Omnichannel

It's the goal of every business to turn casual customers into raving fans who refer new customers, give great ratings and reviews, and are an all-around dream for marketers. But how does a small business guide customers up the sales chain? Obviously, having great products and services is key, but connecting with, embracing and educating these casual customers through multiple channels will also help the process.

Retailers (or any marketer or publisher) seeking higher conversion rates must adopt an “innovation attitude” to guide them amid a fertile landscape for new ideas, advanced technology and customer behavior learnings. So advised speaker after speaker at last week's Shop.org Merchandise Summit in Huntington Beach, Calif.

With retailers forced to take a hard look at their bottom lines during the recession, catalogs are adjusting, but not disappearing, says Leslie Linevsky, founder of Catalogs.com. As postage rates climb and customers become concerned about the environmental impact, retailers are scaling back on the number of catalogs they mail out and are using them to drive traffic to their websites.

The mobile Web can augment the in-store shopping experience as many consumers check and compare competitors’ products and prices as they actually peruse store aisles and contemplate purchases. This was a key finding in Compuware Gomez Mobile Benchmark Review of May 2010.

Location-based mobile alerts have led a third of women 18 to 34 to visit a store, according to a recent survey. And 27 percent of that demographic said that mobile messages have impacted their decision to buy in a physical store. The poll, conducted from May 17 to May 19, surveyed 2,046 U.S. adults 18 and older, including 1,710 who own a cell phone and/or a smartphone. It was conducted by Harris Interactive and commissioned by location-based ad company Placecast. It studied opt-in mobile marketing messages only.

The InterACT! Conference, an educational forum for marketers, brand owners and service providers on cross-media direct marketing opportunities and strategies, has launched "Build-a-Buzz" Giveaway - a social networking contest for marketers (or anyone) who wants to win one of four cool prizes: an Apple iPad, HP Netbook, Amazon Kindle or American Express gift card.

IKEA has taken its 2010 catalog mobile with the launch of an augmented reality application for Apple’s iPhone. Mobile marketing agency Mobile Dreams Factory has brought the 2010 IKEA catalog to the iPhone with a unique augmented reality feature: Users can select a piece of furniture from the catalog and place it anywhere inside the room around them, changing its size to fit the perspective by using the phone’s camera.

1. Online retail growth in the context of overall retail and Amazon.com. Online sales today far outperform retail stores, and they continue to be a bright spot in the industry and a growth driver in retail overall. But retailers should also think about the web's impact on offline sales. "Looking at the impact the web has on offline sales makes you think about things differently, and makes you think about the fact that online sales are just the tip of the iceberg," Silverman said.

Ali Wing has a lot to smile about. giggle, was founded in 2003 with a website and concept store in the city's SoHo district. Since then, the founder and CEO of this cross-channel retailer of baby products, gifts and informational resources for new parents has seen it grow to include 11 brick-and-mortar stores throughout the U.S., a sophisticated transactional website, a series of print catalogs and a growing line of baby products called giggle Better Basics

The Global E-mail Attitudes Survey of 13,000 consumers in 13 countries across the Americas, Europe and Asia Pacific reveals that email’s influence over multichannel purchasing is powerful, with the majority of consumers (58 percent) having been driven to make a purchase in a store or over the phone by a marketing email. And while websites are the preferred place for consumers to opt-in, they are also very willing to subscribe to email messages offline, for example, when placing a catalog order (46 percent), at the point of sale (29 percent) or via SMS text message (13 percent).