How to Integrate Online and Offline Data for Omnichannel Retailing: Why and How to Connect Customer Touchpoints

How to evaluate both online and offline customer touchpoints? That is the question omnichannel retailers often have to ask themselves.

As today’s customers tend to interact with businesses through multiple channels, companies that fail to answer the question or simply ignore it risk making costly mistakes. For example, you cut down on investments in an advertising channel that feels like it doesn’t pay off, and as a result, offline sales drop drastically.

In this article, you’ll find out how you can combine the data about the online to offline retail behavior of your customers and how doing so helps you drive your business forward.

Understanding the importance of digital channels in gathering insights is crucial for an omnichannel and marketing strategy, as it allows for a more comprehensive view to identify patterns of customer interactions across different platforms.

Note: This post was initially published in January 2018 and was completely updated in April 2024 to ensure accuracy and completeness.

Omnichannel retailing is a marketing strategy that seeks to offer an integrated shopping experience on multiple channels or contact points, including both offline and online channels. It allows for a unified space where retailers can reach out to customers where they prefer to make their purchases, ensuring there is no disconnect between offline experiences and online activities and enabling cross-channel data analytics.

Omnichannel shopping is more than just a physical store space. It can also fit into mobile applications, online marketplaces, social media platforms, and online retargeting advertisements, ensuring a seamless customer journey across both offline and online marketing channels.

Essentially, the idea behind omnichannel is that the end business result is more significant than the sum of its parts. It involves merging every touchpoint to deliver precisely what customers seek at the right time and place, irrelevant of location or device.

So if you want to succeed in an omnichannel environment, you should execute exactly this marketing strategy in both the digital and physical worlds.

The integration of online and offline data for omnichannel retailing has numerous benefits that can improve the customer experience, operational efficiency, revenue growth, and enhance marketing efforts. Some of the major benefits include optimizing marketing strategy by creating a holistic view of the customer journey across all channels.

Omnichannel retailing guarantees consistency throughout all shopping channels, including websites, brick-and-mortar stores, and mobile applications.

Moreover, understanding and analyzing behavioral patterns and customer interactions across these channels, when integrated data is utilized by retailers enabling marketers to customize the experience, providing product suggestions and promotions based on an individual’s preferences and past interactions, the shopping experience becomes more interactive and personalized for customers.

When combined with in-store data, these vast, interconnected data sources provide retailers with a 360-degree view of customer behavior and interests. This perspective helps retailers better understand their customers.

Furthermore, retailers can use predictive analytics to predict what is likely to occur in the future. These forecasts include sales trends, surpluses or shortages in inventory, and even customer preferences and behavior. Such an approach can improve the decision-making process within retail and ensure that strategies deliver significant results.

Incorporating customer relationship management (CRM) systems further enhances retailers' understanding of customer behavior by collecting and organizing customer information from various offline touchpoints, integrating CRM data with online conversion data, and segmenting customers and target audience based on their offline behaviors for more effective cross-channel marketing strategies.

When it comes to making marketing and advertising better, there are two important approaches:

1. Precision marketing: Stores can aim their promotions and ads specifically at customers, ensuring the offers match people’s interests. This includes tailoring offline marketing campaigns, such as in-store promotions, call center engagements, and customer surveys, by analyzing how people interact both online and offline.
2. Location-based marketing: Stores use customers’ locations to send special offers when they’re near their physical stores. It’s like getting discounts and offers from a particular store based on customer location, which makes it more relevant and convenient.

Integrating online and offline data helps build customer loyalty and aid in retention strategies, which play a crucial role in building strong customer relationships.

Effective Loyalty Programs:

• Integrating online and offline data enables more effective loyalty programs.
• These programs can offer rewards and benefits based on a customer’s entire shopping history, making them more enticing and tailored to individual preferences.
• Identifying and targeting both 'online customers' and 'offline customers' is crucial for the success of these programs, ensuring a personalized and consistent experience across all channels.

Proactive Customer Outreach:

• Retailers can employ data to recognize and reach out to customers who might be at risk of leaving.
• This proactive approach helps reduce customer churn, as retailers can re-engage with at-risk customers and improve their overall retention rates.

Data-driven decision-making is crucial for modern retail operations. It involves using both online and offline data to make informed choices. By integrating different sources of data, including the crucial step of integrating offline data with online analytics, retailers can now gain insights and a comprehensive understanding of their customer needs and journeys. This holistic view helps them:

• Optimize store layouts to enhance customer experience and increase conversions
• Ensure the right products are available at the right time
• Develop effective pricing strategies that resonate with target customers

In addition to incremental sales, integrated online and offline data allows retailers to track performance and measure the effectiveness of their omnichannel strategies. This information helps them identify areas for improvement based on data, leading to better overall business strategies.

Omnichannel and multichannel are different ways stores sell things. In other words, omnichannel focuses on making the shopping experience smooth and personal for the customer.

Multichannel: Imagine a big electronics store that lets you shop easily both online and in their offline store. They have one system that keeps track of all their items and knows everything about their online interactions with their customers.

Omnichannel: On the other hand, there's a clothing store that sells in their shop and online. But, these two ways of selling don't really talk to each other. So, the online store and the physical store might not share the same stock information or know the same things about their customers.

The main difference is that omnichannel is all about giving customers a smooth and connected shopping experience everywhere. In contrast, multichannel is about selling in many places, but this can sometimes make shopping more confusing and less smooth for customers.

Here’s the challenge: today’s shoppers don’t limit themselves to one retail channel. Today’s consumers’ purchasing behavior may include:

• Finding and buying products of interest online.
• Examining and buying products in brick-and-mortar stores.
• Online to offline retail, known as Researching Products Online and buying them Offline (ROPO), a.k.a. webrooming.
• Examining products in offline stores and purchasing them online, a.k.a. showrooming.

There are a lot of studies on research and purchase behavior. For example, the Consumer Barometer with Google provides detailed statistics about how people use the Internet, with detailed reports on different business niches, regions, and product groups. The Research and Purchase behavior report shows that 28% of the survey respondents in the US choose to research products online and buy them offline, while 9% of the respondents did the exact opposite.

To see the actual number of sales and the revenue generated by online to offline channels, marketers need to integrate unified customer profile, purchase history and behavior data across online and offline data touchpoints.

In addition, combining the data may give you clues about why your customers don’t purchase online but rather go to your offline stores for offline purchases; in the worst-case scenario, they switch to your competitors.

Let’s say you see that your customers research products on your website and then purchase them in your offline store using a pickup discount or a rewards card. Does the website allow your customers to take advantage of discounts? If not, this may be the reason why customers prefer shopping offline. Think about it.

Bringing the data together will help you improve the entire online shopping experience of your customers in terms of advertising campaigns, range of products, payment and shipping options, etc. Identity resolution plays a crucial role in this process by unifying customer profiles from various sources, enhancing cross-channel analysis, as well as improving marketing efforts and strategies through a comprehensive understanding of customer behavior across offline and online platforms.

Any reputable advertising and analytics service offers its tools for conversion tracking. Among such services are Google Ads, Microsoft Ads (formerly known as Bing Ads), and Facebook, not to mention the others.

However, each service provides statistics only about its performance for connecting offline and online data. In addition, they do not take into account all the offline and online data available in your CRM system. Getting a complete picture of their performance becomes a challenge, especially if you’re advertising through multiple channels.

The best possible way to do this would be to integrate user actions across channels using email addresses or User IDs. The User ID is a unique identifier that represents each signed-in user and is stored in a CRM or other internal system.

When a signed-in user visits your website, their User ID is sent to Google Analytics. This enables you to associate user sessions and all activities from those sessions with the particular user who performed them on the website. Also, what if someone visits your website without signing in or otherwise providing identifiable data?

That’s right, you’ll only see unrelated data points. That’s why, if you’re looking to analyze your customers more accurately, you should make them want to sign in. The best way to do that is to show customers you care. Let them know the benefits of having an account on the website. For example, you can enable your customers to:

• Activate their loyalty cards online.
• Track their orders directly on the website. By doing so, you’ll also make life simpler for your call center by reducing the number of calls from buyers who call to know the status of their orders.
• Subscribe to a special offer newsletter.
• Sign in to take part in promotions and contests online.
• Get discount coupons by signing up.
• Take a free trial (this, in particular, is often offered by SaaS and service providers).
• Download useful content: guides, transcripts, slides, etc.
• Connect with your company’s managers by filling out contact forms.
• Sign up to attend webinars, seminars, training sessions, etc.
• Get an extra month of warranty by registering the receipt online.
• Provide their email addresses to get video manuals and advice on how to use the product.

In addition, you can get measurable results by adding campaign parameters to the URLs in your emails. You’ll be able to merge the data about users who visit via a link with a special identifier appended to it, even if they don’t sign in. Here’s an example of the link with the user identifier in red:

https:⁣//www.site.com/promo/black-friday.html?utm_source=email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=blackfriday&user_id=87af363db4d25b948c24bdf9cdac6aedb5a1ced9

Note the get-parameter user_id, which is used to pass the id of the user.

Let’s discover how omnichannel retailing integrates online and offline customer data through a few examples.

Example 1:

1. A customer explores products on your e-commerce site, receiving a unique Client ID from Google Analytics during their visit.
2. This customer later buys a product in your brick-and-mortar store and subscribes to your email for future promotions.
3. You send out promotional emails featuring "special offers" to these offline subscribers.
4. When a customer accesses your site via these promotional emails, their visit is linked back to their Client ID and email address. This connection helps trace the success of marketing campaigns from online interactions to in-store transactions.

Example 2:

1. Initially, a customer checks out a product on your site and signs up for your newsletter, providing their email and a unique Client ID from Google Analytics.
2. They receive a newsletter highlighting an in-store discount on the product they viewed online, prompting a visit to your store where they purchase the item and join your loyalty program using the same email.
3. This allows you to match the online browsing data with offline purchasing data under one profile, offering insights into customer preferences and behavior across different shopping environments.

By using a unique identifier like the Google Analytics 4 Client ID and email addresses, companies can create a seamless and holistic view of individual customers' journeys by connecting online and offline customer data and actions that can lead to more effective marketing, increased customer engagement, and a better understanding of the customer journey, ultimately benefiting both customers and businesses.

When you explore the ways to connect online and offline data, you need to have a better understanding of key strategies to guarantee the accuracy and success of your online and offline data integration using Google BigQuery.

Combining online and offline data strategically offers a comprehensive view of customer behavior, enhancing the effectiveness of marketing strategies by leveraging insights from both data sources.

Let’s take a look at how to optimize user identification, track the complete customer journey, and enhance the precision of your online advertising campaign measurement.

In our experience, connecting and combining online and offline data in Google BigQuery allows you to supplement the previously processed data.

For example, if a user goes forward with offline purchases and then authenticates on the website, you can connect that data retroactively. You won’t be able to do so in Google Analytics 4. In addition, the data from Google BigQuery can be used by OWOX BI Attribution to evaluate how your advertising campaigns perform with an account of offline purchases.

By encouraging visitors to enter email addresses on the website and connecting online and offline, gathering data across multiple touchpoints, you’ll be able to see how many visitors are ready to share a significant portion of their information with you and why:

As a result, the number of identified users will grow as you introduce improvements to the website. Here’s an example:

At first, there were only 10% of the total number of website visitors identified on the website. On March 5th, you added an email subscription form and the number of users who provided their email addresses increased to 29%. On May 10th, you introduced an online order status & tracking feature, and the percentage of identified users increased to 42% as more people registered to track their orders. And so on.

With the help of OWOX BI Attribution, you can do what all marketers dream of — see the complete customer journey, from the first interaction of an online touchpoint to making an offline purchase.

In addition, by supplementing the data from your website with offline purchases, you’ll be able to measure the performance of your online advertising campaigns more accurately.

This chart demonstrates how the return on ad spend may change if you consider offline activities in the calculations of your attribution model. The second bar stands for the ROAS, with an account of offline sales. The ROAS has increased in some campaigns and decreased in others because of the order cancellations.

In this case, you may try using DMP systems offering third-party data. For example, such systems can provide you with email addresses of visitors who haven’t yet signed in to your site.

In fact, it’s impossible to identify all the visitors. Let’s just say that the more visitors you can identify, the more accurate your data will be, providing for better, statistically sound decisions. Much better than nothing, isn’t it?

By connecting the online and offline data of users, you’ll be able to:

• More accurately evaluate the performance of your advertising campaigns and optimize your marketing efforts by taking into account their contribution to purchases in offline stores. This holistic view enables marketers to craft campaigns that appeal to new target audiences, find new customers, achieve essential business objectives, and produce engaging marketing campaigns.
• Discover what prevents your customers from purchasing online. Let’s say they create a user account, browse the website, and then leave without placing any orders. What do these customers have in common? Let’s say you see that they tend to opt for an extended warranty when buying smartphones, something that your website doesn’t offer at all. By adding this option to the website, you may turn future visitors into grateful customers, reducing the risk of leaving your website and looking elsewhere.