichannel Expansion

At SmartCommerce, we’re all about YOU. Solving your pain points. Skyrocketing your sales. Making your brand shine.

So when it comes to designing new products and features, a lot of research and thought goes into it. And we want to let you in on all of that. That’s what Straight To The Source is all about. It’s our way of pulling back the curtain and letting you hear directly from the team WHY we built something and WHAT it can do for your brand.

In this edition, we’re chatting with Phil Wolpers, Sr. Vice President of Consumer Product & Growth, who oversaw our recent Omnichannel Expansion, which includes in-store inventory awareness and deep data consumer insights.

He’s going to give us the download on all the exciting new updates and features that will give consumers what they want – more options.

THE CONSIDERATIONS

Consumers are everywhere, but you can be too! Customers are everywhere and the consumer is omnipresent, yet we invest great thought to try and find them and meet them “where they are.” Must it be such a challenge? I’ll argue a playful “of course not,” because we create products with your brands in mind, so you can meet your consumers where they are.  Not only in the channels where you can easily access them, but also while keeping their preferences for lots of shopping options in mind as well.

With over half of shoppers engaging with four or more touch points before they make a purchase and 53% opting to explore a purchase online before finding it in store, it’s more clear than ever that the consumer will not be spoon fed a singular avenue on their purchase journey. 

Capture more shopping behaviors (and more conversion). Folks love buying their produce in a store and getting staples delivered, and these macro patterns may appear as common sense. But going a layer deeper reveals a web of shopping behaviors. Here are a few examples:

• Mary will add that spicy margarita mix (the one her friend Thomas texted to her) to her cart for the taco party tomorrow night, and she knows she can get it delivered same-day. 

• Joey promised his kids some jelly beans he discovered on Instagram. Because the post had a Click2Cart link, he can walk into his favorite retailer, knowing with confidence that they will be there.

THE SOLVE

Good maps are easy, good data is hard. Anyone with an internet connection can quickly find a retailer on a map, but when you bring multiple products together across multiple retailers and then introduce geography and time into the mix, things get dicey. This four dimensional matrix is exactly what happens when someone considers buying something after being inspired by media: the products, the retailer, the availability, and location all must line up. Excluding any of these dimensions inevitably narrows the reach and potential for conversion. 

Our Omnichannel maps make it easy to widen the reach of your media and digital assets and take full advantage of the scale and power of MOE to reach your consumers where they are – wherever that may be. And this 1st party product data is refreshed in near real-time (unparalleled in the industry) and knows not only your products and their best brand substitutes, but also where they are and how to get them. Online or offline, shopping carts or store shelves, MOE makes it easy for you to line up all four dimensions for conversion.  

Easily enabled, easily measured in SmartSuite. Connecting your products to consumers is our thing, but we also love giving you the keys to your data. Enabling Omnichannel maps is as easy as flipping a single toggle in SmartSuite, and you can see exactly how your consumers are engaging with that media – adding to a cart, browsing the Omnichannel map, or both. With every Omnichannel-enabled link and widget, you’ll see those insights and more as soon as the clicks start rolling in.