How To Support Your Marketing Campaign With Operational Integration

How To Support Your Marketing Campaign With Operational Integration

So you’ve collected emails, paid for your marketing strategy, and have successfully built an online presence. Your brand is starting to gain visibility in the market – so what happens next?

One answer to this question that is inevitably offered by fellow attendees and speakers at the ecommerce meetups and conferences both I and VL OMNI attend regularly is that companies should optimize various advertising methods to accelerate sales on their ecommerce site. This push to optimize ad dollars comes with good reasoning: after all, how can someone buy your product if they don’t know where it lives in the never-ending sea of online information?

But ads aren’t the end-all, be-all in today’s customer journey: it’s much more complex than just throwing money at Google or Facebook to push your message or products.

Online advertising so often takes the main stage when merchants discuss the customers’ experience and their path to purchase that it’s almost laughably predictable. But the customer’s experience doesn’t end at advertising, and it often does not even begin with the ad anymore. Nor does the customer journey end after they’ve made the purchase and handed you their money. The customer experience ends when they receive the product and are happy with the overall experience, and even then, masterful merchants know that where one purchase ends is the opportunity for the next.

When you really dig down and think about the customer experience from a macro level, it’s easy to see that ad spending is a one-dimensional element in the multidimensional world of customer experiences and journeys. And if you’re really savvy, you’ll also notice that there are a million ways and ample time for that experience to go off the rails… And ad spend helps with none of this.

So why do merchants spend so much money on ads to push their brand if they’re just going to fall short when it comes to the actual delivery of the product?

The psychology behind this is pretty straight-forward: customer journeys are so complex that many brands and merchant simply don’t know where to start. Or, this has been the way they’ve always done it, and are perfectly content with keeping the status quo — even if it means slowly chipping away at your customer base and bottom line.

When it comes to the customer experience, the idea should be to create intuitive, connected advertising-to-delivery experience that empowers your customer. Marketing and advertising’s purposes are to drive consumer awareness for your brand at a very high level. With advertising, CPC, or other paid campaign, brands can communicate why they are different. With planning, success, and a little luck, these paid ads can create an influx of online orders.

But a brand’s image doesn’t end here, nor does the work to satisfy the customer’s purchase and experience. After a purchase is made through your ecommerce site, the customer’s experience becomes intrinsically linked to the back end processes of your company. The speed and accuracy of your order to fulfillment process will absolutely impact the customer’s experience.

Until the order ends up in the customer’s hands, there are many ways you can potentially fail your customer and unintentionally derail the customer journey, leaving a negative experience as your final calling card. It’s important that you show your customer that you are beyond the promises from your ads – you need to show them you care about their purchase and validate their trust in your company to fulfill delivery promises. From here you can drive brand loyalty, encourage repeat business, and create social proof from positive reviews from champions of your brand – all of which can organically increase sales for your company. Advertising is simply the first step in a long journey toward customer satisfaction. But if you truly want to grow your business, now is the time to take those ad spends and turn them into positive experiences through the right technology stack combined with strategic data integration to tie it all together.

With VL OMNI ’s integration platform, you can pass order and shipment data seamlessly and with complete accuracy in customer information. You’ll never fail due to the inevitable human error factor as the information transfers between your application stack are made automatically and with complete accuracy. With VL OMNI’s platform, you’ll also avoid compounding the issue of human error further as volume greatly increases by a successful advertising campaign.

You can’t discount the speed of the VL OMNI platform either! As VL OMNI can process information at amazing speeds, you can rest assured that any sudden burst of volume from advertising campaigns will not be held back by your operational processes. In fact, very much the opposite occurs with a keen integration strategy in place. Instead, you’ll have a data integration between your ecommerce store and your back end applications that ensure your customer will receive their products in good order while providing your team freedom and time to grow your business.  Our platform creates high-velocity integrations, with all information is received and processed in almost real time, giving your business a competitive advantage over any looking to process information manually. You’ll never miss orders and you’ll ensure accuracy in delivery.

By the end, your customers will be satisfied with much more than just the branding, company ethos, and a slick advertising campaign. They’ll be truly satisfied with your company as you’ll show them that you care about their order and experience, and continue to offer that level same level of care regardless of growth.

Ultimately, a proper integration strategy will empower your advertising campaign. After you’ve driven them to your website and convinced them to buy, your back-end integrations can begin to push that relationship to the next level. Both the advertising campaign and proper data integration work hand-in-hand and can set your business apart from the competition.

Why be like everyone else, when you can be one of the best?

Need help turning Ad spends into a great customer journey?

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