Incorporating an omnichannel strategy for your business allows you to integrate offline and online channels. The seamless integration between these channels offers customers a smooth and consistent experience. However, to measure the impact of omnichannel strategies, you must use omnichannel KPIs (Key Performance Indicators).
The seamless integration of channels makes it difficult for marketers to track and measure the performance and impact of each channel separately.
The information you get from different touchpoints can be overwhelming. So, to retrieve meaningful insights from the collected data, you need to use omnichannel metrics.
In this article, I will be talking about the role of metrics in omnichannel marketing. We will also look at the most important KPIs to measure performance in omnichannel approach.
What are Omnichannel Metrics?
Omnichannel metrics allow you to measure the performance of omnichannel campaigns. With the help of these metrics, you can determine whether your strategies persuaded the customers to take the required action or not. The value generated through those actions is also measured by using these metrics.
The omnichannel KPIs may differ according to your campaign goals and objectives. For instance, the metrics for measuring engagement differ from those for measuring conversion rates. Metrics like CTR (Click-through Rate) can be tracked to measure the conversion rate of different channels.
The metrics and channels also differ as per your industry and business type. For example, financial firms may be interested in measuring customer retention rates. On the other hand, real-estate companies may be more interested in measuring the effectiveness of their communication strategies. So, they may track metrics like response rates that measure the number of users who respond to their communication efforts.
What is the Importance of KPIs in Omnichannel?
The words like instincts or gut feeling do not have any relevance in business. The support of numerical data is necessary when developing strategy or making business decisions.
In omnichannel marketing, each channel generates a ton of data daily. Measuring the performance of business decisions and actions across channels is a complicated task.
The highly connected channels in omnichannel marketing make detecting the reason for increased sales or retention rates difficult. For example, improved brand visibility through online marketing may increase footfall in your physical stores.
However, with KPIs, it is possible to measure the performance of omnichannel strategies. You must retrieve data from multiple touchpoints and handle it with care. You may need highly sophisticated data management apps to achieve this.
While implementing omnichannel marketing strategies, you must identify the channels that work best for your business. Also, identify the channels most customers prefer when communicating with your brand.
Some KPIs can be outdated in the context of omnichannel marketing. Therefore, you need omnichannel KPIs that consider the interactive and integrated nature of omnichannel strategies.
New technologies like social listening tools can be implemented to track customers’ behavior across the channels. Along with the technologies and tools, you must also identify the omnichannel metrics data that suit your business goals.
Also Read : What are the Challenges of Implementing an Omnichannel Strategy?
The Crucial Omnichannel Metrics
Considering the above viewpoints, these are the key metrics to measure omnichannel performance:
1. Customer Engagement
Customer engagement is one of the most crucial KPIs when it comes to the measurable factors for omnichannel marketing success. It determines whether or not the customers are interested in interacting with your posts, campaigns, and content strategies.
Likes, comments, and shares are the most common engagement metrics. These metrics help you to know the customers that interact often with your brand.
However, omnichannel marketing needs more specific metrics to determine engagement levels. For instance, the length of the visit is a metric that indicates the level of engagement across the channels.
The conversion rate of product recommendations is another important metric. It reflects the conversion rate from one touchpoint to another.
For instance, a customer visits the physical store to buy a product after getting a discount code via email marketing. In this case, the conversion rate of product recommendations will come into the picture.
2. Brand Loyalty
Brand loyalty measures how loyal your customers are when it comes to promoting your products or buying them. For example, advocacy is a metric that shows how willing your customers are to promote your brand via online reviews, social media, or word-of-mouth.
CLTV (Customer Lifetime Value) shows the value generated by a customer across their buying journeys. Metrics like revisit rate or frequency reveal how many customers revisit your store or website after purchasing your products once.
3. Customer Satisfaction
Customer satisfaction, or CSAT, determines how satisfied or dissatisfied your customers are with your products/services. Usually, a survey question is asked to assess customer satisfaction.
The customers are asked to rate their experience on a scale of 0 to 10. The worst experience may result in a ‘0’ rating, whereas the best experience may result in a ‘10’ rating. The average of all the scores will be your final CSAT score.
4. Cross-Channel Consistency
If the customer experience is inconsistent across the channels, it may result in fewer conversions. So, you must track the metrics that reflect your cross-channel consistency.
For example, the cross-channel conversion rate determines how many people were converted into customers across your marketing channels.
5. Channel Contribution
Channel contribution is a simple metric that measures the performance of individual channels. You can use this omnichannel metric to determine the best-performing channel across the touchpoints.
Channel contribution is calculated as a percentage. It is calculated by dividing the total revenue generated by a channel by the total revenue generated by all the channels.
6. Social Media Interactions
The level of customer interaction achieved by each social media app or network can be measured using certain metrics. These metrics can be listed under social media interactions.
Likes/reactions, shares/retweets, brand tags, brand mentions, customer engagement rates, etc., are some of the key components of social media interactions. Some of the key omnichannel KPIs in this regard include:
- Website traffic generated by social apps or networks
- Number of followers and likes generated by social media platforms
- Positive sentiment generated by social apps
7. Website Traffic and Bounce Rates
One of the KPIs to measure performance in the omnichannel approach is website traffic. The total number of people who visited your website in a month, week, or specific period is called website traffic.
Bounce rate refers to the number of people who left your website after visiting. It is calculated by dividing the count of one-page visits by total visits.
Suppose that 25 out of 100 visitors left your website without making any moves or actions. In this case, the bounce rate of your website is 25%. A higher bounce rate indicates an issue in your website’s UI and functionality.
8. Email Open and Click Rates
Email open rate refers to the number of people who viewed your email upon receiving it. It helps to measure the impact of your emails’ preview and subject line. The formula for calculating the open rate is given below:
Open rate = Number of people who opened the email/ total number of emails sent – total number of bounced emails
The bounced emails are subtracted from the total number of emails to get an accurate open rate. Also, unique opens are considered while measuring the open rate. If the same person visits an email twice, it is still considered a single open.
The click rate refers to the number of people who clicked on the links integrated into your emails. A good click rate for an email depends upon the industry to which your business belongs.
Both open and click rates are crucial for measuring the impact of your email marketing campaigns.
9. Repeat Purchases and Retention Rates
The repeat purchase rate, aka repeat customer rate, is one of the critical omnichannel KPIs to analyze customer retention of brands. It reflects the tendency of the customers to visit their stores or e-commerce sites after making a purchase.
The repeat purchase rate is calculated as a percentage. The below formula can be used to calculate it:
Repeat purchase rate = Number of repeat customers/ Total customers
Multiply the final answer by 100 to get the repeat purchase rate as a percentage.
The customer retention rate gives you an idea of how many customers you have retained over a period. It gives you an idea of whether or not your omnichannel strategies are helping you retain customers over the long term.
The formula to calculate the customer retention rate is given below:
CRR = (R – N)/T
R – Number of retained customers
N – Number of new customers
T – Number of customers you had at the start of a period
Now multiply the final result by 100 to get CRR as a percentage.
10. Net Promoter Score (NPS)
NPS or Net Promote Score reflects the probability of your customers recommending your products/services to their friends and relatives.
A survey question is asked of the customers to determine NPS. For example, on a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our products/services to your friends and acquaintances?
A ‘10’ reflects that the customers are satisfied with your products/services and are willing to promote them. A ‘0’ reflects that the customers are unhappy with your products/services. Now, the final NPS is calculated by adding all the scores.
If you want to unveil the reason for their scores, you can include follow-up questions in the survey.
11. Customer Advocacy and User-Generated Content
Metrics like NPS can be used to measure customer advocacy. User-generated content like reviews and testimonials also show whether the customers are promoters, detractors, or passives.
A neutral review suggests that the customers are in the passive category. They neither promote your brand nor discourage others from buying your products/services.
A positive review suggests that the customer will promote your offerings to others. A negative review indicates the customer wants others to avoid your products/services. Brands usually ask customers to rate their products/services while posting a review. It gives them a clear idea of the level of customer advocacy.
12. Channel-Specific Conversion Rates
Channel-specific conversation rate is one of the key metrics for omnichannel sales measurement. It gives you a clear idea of your best-performing channels from the sales point of view. The formula for calculating the channel-specific conversion rate is given below:
Channel-Specific Conversion Rate = (C/V) x 100
C – Total conversions generated by the channel
V – Total visitors generated by the channel
You must first define your conversion goals to determine the channel-specific conversion rate. The goals may include buying products, signing up on your website, or downloading your mobile app. Once you define these goals, you can track them using data analytics tools.
13. Customer Journey Insights
You can use a metric or set of metrics to get insights into the customer experience across the touchpoints. These metrics can be broadly classified into customer journey insights.
Some important omnichannel KPIs used to analyze customer journeys include cost per subscription, ROI (Return On Investment), and CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost). These metrics also reveal whether the omnichannel strategies are working or not.
Challenges in Measuring Omnichannel Metrics
Setting omnichannel goals and tracking them is the key challenge faced by brands. There are so many metrics for omnichannel marketing that you can get easily confused. First, you must pick and track a few metrics on specific channels.
For example, you can measure your website’s conversion rates, revenue per visitor, and other metrics. Gradually, you can implement them for other customer touchpoints.
Linking customer data is another challenge you may face while tracking the performance of your omnichannel objectives.
For instance, you may track your online users, but when it comes to offline channels, you may not have the same kind of data. Here is where loyalty cards can be used to collect customer information like mobile number, email, etc.
Also, you may not have enough technological support to track KPIs for omnichannel performance analysis. In this case, you must look for platforms that help businesses to manage their omnichannel strategies. You might want to take a giant leap for defining omnichannel metrics. However, if you do not have a sound channel ecosystem, implementing one might be challenging.
For example, if your e-commerce website does not offer a smooth UI, it may affect your overall omnichannel strategy. Similarly, if you have a well-maintained and functional e-commerce site but have no physical location to serve offline customers, it too could create hurdles. Develop a strong ecosystem comprising multiple offline and online channels before implementing and measuring omnichannel strategies.
Lack of attribution could arise by not knowing the exact sources of leads. So, mapping customer journeys accurately is also essential to maintain data accuracy.
Also Read : Three Crucial Steps To The Omnichannel Customer Journey
Conclusion
I hope you now understand which are the key omnichannel performance measurement metrics. Irrespective of the metrics you want to measure, leveraging technology to track the customer journey is a must. Here is where I would suggest you use platforms like Konnect Insights.
Konnect Insights is the leading omnichannel customer experience management suite. It comes with a range of data analytical and social listening tools. With this platform, you can easily track customer journeys and implement your omnichannel strategies. To learn more about its offerings, you can visit its official site today!
