How do you balance the costs and benefits of maintaining multiple channels and platforms?

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As a multi-channel retailer, you want to reach and satisfy your customers across different platforms and devices. But managing multiple channels and platforms also comes with costs and challenges. How do you balance the benefits of expanding your presence and offering with the risks of diluting your brand and increasing your complexity? Here are some tips to help you optimize your multi-channel strategy.

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Jaime B.

Strategy & Operations | General Manager | I use data and lead teams to achieve +78% revenue growth and profitability in…

1 Define your goals and metrics

Before you invest in any channel or platform, you need to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve and how you will measure your success. Do you want to increase your sales, loyalty, awareness, or engagement? How will you track your performance and compare it across channels and platforms? What are the key indicators of customer satisfaction and retention? Having a consistent and realistic set of goals and metrics will help you align your efforts and resources with your desired outcomes.

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Jaime B.

Strategy & Operations | General Manager | I use data and lead teams to achieve +78% revenue growth and profitability in 8 months | Ex-DoorDash, Ex-Walmart
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I'll speak from the perspective of restaurants engaging in omni-channel. The goal of selling food through 3rd Party Delivery provider (DoorDash, GrubHub, etc.) is increase sales, drive brand awareness, and acquire new customers distinct from your traditional "bread-and-butter" segment. Margin is not goal as most delivery channels are margin decretive. The biggest obstacle to setting omni-channel metrics lives in the getting the right data from 3P to merge with internal Point-of-Sale (POS) data. That's an advantage to engaging in white label options offered by most 3P, data ownership. The best data point is traceable tender, in other words, credit card info. Owning transaction data is the first step to robustly measuring impact.

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2 Understand your customers and segments

Not all customers are the same, and not all channels and platforms are equally suited for them. You need to understand your customers' preferences, behaviors, needs, and expectations on each channel and platform. How do they discover, research, compare, buy, and review your products or services? How do they interact with your brand and your competitors? How do they switch between channels and platforms? By segmenting your customers based on their channel-specific characteristics, you can tailor your offer, content, design, and communication to match their needs and wants.

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Jaime B.

Strategy & Operations | General Manager | I use data and lead teams to achieve +78% revenue growth and profitability in 8 months | Ex-DoorDash, Ex-Walmart
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My advice in segmenting customers is to focus on behavioral based segmentation as opposed to demographic segmentation. Think through the customers decisions to make a purchase and channel choice. Yes, age might play in buying online over a physical store, but the act of buying online or in-store is the most clear signal. One of the ways I used behavior to drive appropriate segmentation was in an effort to increase ROI of promotions. I targeted customers that abandoned their cart at the checkout page. Albeit this signal is rough, this approach was used to help improve customer retention by targeting soon to churn customers that indicated price was a detractor to purchasing. My business' customer retention and order rate improved!

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3 Integrate your channels and platforms

Having multiple channels and platforms does not mean having separate or isolated operations. You need to integrate your channels and platforms to provide a seamless and consistent customer experience. This means ensuring that your product information, inventory, pricing, promotions, policies, and customer service are synchronized and updated across all your touchpoints. It also means enabling your customers to move smoothly between channels and platforms, for example, by offering click-and-collect, cross-channel returns, or omnichannel loyalty programs.

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Jaime B.

Strategy & Operations | General Manager | I use data and lead teams to achieve +78% revenue growth and profitability in 8 months | Ex-DoorDash, Ex-Walmart
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Channel integration is essential because customers are hyper-aware of price differentials among competing channels. Customers also expect seamless service from every purchase channel. In the food delivery industry there are many software packages that drive channel integration including Toast, Otter, Checkmate, etc. Channel integration is important because otherwise restaurants are stuck using several tablets which leads to poor service and expensive logistics. More so, menu changes and pricing changes can become nightmare-ish for large chains and franchised restaurants. This is not even factoring consolidating channel performance to understand true P&L results. To ensure consistency the best outcome is Point-of-Sales (POS) integration.

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4 Optimize your resources and processes

Managing multiple channels and platforms requires more than just adding new tools or platforms. You need to optimize your resources and processes to ensure efficiency, quality, and scalability. This means allocating your budget, staff, time, and space according to the potential and performance of each channel and platform. It also means streamlining your workflows, systems, and data to avoid duplication, errors, or gaps. And it means adopting best practices, standards, and guidelines to maintain your brand identity and quality across all your channels and platforms.

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5 Test and learn from your results

The multi-channel landscape is constantly evolving, and so are your customers and competitors. You need to test and learn from your results to keep improving your multi-channel strategy. This means experimenting with new channels, platforms, features, or formats to see what works and what doesn't. It also means analyzing your data, feedback, and reviews to identify your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. And it means adapting your goals, metrics, segments, integration, and optimization based on your findings and insights.

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