Inconsistent cross-channel promotions are the biggest irritation for today’s omnichannel shoppers, with 44 per cent of consumers saying retailers don’t join the dots when offering promotions and discounts in-store and online. With non-essential retail in the UK due to reopen on April 12th, retailers and brands risk eroding trust and losing revenue without a cohesive strategy that delivers consistent promotions across each channel during the consideration and purchase journey.
Original research of 2,000 UK consumers in the Promotions at the Speed of Demand report from omnichannel promotion solutions provider, XCCommerce, reveals that prior to lockdown 62 per cent of consumers indicated discounts and promotions differed based on where they were shopping, with 37 per cent saying their biggest irritation was when in-store promotions couldn’t be found online.
The growing digitisation of the shopping environment has created a plethora of promotional touchpoints through which consumers should be engaged, requiring marketing and merchandising teams to work collectively to increase traffic and convert more sales, explains Robin Coles, EMEA MD at XCCommerce.
“As retail in the UK reopens and the customer channel mix continues to shift to reflect greater access to physical as well as digital shopping, the key to success with promotions is consistency. The brand, offer, price, language, and redemption mechanism must not be fragmented across each of these channels. If they are, it’s likely retailers will lose the customer very quickly, particularly if the workload in piecing things together rests upon the shopper alone.
“But there are challenges involved in implementing cross-channel promotions into organisations’ overall strategies and operations. Retailers are finding that these don’t integrate easily with their multiple sales applications, making it next to impossible to properly leverage the full capabilities of complex promotion strategies.”
Once in-store, 30 per cent of customers cite delays at till points when processing promotions as their biggest grievance with the knock-on effect that footfall in stores, already under threat, falls even further because of poor customer experience.
“The solution to creating and executing coherent cross-channel promotions is actually relatively simple. It requires a level of automation that enables retailers to build promotions around customer behaviour and preferences and execute and manage them across channels generating a higher return on investment while increasing customer loyalty and lifetime value,” commented Coles.
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