When it comes to brand engagement, shoppers today are highly comfortable hopping between multiple messaging channels to get what they want. The modern shopper goes through an average of six touch points per brand and consistently uses more than four service channels in a single end-to-end journey. In light of this, retailers are quickly realizing that the future of commerce is neither fully online or offline, but both.

But successful hybrid models are not simply about replicating in-person experiences in the virtual world and vice versa. Rather, it’s about having both online and offline experiences co-exist, enhance, and complement each other.

Here’s the challenge: most businesses aren’t fully equipped to meet the sudden demand for hybrid, multi-channel experiences. This goes both ways—traditional offline retailers are still finding their feet when it comes to delivering seamless online experiences, while eCommerce brands are working to fill the gap in their offline engagement.

So how do you pin down a winning multi-channel strategy that works across multiple channels and markets? Maahen Melvin, a product manager at 8x8, believes that the key to building brand equity, regardless of platform, is to connect with customers in the moments that matter most.

Centre your strategy around experience

Every customer journey is unique, especially in a region as diverse as Asia-Pacific. Whether you’re doing business in Indonesia, Thailand, or Australia, no two audiences are alike. Replicating what another company has done for its multi-channel strategy won’t necessarily deliver the same results, even if you’re both in a similar eCommerce space.

But what does always seem to resonate with customers is great experience—and the effect is cumulative. “It’s all the small experiences along the way that ultimately lead up to building customer loyalty,” explains Melvin. “This is an issue for most businesses because they tend to overlook the customer experience and go straight to targeting the customer journey.”

He emphasizes that because it’s impossible to dictate the customer journey, focusing on experience first is what allows brands to build winning engagement strategies, regardless of the communication channel. This means fostering a strong culture of ownership around delivering great customer experiences across the entire organization, rather than relegating it solely to the customer service or support team.

Prioritise your channels

Managing a multi-channel strategy is often resource-intensive. Keeping your engagement channels active and optimized requires time, energy, and finances, which prompts many business leaders to ask themselves: "Which channels should I prioritise?"

According to Melvin, “It’s not the number of channels you’re using, but whether you’re maximizing them. Focus first on the few that are going well, build on that momentum, gather data, and evaluate the pros and cons of your existing channels before you open up new ones.”

It’s easy to get caught up in the latest trends, such as social media selling or live video engagement, but if they’re not appropriate for your audience, or if they’re not adding measurable value to your business, they could be adding dead weight.

This reinforces the importance of having a strong underlying strategy before embarking on multi-channel engagement because simply having more channels is not always better. In fact, it increases the risk of one or more of them being poorly managed, which can actually weaken your customer experience and erode customer loyalty. Choosing which channels to focus on could also differ based on which market you’re engaging, so be sure to consider localization when shortlisting your selection.

Be agile with your strategy

Melvin sees many businesses making the common mistake of leaving channels to stagnate, and not revisiting or adapting outdated strategies in order to align with evolving market trends or business models.

“A long-term multi-channel strategy needs to be scalable,” Melvin points out, “so you have to keep trying new things and tweaking your strategy along the way. It’s also important to be willing to scrutinise which channels are giving you the most traction and which channels should be let go.”

But how do companies know how to re-evaluate, reconfigure, and fine-tune their engagement strategy? Look at the data points. “The customer is always giving you data. It’s just a matter of whether you’re listening or not,” Melvin says. More importantly, build that data into your ongoing processes and use it actively in your strategy. Don’t simply relegate it to a quarterly report.

Remember that it’s a two-way relationship

Brands often fall into the trap of communicating at customers instead of with them. As important as it is to get your brand messages out and have your marketing content be seen, it’s just as important to listen and collect feedback on what’s working, what’s not, and how to improve.

“Relationship-building is essential to customer retention, but if you don’t even listen to your customer, if you don’t even understand your segment, you won’t be able to achieve the kind of engagement and data that’s necessary for your strategy to work,” explains Melvin.

This relationship-centric mindset is what brings out the full benefits of multi-channel engagement that can strengthen customer loyalty. What separates a good strategy from a great one is that companies with great engagement strategies bring their customers into the fold to co-create experiences that are highly tailored and hyper-personalised. “This is especially valuable when the customer journey is extremely complex,” Melvin says, “but the key here is to bring the customer in as a peer, as a partner—with respect, not as someone beneath you.”

Shopper loyalty in Asia-Pacific is won with clear strategy and engagement

Truly seamless omnichannel experiences are essential to building powerful customer relationships that will drive business value and help move the needle for customer attraction and retention.

The fundamental need, however, is to make that online-to-offline, multi-channel transition as frictionless and connected as possible. “We tend to conflate the terms multi-channel and omnichannel, but they’re not the same,” Melvin says. “Multi-channel is engagement on multiple channels. Omnichannel is how to bring all those channels together to create a cohesive experience.”

These insights were shared at Seamless Asia 2022, a virtual conference held on 22-23 June 2022. To learn more about using multi-channel strategies to build stronger customer loyalty in eCommerce, watch the full panel recording.

8x8 Panel Discussion at Seamless Asia