Answering Your Billion-Dollar Questions: The How & Why Of Omnichannel Shoppers
Why Omnisales Data Matters in the Reshuffled Retail World
During the last 18 months, the grocery industry has evolved in several ways to meet new challenges and demands from consumers. Retailers and manufacturers around the world have been forced to rethink the traditional grocery buying process.
As of December 2019, 81% of consumers had never bought groceries online before. By May 2020, 79% of all grocery shoppers in the U.S. reported having made at least one online grocery purchase, and the impacts of the coronavirus pandemic drove online grocery sales to a peak of $7.2 billion in June 2020.
However, even before the spread of COVID-19, consumers were shifting toward multi-channel shopping habits with more e-commerce transactions and mobile app usage supplementing their brick-and-mortar purchases. The pandemic accelerated this trend, and grocers have had to quickly catch up.
Retailers and CPG manufacturers need omnichannel data to understand and navigate this behavior shift. Omnichannel data gives them a more detailed picture of who their customers are, why they make purchases in different channels, how they stack up against the competition, and what the whole market really looks like. These invaluable insights ultimately help eliminate blind spots and drive better strategic decisions.
CPG evolved its digital strategies
Regional grocers and national chains alike largely lacked the infrastructure to immediately pivot to a mostly-digital shopping experience at the onset of the pandemic last year. To make this happen and meet demand, retailers were required to invest in quality delivery drivers and partners, mobile apps, and well-functioning websites.
Grocers also changed the way they interact with customers by developing more digital touchpoints, new marketing tactics and different assortment strategies. Along with this, both manufacturers and retailers reassessed how they measure product performance in the new digital-first reality of pandemic shopping, because the tools and data sets normally used to track sales and understand shopper behavior weren't designed for the omnishopper.
Omnichannel data eliminates sales blind spots
In the uncertain retail industry that’s still being impacted by COVID-19, deftly tracking sales across different channels, keeping up with the omnishopper, and understanding the consumer behavior driving sales is challenging for brands. Traditional data sources can get confusing, and not properly differentiate between online, pickup, and delivery sales.
For the most accurate and wide-ranging coverage of the market, retailers are turning to omnisales data to track their performance. When it’s clear why sales happen in each channel, manufacturers and retailers can ultimately spend less time stitching together complex data from different sources. They can instead spend that time strategizing how to maximize growth and profitability.
With straightforward numbers that show the whole picture, sales blind spots are eliminated and a business can better understand how it compares to competitors in the category.
Find your solution in the shopper
Following the consumer along every step of the retail journey is crucial to truly understanding the omnishopper in today’s evolving environment. This helps retailers improve their assortment strategies for each channel and decide which products and brands to offer where. Omnisales data also provides insights into which fulfillment methods may be working best for a retailer, and how to approach promotions by channel.
For manufacturers, the benefit of omnisales data lies in baseline product performance. If the brand knows which retail channels their products perform best in, they can devote more resources to expanding distribution and upgrading pricing or promotion strategies within those channels.
For deeper insights about how retailers and CPG manufacturers can leverage omnichannel data for sustained success, download NielsenIQ’s latest whitepaper, “The Great Shopper Shift and the Source of Omnichannel Truth,” here.