"Omni Commerce" About to Collapse the Digital Funnel

Since the beginning of the digital age, email and other digital marketers have been focused on getting a click to drive the user to the website. From there, the website does the work of converting a customer.

But that traditional focus is about to change. Thanks to the digital money revolution and products like ApplePay, Samsung Pay, Bitcoin, and traditional payment gateways, consumers are gaining the ability to transact or convert money anywhere and anytime.

Earlier this month, Paypal, as part of its big New Money rebrand, launched Paypal Commerce, meant to compete with products like Stripe’s Relay that allow conversions to happen anywhere with a “buy now” button that can be embedded in any digital communication.

Now, companies no longer need to host a transaction on a website or landing page. Consumer can purchase items from a social post, push message, email, ad, article -- essentially, anywhere -- in a process called “omnicommerce.”

As the world moves to omnicommerce, there will be several implications affecting marketing -- namely that email marketers will no longer be tasked with “selling a click.”

Here are some ways to help you reshape your focus for this drastic, omnicommerce shift on the horizon.

Creative and User Experience

While we’ve traditionally focused design on driving a click to a website, omnicommerce will require that the design of messages incorporate the information needed to enable a user to convert right from the inbox. The design needs to be optimized to make it clear that customers can convert right from the email, in a way that strategically limits content and friction.

We continue to see smartphone engagement rise across all digital channels, so this new design will need to take the mobile-on-the-go consumer into account. In fact, this mobile customer will most likely be the most common type converting from an omnicommerce message.

Customer Profiles and Targeting

The customer profile should already be omnichannel, but in the omnicommerce world, it will be essential to have a unified view of the customer. This will enable you to create a cohesive brand experience as all channels become revenue-producing, rather than just influencing.

It will be important to understand how your company is unifying customer data and how that information is and can be used in the future to execute across channels. And it becomes  paramount to continually gather direct and indirect profile information to build and refresh customer profiles.

Reporting

The attribution and reporting of marketing campaigns becomes more important than ever as omnicommerce takes hold. These insights will be critical as you leverage this information to drive channel strategy, lifecycle logic and dynamic personalization. It will also help your company understand where to invest.

What do the conversion details tell you about your brand, your consumers, and how you can message each consumer better? It's vital to leverage all the information you have on a particular customer to determine the channel where he or she typically prefers to convert. And it will be important to decide if a “buy now” button should even be presented as part of the messaging at any particular point in the customer journey. Because the conversion will be taking place right in the channel, it’ll be important for marketers to understand what is and is not working to get the experience right.

In Conclusion

Marketers that begin shaping their strategies around omnicommerce will be positioned to gain a competitive edge when the technique becomes more commonplace, especially since millennials have already adopted this technology and represent the largest buying segment for most brands. Even for other demographics, anything that reduces friction in the buying process should increase conversions. But be sure to start testing campaigns to learn how to navigate through this new territory.

How do you plan to approach omnicommerce? Will you become an early adopter? Let us know in the comments.

Collaboration with the one and only April Mullen @aprildmullen