“Every Shopping Move You Make, We’ll Be Helping You”
In a rapidly interconnected world, shopping strategy isn’t a “one-size-fits-all” situation anymore. The future of commerce happens in multiple touchpoints with e-commerce being a hub that signals whether a decision to purchase will be made or not.
The multiple touchpoints in question stem from the notion of Total Commerce, which, according to dentsu Indonesia’s “Group Commerce Director” Maria Morozova during a fruitful session at dentsu Connect, is a “synergy between online to offline (o2o) commerce acquisition and retention” that makes up a cohesive, full-funnel service.
Consumer’s path to shop encompasses two important questions that every marketeer should ask: when? and where? Both of which are rooted in time-led and frictionless navigation. No one wants to wait long for a set of groceries to be sent directly to their homes anymore and no one wants to search for hours looking for the best deal when they could use said the time for literally anything else.
Accompanied by Antoinne de Carbonnel, Chief Commercial Officer at Gojek; Arief Teguh, Head of Business Solutions at aCommerce; and Jan Oudeman, CEO at Grivy, Maria discussed pressing topics centering around how one drives successful omnichannel marketing to secure offline-online synergy and seamless consumer experience.
The Essence of the Online to Offline (O2O) Campaign
There’s no denying that the pivotal growth for many retailers during and predictably post-pandemic is online-to-offline e-commerce. According to research done by Shopify, “87% of shoppers conduct online research before making purchases (up from 71% a year prior), channelling even a small percentage of their research to your offline store would represent massive revenue potential.”.
Antoine de Carbonnel saw that potential and decided to leverage GoTo’s vast online-to-offline ecosystem in an attempt to follow their prospecting consumers throughout their shopping journey.
“We target users offline through digital out-of-home and retarget them online to do action based on a personalized campaign driven by our app while measuring the complete attribution” he explained when asked to give a tangible example of how he activated the Online to Offline (O2O) campaign.
He also fleshed out how GoPay, a behemoth of an e-wallet that helps the payment aspect of the whole Gojek app—and now can be used for purchases on Tokopedia—by taking advantage of the availability of data signals can also be utilized to craft certain audiences segmentation that drives the accuracy of GoTo-related campaigns
Speaking of data itself, the Online to Offline (O2O) campaign requires the vast usage of data points. However, moreover than not, these data points aren’t necessarily usable let alone integrated to leverage.
Jan Oudeman responded to this issue by pointing out the importance of a solid data strategy that puts great emphasis on quality. “Data can be a blessing but it’s also a disaster if its high quantity can’t be used. Therefore, user validation needs to be imposed on our ways of acquiring data.”.
Jan highlights that with the advancement of technology, conventional ways of collecting leads that demand audiences to fill out forms may not be an end-all-be-all approach anymore. We need to create a system that can automatically examine whether those data are valid and it all starts with a simple login to that system to determine the accuracy.
This system can be transmogrified into any third-party partner, for instance, their WhatsApp account. The next step is not to have those data sit in a silo. The solution to this, according to Jan is to have a clean room that unifies two parties (for instance the telco company and the retail company). This clean room is done to fine-tune a process of unification that doesn’t jeopardize PII (Personal Identifiable Information) regulation.
“Putting those data together and identifying the behavioural aspects of the audience’s offline and online is where the magic happens,” concludes Maria.
The Roles of Enablers in the Age of Total Commerce
“Data is critical for distribution strategy” said Arief Teguh. “80% of demand coming from Java Island,” this kind of fact could be the foundation of where an enabler applies a distribution especially when it comes to cost delivery that would inevitably impact profit-related metrics like GMV (Gross Merchandise Value).
While Antoine’s point of view articulated Online to Offline (O2O) from the marketing perspective and Jan’s focused more on the significance of data points to drive growth in commerce, Arief looked at the forceful relationship between shrewd distribution and cost-delivery that falls under sensitivity analysis in which analyzing different values of a series of independent variables result in a precise dependent variable under certain conditions.
Arief and his aCommerce team then came up with a feature called Multi-Warehouse fulfilment where they have a single store in the marketplace that helps retailers provide their customers with their purchased products from the closest warehouse regardless of where the latter made such purchase.
This exercise proved effective at improving CVR, GMV, and overall distributions of the order. They piggybacked the existing supply chain infrastructure rather than establishing new infrastructure for e-commerce. They utilized the networks that every warehouse possesses and collaborated to turbo-charge the overall distribution strategy.
The O2O journeys won’t be complete with the management of synergized online and offline SKUs. From the enablers’ perspective, having the same SKU between two touchpoints is important. Retailers can’t differentiate, they have to minimize the differentiation as much as possible to create more seamlessness when audiences look up the brand online and offline.
Ultimately, implementing a successful Total Commerce lies in the integration of commerce technologies and multiple selling channels that are empowered with a strong distribution strategy. All of these need to be under the singular purpose of connecting with the customers whatever moves they make, be it online and offline, when deciding to try a product.
Dentsu Total Commerce, is our solution for global reach combined with end-to-end business solutions. Our integrated capabilities help brands meet customers with seamless, shoppable experiences. Learn more about dentsu Total Commerce here.