People buy online more and more. It’s not a trend; it’s part of our lives. However, online shopping has transformed from clicking ads to having an experience with brands. Modern consumers want their chosen companies to meet their needs, take care of the environment, promote inclusivity, voice their opinions, and so on.
So, your role as an online merchant now is to become a trusted partner rather than a mere seller. How can you achieve that? You need to communicate with consumers on various channels. Meet them where they prefer to spend their time. Invest in email marketing, social media, and search engine optimization (SEO) and juggle all these channels effectively.
That’s where marketing integration comes into play. It allows you to create a cohesive narrative across various channels, enhancing customer experience at every touchpoint. What’s more, marketing integration is about uniting client information. It simplifies your team’s work, which gives instant access to the needed details, such as orders, customer preferences, and inventory.
By syncing your marketing efforts with backend processes, you free employees from the drudgery of manual work. The result? It’s easier to deliver exceptional experiences that foster brand loyalty and turn shoppers into brand advocates. In this article, we’ll take a closer look at marketing integration and how to boost sales with its help. Keep reading for actionable insights.
The Power of Integrated Marketing in eCommerce
Have you ever wondered why some online stores stay in your memory while others are so easy to forget? The reason may lie in the way they organize the shopping experience.
Take one online store as an example. It posts an announcement on social media about upcoming discounts. Then, you get an email with those discounted goods tailored to your taste. You click a link and land on a user-friendly page with simple navigation and relevant offers. Moreover, it loads fast, as the online retailer conducted website performance optimization. Rapid loading times, smooth interactions, and efficient checkout processes play a crucial role in retaining customer interest and ensuring they don’t leave the site due to technical delays. It’s an excellent shopping experience.
Imagine a scenario where an email team doesn’t know what the social media team is up to, and vice versa. This lack of alignment would lead to lost sales, disgruntled customers, and undermined reputation. That’s what makes integrated marketing essential.
Integrated marketing ensures that all channels complement each other, creating a comprehensive picture. Your store becomes an orchestra where each instrument plays its part, but in harmony with others. In fact, statistics show that integrated marketing can increase purchase intent by an astounding 90% and enhance brand perception by a noteworthy 68%.
The main difference between integrated vs. traditional marketing is that the latter often operates in silos. It doesn’t aim to feature the same theme across the website, social media, email newsletters, and in-store displays. Integrated marketing, in contrast, is about creating a dialogue with customers that flows smoothly across all channels.
Key Strategies for Successful Marketing Integration
What channels and strategies can contribute to effective marketing integration? Let’s briefly overview the most important ones and how they drive sales growth, such as:
Cross-channel content marketing
It revolves around ensuring consistent brand messaging across multiple platforms through texts, images, videos, etc. Thanks to this approach, customers can recognize the brand faster and trust it more. This strategy increases audience engagement and the likelihood of conversions and sales.
Data-driven personalization
If you want to increase sales, make customers feel like you’ve selected the promoted goods based on their interests. In short, you need to leverage personalization. A direct correlation exists between enhanced sales and personalized experiences.
When shoppers receive content and offers tailored to their preferences and past behavior, they become more interested. This strategy attracts attention, boosts engagement, and leads to higher conversion rates.
Seamless social media integration
Shorten the path to purchase by selling on social networks. These venues are about impulse buying, so promote the product and provide the ability to buy it right there. This convenience reduces the likelihood of cart abandonment, directly boosting sales.
Unified multichannel customer service
People need the ability to contact the company. To ensure customer service is part of the overall brand experience, it should be consistent and effective. As a bonus, taking time to enhance the customer service experience results in higher satisfaction. Pleased clients will be more likely to return to you and recommend you to others. As such, this strategy drives sales through both retention and referral.
Leveraging automation and AI
Automation and AI make it easier to handle all the channels. You don’t have to check when a shopper abandons the cart manually. The automation tool will wait and trigger a notification. If powered by AI, it’ll also take into account the user’s browsing history, demographics, and other details to offer relevant goods. The right recipient thus receives relevant information at the best time, without you having to lift a finger.
Ensuring a Unified Customer Journey
A cohesive customer journey should flow from one stage to the next to keep the reader interested. It’s like creating a compelling story, with each chapter contributing to a general topic. A customer journey starts with initial contact through purchase and beyond. Here is what you can do to align marketing across multiple channels:
Map the customer journey. What potential interactions might a customer have with your brand? Include everything from discovery to post-purchase.
Ensure your emails, social media posts, or in-store promotions deliver the same message. For example, if you’re running a sale, the discount and terms shouldn’t change across all platforms.
Collect data. It’s needed for personalization. A study by McKinsey & Company found that personalized experiences can increase revenue by up to 25%. But to make it happen, you need to know as much as possible about your prospects.
Screenshot taken on the official McKinsey & Company website
Harnessing Diverse Marketing Channels
In 2024, you have an unprecedented number of marketing channels available. Each one has a unique purpose, contributing to the success of the project, for example:
Email marketing. Due to being popular for quite some time, it may seem outdated, but in fact, it remains powerful and convenient for personalization and segmentation.
Social media platforms introduce shoppable elements like tags and encourage people to share viral content. They differ in terms of the target audience and preferable content formats, so the trick is to tailor your campaigns to meet these requirements.
Emerging platforms like augmented reality (AR) in advertising can provide immersive experiences that boost engagement and conversions.
To optimize each channel, you need to understand your audience, measure the results, and adapt based on what the data tells you.
Pro tip: Synergize, don’t silo. Each channel should work well with the others. Utilize email marketing to follow up on a social media campaign, for instance, or employ your social media accounts to direct readers to the most recent blog article.
Omnichannel vs. Multichannel Approach
Omnichannel and multichannel marketing are often confused. Both involve leveraging several channels, but the difference is simple:
In a multichannel approach, you try to reach the audience through several independent touchpoints (like email, social media, web). Each one operates in its own environment with its strategy and goals. Omnichannel marketing is easier to manage. It’s great for increasing brand awareness and as a starting point in the marketing integration process.
Omnichannel marketing requires strategic thinking, a great deal of effort from a marketing team, and efficient technical solutions. Why? Because it stipulates that all channels are interconnected. No matter what device or platform the user utilizes, they should feel like they continue their journey seamlessly from the point they left it.
An omnichannel approach covers all aspects of functioning:
our leading marketplaces;
social media;
support and dev teams;
analytics;
logistics, and so on.
Let’s take logistics as an example. There are lots of channels, but they all should contain up-to-date information about inventory, delivery times, and tracking. If a person wants to return the product, they should be able to do it on any platform without having to repeat their request when switching between them.
eShipper integrates with major eCommerce platforms, like Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce, and others. Connecting it with your online store allows you to manage your inventory across multiple channels and process orders in one place.
Advanced Technologies in eCommerce Marketing
Integrating various channels is more accessible with several technologies. They include artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), data analytics, and emerging concepts like headless commerce, MACH architecture, and composable commerce.
For instance, AI and machine learning are crucial for personalization. Whether you introduce product recommendations on the website or want to enhance your customer service, these technologies can analyze vast amounts of data. This analysis, in turn, serves as the basis for behavior prediction. Businesses use it to make more informed decisions and tailor their marketing campaigns according to how their consumers would most likely react.
AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants help users in real time. They also personalize the experience, considering each customer’s previous history. These solutions free up human resources, allowing employees to focus on more complex tasks.
As for future trends in eCommerce, let’s overview three main ideas:
1. Headless Commerce
This approach is about separating the frontend of an eCommerce platform from the backend. The goal is to make development more flexible. For example, the works on the frontend don’t affect those on the backend, and vice versa.
So, if you want to update the user interface and change the button location or color, developers may not need to go to the backend to implement these modifications. This flexibility is crucial for businesses that want to provide unique customer experiences on various devices and platforms.
2. MACH Architecture (Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native, and Headless)
Apart from the above-mentioned headless architecture, MACH is also based on microservices, API-first, and cloud-native principles. It means the following:
The website/application should be broken down into a collection of services;
The components should interact via APIs;
The software should be hosted in the cloud;
The frontend should be independent of the backend.
MACH architecture enables developers to choose and combine different technologies based on their specific needs. It’s like playing with Lego, removing and adding parts wherever needed.
3. Composable Commerce
This is an extension of the MACH concept, which relies on dividing eCommerce capabilities into modules. These components are easily replaceable and interchangeable. This arrangement gives you more freedom to add and remove unneeded functionality like payment gateway, checkout, or search. As a result, you can respond faster to market changes and customer needs without overhauling the entire system.
These technologies play a big role in the eCommerce industry. They allow for greater flexibility, higher customer satisfaction, and increased efficiency.
eCommerce Automation and Its Advantages
Ecommerce automation is like having a top-notch assistant who never sleeps. Technologies act like these assistants, performing time- and resource-consuming tasks. You can get some time to focus on growing the business rather than sending emails or posting on social media simultaneously. Here is what you can automate:
Email campaigns. The most vivid example is cart abandonment reminders. Some consumers may get distracted or want to save products to purchase later. An automated email triggered at the right time may nudge them to complete the order and increase the conversion rate by as much as 50%.
Inventory management. Updating stock levels after a shopper places an order is another way to speed up the store management process. Automated software may also track the stock level and, when it’s low, notify you about it or make a purchase from suppliers. Because of its accuracy, there is less chance of overselling, which turns off a lot of buyers.
Order processing. Automation begins as soon as a customer clicks “buy.” Without human interaction, orders are processed, sorted, and ready for shipping, which expedites delivery and raises customer satisfaction.
How can automation tools streamline marketing and sales processes? The three main applications include:
Targeted marketing (customer segmentation and analyzing their browsing and purchasing history);
Unifying customer experiences (ensuring that every customer interaction, be it an email, a social media ad, or a customer service chat, is consistent and on-brand);
Increasing efficiency and reducing costs (you don’t have to input data manually, so labor costs and human error are kept to a minimum or eliminated).
The Mobile Commerce Revolution
A mobile device is a critical touchpoint during the shopping process. Consumers make purchases on smartphones more and more. So, the mobile commerce (m-commerce) wave shows no sign of slowing down. M-commerce is no longer a subsidiary channel; it’s a primary one. This shift signifies a change in consumer behavior—convenience and accessibility are now king.
Smartphones also provide more opportunities to engage with users. Take push notifications or SMS messages as illustrations. Mobile devices establish a direct line to your customers. All you need to do is to optimize your store for such users:
Go mobile-first. It means prioritizing a mobile version design over shrinking the desktop one for smaller screens. The website should load fast (under 3 seconds), have easy navigation, and enable customers to check out effortlessly.
Utilize mobile data to offer personalized shopping experiences. This idea may become challenging in a cookie-less future. However, you may count not only on web browsing but also on native apps. They leverage device-specific features, let users choose what data they share, and save personal information, like payment details.
Integrate multiple mobile-optimized payment options, such as Apple Pay, Google Pay, or PayPal. They make it easier for buyers to purchase on a mobile device, which may increase the likelihood of a sale.
Leverage SMS marketing, mobile ads, and social media platforms. When using them, you have less time and space to talk about your offers, so create engaging, concise, and attention-grabbing content to engage the on-the-go mobile user.
Utilize AR and VR. Whether it’s a virtual try-on or social media mask, you let shoppers apply the product to real-life images to see how it’ll transform their appearance, house, and so on before they buy. Here is an example of the NYX online store, which has such a feature.
Screenshot taken on the official NYX website
Conclusion
As you can see, marketing integration provides numerous benefits for online retailers. From enhancing customer satisfaction with personalized experiences to triggering relevant messages at the right time, you can achieve your goals:
Encourage repeat purchases;
Increase the average order value;
Boost sales and revenue.
With eShipper, building a seamless purchase journey becomes even more straightforward. It provides numerous logistics solutions for merchants, such as courier, freight, air shipping, air zone skipping, and next-day delivery.
All these services aim to delight your customers with rapid delivery. eShipper also takes the logistical load off your shoulders, allowing you to focus on core business activities like product development, marketing, and customer engagement.
Ready to explore shipping and fulfillment solutions? Contact eShipper today and create a free account to get shipping quotes and start delivering goods more efficiently.
