As more ecommerce retailers expand their sales onto new online marketplaces everyday, the benefits of multichannel sales have become increasingly undeniable. Not only can a multichannel selling strategy help your business to unlock new sales opportunities and reach more customers, it can also open up unique multichannel marketing opportunities for your brand.
In today’s increasingly competitive ecommerce landscape, multichannel selling isn’t just an option– it’s critical for your brand’s success. A single sales channel simply can’t keep up anymore, especially with an ever-growing target audience from social media. Multichannel selling is the key to growing your customer base without needing to hire a sales team.
Ready to try the multichannel approach? Let’s dive into why multichannel selling is the future of ecommerce and how to get started!
What is multichannel selling?
As we’ve previously discussed, multichannel is a selling strategy that allows brands to offer their products through multiple online sales channels. This type of strategy allows sellers to take advantage of multiple platforms for sales opportunities and marketing campaigns, rather than just their own website.
Omnichannel vs. Multichannel
With so many selling strategies available to brands today, it’s easy to get confused. One of the most common misconceptions among new sellers is that a multichannel selling strategy is the same as an omnichannel selling strategy.
While both omnichannel and multichannel sales strategies use multiple channels to reach new customers, the key difference is how they function. An omnichannel sales channel integrates all multiple channels to create a unified customer experience. On the other hand, a multichannel strategy operates multiple channels independently to offer distinct shopping experiences across each sales platform.
While an omnichannel experience can help maintain consistent brand identity across sales channels, it also limits your target audience. A multichannel selling strategy helps you to reach a wider customer base through multichannel marketing strategies that appeal to different types of consumers.
Benefits of Multichannel Sales
By adopting a multichannel approach for your ecommerce business you can expand market share, increase brand awareness and visibility, and achieve a greater level of competition. Today’s shoppers expect to access online stores where they’re most comfortable– whether that’s through a traditional online marketplace or social media.
Expand market share
The more channels your business sells on, the more market share you can take up and the more customers you can reach. While this might seem obvious, expanding onto multiple channels can allow your business to tap into new potential customers that have previously been unreachable.
Consider what the average demographics of a shopper on your current sales channels looks like. While some degree of overlap probably exists, there’s also a great deal of variation from an online marketplace to a physical store. New channels often mean a wider audience.
Increase brand awareness and visibility
Establishing your business on a variety of ecommerce platforms will drive visibility and brand awareness by presenting your brand on more than just your own website. Consider how presenting your brand on more channels can help your marketing strategies by driving familiarity.
Build trust and brand loyalty
It might sound silly but the more often potential customers see your brand, and the more comparison sites they see it on, the more trust they’ll have in it. By selling on multiple sales channels you’re verifying that your brand (and its products) are the real deal– not just a pop up store that will disappear tomorrow.
At the same time, participating in social commerce channels can have a huge impact on brand loyalty. Today’s customer journey often involves social media platforms– and for more than just marketing campaigns. To win customers you need to create a strong brand reputation and sense of connection with them, oftentimes through social media. By starting your customer experience on social platforms and guiding them to the sales channel that best fits their needs you can establish strong relationships, all while collecting customer data that’s invaluable.
Increase Sales
Obviously the goal of a multichannel strategy is to increase sales, but how does it do this? Not only are you reaching a bigger customer base, multichannel selling ensures that you’re diversifying income streams and ensuring more revenue each period.
Multichannel selling protects your business against the uncertainty that comes with a single sales channel. While profits on one sales channel might dip due to problems on a marketplace or supply chain issues, different sales channels will remain steady and available for your customer base– keeping profits strong.
Collect Customer Data
While single channel shoppers still exist, they’re few and far between today compared to multichannel shoppers. By embracing multichannel selling you can collect invaluable customer data across ecommerce platforms to inform your marketing strategies. Not only will this keep your business competitive, it will also allow you to personalize offers and keep your marketing budget low.
Challenges of Multichannel Selling
For all the benefits of multichannel selling, it still comes with certain challenges. As you expand your business onto other channels you’ll likely need to upgrade inventory management software and automation tools to keep things running smoothly across all sales channels.
Technical capabilities and integrations
As you grow your ecommerce business through multichannel selling it’s imperative that your technology can keep up. Not only do you need tools that integrate smoothly with your current sales channels, you should also be thinking about different channels that you might embrace in the future.
Investing in tools that integrate seamlessly with a variety of different channels that fit your current and future customer base is a must. Consider tools like Base., that offer integrations to more than a hundred online shopping options for your multichannel ecommerce business.
Inventory management
Multichannel selling introduces new levels of complexity to your business in a variety of ways, but most especially when it comes to inventory management. Multichannel retailers need a software program that offers more than just a generic Excel template to track products across different channels both in store and online.
Ensure that your inventory management system offers real-time tracking and updating, as well as easy accessibility for every sales channel through mobile devices.
Automation tools
Keep your business running smoothly across all sales channels by taking advantage of the best automation tools available. By creating automated “rules” for repetitive tasks, such as updating product listings, reordering inventory, or adjusting pricing you can save your business time and money.
Future of Multichannel Selling
As the customer journey continues to evolve with the growth of ecommerce and social commerce, multichannel selling is the key to growing your business. Whether you’re looking to reach more customers through brick and mortar stores or on social media platforms, a multichannel selling strategy allows you to reach consumers where they’re at and build safeguards for revenue in your own business.
Luckily, Base offers a full suite of tools for multi channel marketing and management. Base provides sellers with a fully integrated solution for multichannel ecommerce management, including order, shipping, product listing, and marketplace management, among a variety of other tools. You can get started today with Base’s 14 day free trial here.
