Omnichannel is such a frequent buzzword among corporate strategists and executives that it’s easy to overlook a very simple and fundamental aspect of customer-based business: do shoppers actually want an omnichannel experience?

Now, if you ask people this specific question (as we did with shoppers on the street in Bogota), these are the responses you will likely get:

Not terribly surprising.

However, when you put the concept into more familiar terms, the responses get a bit more exciting. According to a study published by SAS Canada, customers very much want Omnichannel experiences via mobile: “Retailers with both an online and bricks and mortar presence should consider offering purchasing suggestions to their customers while they are in store,” the study summary reads. “Seven in ten surveyed said they find it helpful when retailers make suggestions based on their previous online purchases.”

Said another way:

70% of shoppers want retailers to help them decide what to buy in-store based on their previous online purchases.

This study seems to be primarily talking about promotional offers, but what’s not entirely clear is the context in which customers were asked these questions. Are these offers discount-based or simply contextually and temporally relevant?

Those details matter. A lot.

And that’s exactly what we’re doing with the CloudTags platform: testing these very scenarios and learning empirically what offers and personalized messaging work best with a particular type of shopper.

Too often retailers fall into the discount trap - run a sale to entice shoppers. It’s difficult to determine exactly how effective these sales are as each individuals’ motivation for buying is a slightly different melting pot of factors: timing, mindset/mood, price, perception of value, degree of necessity, etc. Would they have bought that item at 10% off, or 20% off? How important is speed and personal service to them today?

Personalization takes some of the mystery out of the equation by allowing retailers to track conversions back to the specific factors that may have motivated the shopper. One of our current hypotheses is that increasing personalization of the in-store shopping experience will decrease retailers’ reliance on discounting. It’s one we’ve yet to fully prove out, but studies like this one give us reinforcement that shoppers are interested in the type of personalized omnichannel interaction that CloudTags can deliver, even if they don’t know exactly what to call it.