Retailers often lax in marketing to multi-channel shoppers
Retail marketing managers too often focus on their best single-channel customers without considering the broader benefits of focusing on their strongest multi-channel shoppers, says Jim Okamura, senior partner with consultants J.C. Williams Group. “They concentrate on high-value single-channel customers rather than high-value multi-channel customers, even though multi-channel shoppers usually spend more overall,” he says.
Okamura adds that many retailers don’t understand the impact multi-channel customers have on overall profits. “They see the top-line revenue for a single channel, but in many cases the cross-channel influence on overall revenue and profit isn’t understood enough. They lack measurement systems, and in some cases retailers are guessing at what might be the impact of customers who shop online and buy in the store,” he says. Okamura addresses these and other issues in “Retail Details: Best Practices in Multi-Channel Integration,” a forthcoming report sponsored by online advertising and research firm DoubleClick Inc. and Rich FX, a provider of rich media.
Although more retailers have come to recognize the need to improve their marketing and merchandising campaigns in relation to multi-channel customers, Okamura adds, they’re also realizing they must face integration issues in such areas as inventory management and merchandising. “Allocation of inventory can be a problem if the stores division takes more than its share of hot-selling items, leaving money on the table for the online division,” he says. “So retailers need to match up supply and demand to better fit where the customers are.”
Key to improving multi-channel strategies, Okamura adds, is an effective organizational structure that involves online merchandising and marketing managers along with corporatewide plans--an area that many retailers still need to improve. “In the past, we forgot to invite the online marketing manager to corporate marketing meetings,” he says. “Now he’s invited, but online’s goals are still not necessarily aligned with corporate goals.”
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