Retailers face the challenge of targeting today's "omnishoppers." Inflation has accelerated the trend toward multichannel comparison-shopping in-store and via online, social media and mobile. In fact, The Harvard Business Review has reported a whopping 73% of retail consumers use multiple channels to shop. According to Nielsen, these omnishoppers will spend over $600 billion on retail purchases by 2025. They already spend 4% more than single-channel shoppers on ecommerce sites and 10% more on every in-store trip.
To capture these valuable buyers, retailers will need to market via multiple channels, too. The average engagement rate of campaigns using three or more channels was 18.96% across all channels, while single-channel campaigns earned only 5.4%, per a 2019 retailer study.
While many retail marketers have boosted online at the expense of offline advertising in the past, online marketing faces new consumer data restrictions, falling engagement rates and rising costs (a 2022 study showed the average CPM for Meta was up 61% year-over-year), and that suggests a rebalancing of the marketing mix is in order to cost-effectively woo omnishoppers in 2023 via a bump in offline, including direct mail. Note that The Association of National Advertisers' 2022 report shows direct mail with an average ROI of 112%, email with 93%, paid search 88%, social media 81% and digital display 79%.
At the same time, retailers will need to work harder at integrating campaigns and data to create a seamless customer journey across channels, avoiding the kinds of silos that generate customer complaints. For direct mail and omnichannel retail marketing support, see https://www.acculist.com/retailers/
