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The Four Pillars of Omni-Channel Strategy

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article | The Four Pillars of Omni-Channel StrategyAn effective omnichannel strategy involves orchestration, connection, and fulfillment. Let’s take a closer look at each. What are they? If you’re unsure, here are four essential pieces to consider. First, you should tailor your marketing strategy to your customers’ preferences. Then you can curate an experience around those preferences. 74% of customers prefer to shop online at sites that cater to their interests, while nearly half leave a website that doesn’t provide a curated experience. Personalized experiences make customers feel like they’re a valuable part of your business, and orchestration is part of this process.

Connectivity

The ability to create an integrated experience that spans multiple channels is a key component of a successful omnichannel strategy. For example, omnichannel platforms can integrate all aspects of a customer’s shopping experience, including past purchases, social media activity, email lists, and Internet of Things data. The data from these sources can help automate customer service and marketing while allowing for two-way communication.

As consumer preferences evolve, companies must be flexible enough to keep up. While diversification through every channel isn’t ideal, it is essential for an Omni-channel strategy. For example, Disney pays close attention to its website. Not only does it support all channels, but it also makes the site user-friendly for any device. In addition, it has a new Magic Band program that allows Disneyland and Walt Disney World visitors to unlock their hotel rooms and enter the parks using the same account.

A good omni-channel strategy has many moving parts, but all of them should function as a cohesive system. Ideally, each touchpoint should offer a distinctive experience and build upon previous interactions. The omni-channel strategy also should empower users to make decisions, such as when to react to a specific type of customer behavior. Further, it should enable users with the right information and make decisions based on that information.

Operations

An effective omnichannel strategy is dependent on several different factors. It requires the ability to reach the broadest possible audience with a single marketing message. Still, it also relies on a comprehensive understanding of the effects of the omnichannel strategy across all channels. The four pillars of the omnichannel strategy are visibility, measurement, personalization, and optimization. This article will look at the four pillars of omnichannel marketing and how they will work together to help you maximize your marketing efforts.

Your omnichannel strategy must be effective at integrating different channels to maximize sales and customer satisfaction. While you may have an existing multi-channel strategy, you must determine the channels you want to reach. Ultimately, your goal is to increase your customers’ lifetime value and loyalty. To do this, you must know your customers’ needs and understand how they engage with you. For example, if a customer visits your website from their mobile phone, they should have the same level of service they’d get if they were to visit your store via desktop.


Fulfillment

A successful omni-channel strategy is built upon the premise that consumers are increasingly accustomed to various channels and ways to purchase products. For example, a recent study from the National Retail Federation (NRF) revealed that 83% of shoppers want to be able to purchase products wherever and whenever they want. An omni-channel strategy recognizes these changes in consumer behavior and puts the technology and operations in place to meet customers where they want to shop.

The successful omni-channel strategy includes the integration of various fulfillment channels. The first pillar is order orchestration, while the second is fulfillment. Both require efficient fulfillment operations. A successful fulfillment operation can boost revenue and delight customers. BigCommerce’s shipping and fulfillment solutions make the process seamless for all parties. Customers expect to receive their orders quickly and with minimum effort. Moreover, shipping and fulfillment are essential components of the customer experience.

Behavioral triggers

A successful omnichannel strategy is a multi-channel marketing process. A marketing automation tool can help you track user behavior in order to provide targeted content and services. The data generated by this tool can be used to segment the user base and optimize customer engagement strategies. You can also set up triggered campaigns across channels, including SMS and email. Personalized messages and alerts are sent to users at the moments when they expect them.

Managing various channels simultaneously is difficult and time-consuming, but the rewards are immense. Increasing revenues, customer loyalty, and brand recognition require an omnichannel approach. Moreover, omnichannel marketing requires a complete view of the online and offline customer journey. Behavioral triggers are just one of the four pillars of a successful omni-channel strategy.

5 Steps To A Running A Better Business

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article |Running a Business|5 Steps To A Running A Better BusinessBeing a business owner is a great career to have, but the position can also be stressful and overwhelming at times. What will help you succeed is if you don’t ever get too comfortable in one place and are always striving to better yourself and your business.

The five steps below will give you more insight into what you can be doing on a regular basis to improve your office environment and run a smoother operation overall. Set goals and track your progress so you can see what changes are working well and what you should be doing more of going forward.

Monitor Your Employee’s Actions

Ultimately, what goes on under the roof of your business is your responsibility and people will be turning to you for answers on all sorts of matters. Take the time not only to get to know your employees on a personal and individual basis but also be proactive and continuously monitor your employee’s actions. Should you suspect criminal activity in your office, then contact a local law firm that can help you win your case and prosecute the offender.

Track Your Finances

How successful your business is over the long-term essentially depends on how profitable you are or not. Be aware of what money is going out and coming in by consistently tracking and monitoring your finances. What you want to avoid is encountering surprises when it comes to your money and budgets. You may even want to consider hiring a financial director to help you with this task if you’re too busy attending to other important matters.

Find A Partner or Mentor

You can run a better business by bouncing ideas off of other people who you trust. One option is to hire a partner to help you run your company or a mentor who can advise you on how to approach your future. Keep in mind you don’t have to do all the work yourself and that sometimes having an outside or different perspective can be helpful.

Delegate out Tasks

One way to free up some of your time so you can focus on the more important and higher level business initiatives is to learn how to delegate tasks to your employees. What’s most important is that you trust them to get the job done right and avoid micromanaging them and acting like you don’t think they can handle the assignment you give them. You’ll be able to run a better business when the work is evenly distributed to the appropriate people based on skill level.

Request Information in Writing

While it’s okay to make verbal deals, it’s essentially not a done deal until you have it in writing. Get in the habit of documenting all that goes on with your business, vendors, and clients, so you always have records of your conversations and contracts. You will be able to run a better business when you’re wise about making sure all that is said on any given day is written down, especially if it’s important to you and how your business functions.

Keeping Your Business Up And Running

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StrategyDriven Entrepreneurship Article | Managing Your Business |Keeping Your Business Up And RunningPerhaps the most fundamental axiom of business life is that if you hope to generate revenue as a business, you must first be operating. This is so profoundly obvious that we usually don’t even consider it. Sure, your business having to stay open makes perfect sense. But unfortunately, there are little issues that can crop up from time to time to prevent this from happening in the way you might intend. Some might be twists of fate or difficulties that you weren’t expecting. Some downtime might be due to your own large mistake, or a plan gone wrong. Others might be more in how you have decided to run your business, such as what services or utilities you have opted to help your business through its lifespan.

Keeping your business up and running is an important thing to take care of, but perhaps so obvious that we fail to keep all the considerations close to hand in order for it to remain that way. With the following advice, we hope you find a range of methods or potential tips to help adjust certain decisions that might be threatening the temporary closure of your company, even for an unwarranted day or two. After all, time is money. Alternatively you could use this list as a confirmation you are doing everything quite brilliantly. That works too.

Utilities

It’s essentially important to consider your utility needs as a business. Leaks can cause damage, and electricity downtime can affect your entire operation, particularly if you host your website in-house. Without certain basic utilities, it is impossible for you to call your staff into work. Even something as simple as no bathroom access can legally put you in a grey area when asking your employees to come into work. This is where you need the help of an emergency electrician or tradesman, someone on call most of the time and able to find solid solutions to your problem. When you find one as suggested, you should understand that they are worth their weight in gold. Show them around your entire office and give them a working understanding of your office utilities layout, such as your wiring network or problem plumbing. This can give them a good idea of how to work should they be asked back again for an emergency job.

Pay for complete solutions, rather than quick fixes. Issues must not be allowed to repeat themselves, even if it’s something as simple as a leak in your storage basement. On top of this, be sure to have a competent reporting system in-house to ensure that maintenance requests are taken with the utmost speed and priority. This could potentially help you avoid further office downtime.

Health & Safety Code

Your business might be functioning well to a degree, but it’s not just restaurants that need to hit excellent results when it comes to the health and safety code they follow. An office is a co-habited space, and as such can bring with it all the human worries that usually follow a large group of people, no matter how well behaved and civilized they seem to be. Scheduling bi-yearly health and safety meetings can help your staff continually remain updated with the best practices for personal space tidying, for wearing protective gear in construction environments, and any other regulations you feel important to self-impose. It sounds like a harsh reality, but a business must never be afraid of imposing rules to sustain safety, no matter how arbitrary or small they seem to be. If there’s a brand of soup known for exploding hot liquid in the microwave, it might be a good idea to impose a ban on that particular brand to avoid injuries. It’s often the little things that matter.

But of course, you would also do well to schedule regular pest control maintenance measures with the use of a professional. Any leak, wiring difficulty or other construction failing must result in an evacuation of that area. You must take extra special measures of control if renovating or constructing part of a new building or office. After all, if you take care of your staff, they can continue working in their operational capacity day after day. Be sure to inspect your business often to see where these issues might arise, and to catch them early.

Opening Times

The opening times of your business are important to consider, specifically if running a business that doesn’t need to follow the standard 9-5 structure. You might be running a retail store or a restaurant, for example. Opening times are important to consider. It might be that you don’t enter your salon until 11am every day and open up shop then, which is comfortable for you. It gives you time for a cup of coffee after dropping the children off at school, or might give you an extra hour in bed each morning. But you live in a populated area, an area where anyone could enter from 9am. This way, you might be missing a few worthwhile customers. For a simple convenience, the funding of your business might be missing out.

Sometimes, keeping your business up and running means taking those small personal sacrifices to take opportunity where you can. It might not feel like the nicest thing to do, but can surely help you build the reputation you deserve. This helps you meet the demand and need of the local environment, no matter if you’re a restaurant/bar now serving breakfast, or someone realizing that them always being closed on Tuesdays, no matter how long this has gone on for, makes no real sense when there’s money to be made.

Consider your opening times if you have the freedom to, and don’t be afraid to tweak them around a little. It could open you up to the financial lifeblood your business might be looking for, even if it means staying open an extra hour a day.

With these tips, you’re sure to keep your business up and running successfully.

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StrategyDriven Business Operations Management Forum

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Business operations processes support those individuals performing the business’ production functions.  These processes provide, support, and maintain the personnel, processes, technologies, and materials enabling all organizational functions.

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