How O2O Can Benefit Your Business Critically!
The COVID-19 pandemic has driven the utilization of e-commerce around the globe to an all-time high. While at the same time offline retailers have been struggling to get footfall back. We recognized that digitalization is taking the world online.
Presently, physical storefront businesses are being forced to shift, or risk biting the dust. As we move from digital and traditional markets to a combination that offers the best of both types of commerce. If you have a physical shop or business, you need to know what O2O is, as this is especially critical to get it to market, in current pandemic times.
What is O2O?
O2O means “Offline to Online” and also “Online To Offline”, indicating the two-way flow between the online and the offline physical world. According to Wikipedia, O2O is a phrase used in digital marketing to describe systems enticing consumers within a digital environment to make purchases of goods and services from physical businesses.
For example, consumers could click on an ad online and be driven to visit the website. Or, they could be in a physical store but chose to purchase items online for a variety of reasons (selection, price, convenience, etc). There are many aspects to O2O, and businesses are increasingly challenged to satisfy consumers’ expectations of a frictionless flow.
O2O is more often characterized as online to offline because this strategy permits a company to expand its audience using a wider network of potential customers. However, the truth is that the customer journey can work either way.
Combining Offline and Online Retail
Today, consumers would prefer not to choose between online and offline shopping. So that retailers have to stop treating online and offline shopping as an either/or scenario. Online and offline shopping both have their advantages. Online allows customers to shop any time and anywhere that they like. Offline, however, enables customers to have a real experience by trying or testing the product that they are interested in.
Offline to online retail comes in numerous forms and serves many purposes. Encourage customers to use stores in particular ways, or to exploit new services, or to make your brand distinctive from your competitors. Ideally, customers would want to mix and match their two different shopping experiences to satisfy their needs. Combining online and offline shopping might be the answer for retailers to give their customers the best shopping experience.
Benefits of O2O
These are the top 5 benefits of O2O that can most likely be beneficial for your business:
- Online booking is a form of electronic customer reservation system. This technique has shown an increase in overall customers’ spending, simply because when the customers have already indicated an interest in your product or service, they would most likely show up and claim them.
- Customer journey is about understanding your clients, how they behave while visiting and browsing through your website, and what you can do to improve their experience so they keep coming back. With constant changes in innovations and technology and the new approach by which people purchase products or services online, it is essential to plan and foresee how a customer will act every step of the way.
- Providing personalized incentives that can cater to individual customers preferences is difficult in the offline environment, but it is very possible online. For example, you can run online surveys and in return reward your customer their preferred gift code as an ethical bribe for their participation. They can then visit your shop (either online or physical store) to redeem the gift code. You not only increase your brand awareness, but also let your qualified prospects have an option to experience your physical storefront.
- With a strong Online presence of your business in the digital space, it’s easier to zero in onto your ideal prospects by using SEO, SEM. It’s also a remarketing system that allows you to capture the casual browsers who may have engaged your business lightly on a social media comment thread. You can then remarket to them, because they have seen your marketing in another place even if they do not convert immediately, they can soon become your prospects.
- Customers want a simple and easy shopping experience. So by having a store locator and an online inventory manager on your website, it will cut down on lost prospects and wasted trips, both of which your customers will appreciate greatly
- Online booking is a form of electronic customer reservation system. This technique has shown an increase in overall customers’ spending, simply because when the customers have already indicated an interest in your product or service, they would most likely show up and claim them.
With all the physical restrictions during this crisis period, positioning your business online for customers and sales becomes part of an essential factor for survival. Failing to embrace O2O means losing a very big avenue to get potential leads and sales. And as the situation wears on, with many countries being smacked with a second wave of lockdown, more businesses will have to close down if they do not transform digitally and pivot in time. Businesses that embrace O2O, get an unfair advantage as they are in the forefront to provide a smooth Online and Offline shopping experience for their current customers and attract new ones, which is ever more critical now.