Omnichannel eCommerce marketing can help skyrocket sales. Studies show that omnichannel marketing has a purchase frequency of 250% higher than single channel marketing. Moreover, it has a 13% more order value per order. To earn the benefits of omnichannel marketing for eCommerce, it’s best to take this approach for all your marketing campaigns, including your back in stock strategy. Let’s dive deeper into how you can set up an omnichannel back in stock strategy for your Shopify store.

7 back in stock strategies for omnichannel eCommerce marketing

1. Install an automation tool

Omnichannel means the use of multiple channels and methods. And where there are many different components, it can get difficult to manage tasks. That’s where an automation tool helps.For example, imagine you’re using email, SMS, social media, web push, WhatsApp, etc. Now, if you want to share a back in stock announcement on these channels, you’d either have to do it manually or automatically.Doing it manually is time consuming and there are more chances of making mistakes. Moreover, as your subscribers lists get bigger, it would be impossible to share updates manually. You can simplify this task by installing an automation tool on your Shopify store.Install an app like Appikon Back in Stock. The app allows shoppers to sign up for restock alerts via the channel they prefer - email, SMS, web push or Facebook Messenger. It helps you recover lost sales by bringing customers back to your store via notifications and updates.

2. Segment subscribers based on their preferred channels

While it’s often overlooked, customer segmentation is one of the most important aspects of omnichannel marketing for eCommerce.Customer segmentation is the process of dividing your customers into different groups based on common characteristics. But why is it important and how does it make a difference?For starters, it helps you build a relationship with your customers. It helps market to each group in a more targeted manner. Let’s understand this with an example. Say you have customers who subscribed for notifications via email. Now, if you ignore email and only send out text message notifications, these customers might miss it or simply ignore the SMS. On the contrary, if you send the Shopify restock alert notifications to subscribers on their chosen channels, they feel good about the fact that you cared to make a note and remember. You want to make sure that you’re sending the right message to the right person on the right channel. For that, you will have to segment your subscribers. Segmentation helps provide better customer experience. This is a small way of personalizing your marketing communication, which improves ROI. Sending the right message to the right segment could increase conversion by 200%. That’s how important segmentation is.

3. Automate follow ups

When you use omnichannel marketing, you’d be using more than one channel. Infact, you’d be using many channels such as SMS, email, social media, Messenger, web push, WhatsApp, etc. Now imagine if you had to manually send follow up messages on all these channels. It would be an extremely tedious task. Moreover, as your subscribers increase, it would become impossible to manage communication manually. Marketing automation can help you overcome these challenges. However, to automate, focus more on the shopper’s journey. Let’s look at the different stages of a shopper’s journey in a back in stock strategy.

• The shopper finds a product out of stock and subscribers to restock notification
• The subscriber receives your Shopify restock alert notification
• The subscriber receives an update if the item is not going to be restocked
• When the first restock alert is unread or there’s no response
• When the subscriber takes an action after reading the restock notification
• The subscribers purchases the restocked product
• Post-purchase follow-ups such as a request for feedback, review, etc.

When you automate your Shopify restock follow-ups, you can connect customers to the next stages of their back in stock journey. With automation, you can cater to thousands of customers at the same time.

4. Integrate different channels

To maximize the impact of different channels, it’s a must to use them in tandem. When you use multiple channels, it might become difficult to maintain consistency and cohesiveness. You can overcome this challenge by integrating channels.So what does it mean to integrate channels? It refers to the strategies used to consolidate customer information and its use to provide an all-encompassing view of the customer to you, and information to your customers. Let’s understand this with an example:Your customer subscribed to restock alerts via email. However, when you sent an email notification, the customer chose to message you on live chat to ask a question about the product. You responded on live chat. The customer then hopped on to Messenger to ask another question. In this case, if your marketing channels - email, live chat and Messenger - aren’t set up to work in tandem with each other, the conversation history with this customer won’t get updated.However, if all your channels are integrated, your marketing team would have an overview of the conversation you’ve had with the customer and where they are in their purchase journey.Here are some ways in which you can integrate different channels:

• Keep the tone and language consistent
• Keep the visual elements such as color, logo, design theme, etc., consistent
• Use multiple strategies to integrate your marketing channels
• Choose strategies based on your specific requirements
• Enable different departments of your company to engage so that they all have the same information about the customer
• Use a back in stock marketing automation platform to integrate different channels

Appikon’s Back in Stock - Restock Alerts app has integrated this functionality, enabling Shopify store owners to offer a seamless back in stock strategy experience.

5. Complement your strategy with paid campaigns

Your customers are other brands’ customers, too. They might be receiving hundreds of emails and marketing messages regularly. In this crowded space, it’s not easy to get them to click open your restock alert notification. Even though you use multiple channels such as email, SMS, WhatsApp, web push, the chances of your communication getting missed are high. That is why you could also use paid marketing to optimize your back in stock omnichannel strategy. Retargeting and remarketing can help you reach these targeted subscribers. Another reason to include remarketing and retargeting is that, at times, you might not be able to restock a particular product due to some reason. In this case, instead of disappointing your subscribers, retarget them with an alternative product. For this too, you can set up paid ad campaigns. Here are some ways to include remarketing and retargeting strategies in your back in stock omnichannel campaigns:

• Include social media ads in your strategy
• Run paid ads on search engines
• Target/engage subscribers through personalized and relevant ads
• Offer incentives through ads to entice subscribers

6. Open pre-orders for stocked-out products

What if we told you it’s possible to sell an item even if it’s out of stock? Sounds crazy? But it’s possible! Here’s how – if you are 100% sure that you’d be restocking the item on a specific date, you can open pre-orders for the stocked-out product. So, along with the ‘out of stock’ and ‘notify me’ button, you can have the pre-order button.Or, you could open pre-orders as soon as you know a specific date when the products would be restocked. This way, pre-order campaigns can become a part of your larger back in stock strategy. This is one way to keep your shoppers engaged.By opening pre-orders, you are:

• Ensuring shoppers don’t leave without making purchases
• Shoppers are satisfied and buy the product they wanted
• Increasing sales and revenue
• Offering a good experience to your shoppers as they won’t have to wait or go to another store
• Able to assess the demand of the product for better inventory management

Appikon’s Pre-Order Today app makes all these tasks easy for your Shopify store and to sell out of stock products even before they get restocked.

7. Monitor, measure and optimize

eCommerce brands spend a lot of money and resources on marketing campaigns. And so, if campaigns don’t bring returns, it’s a waste of time, money and effort. This makes it important to monitor and measure your campaign performance. When you have an omnichannel marketing strategy for your Shopify store, you’d be using many different platforms. This means you’ll have to monitor all of them. If you find one channel isn’t bringing results, there are two things you could do:

1. Stop using that channel for that particular campaign
2. Make changes in the campaign for that particular channel and measure the performance again

On the other hand, if you notice that a particular channel is working and giving you great results, you can optimize it further by making changes to the campaign to see if it increases conversions.Here are a few steps to monitor and optimize your omnichannel eCommerce marketing strategy:

• Collect data from all marketing channels
• Analyze data to gather insights
• Take action such as tweaking the content, changing the design, changing keywords, offering an incentive, etc.
• Repeat the process of collecting data and analyzing on a weekly or daily basis, depending on the duration of your marketing campaign

Does your Shopify store need an omnichannel marketing strategy?

To create an effective omnichannel eCommerce marketing strategy that maximizes ROI, you need to constantly monitor its performance and optimize it. Moreover, you’ll need to keep all your channels updated and up to speed with marketing trends. To simplify this process, an automation tool like Appikon can be the differentiating factor between a good and a great back in stock campaign.Install Shopify Appikon App Today!