COVID-19 has been critical to everyone, accelerating purchasing behaviour from offline to online at a faster rate than expected, especially in food purchasing and retail shopping. The question that presents itself amidst this unforeseen disruption - what can your businesses do to increase their income.
“OMO” or Online Merge Offline is the merging between online and offline retailing to create business opportunities while giving the best customer experience to customers, far beyond their expectations. OMO is the natural progression of O2O (Online to Offline) as it is not simply the convergence that switches customers from offline retailing to online retailing, but a simultaneous utilization of online and offline channels. This new platform allows the customers seamless access to products and services of your brand from any channel.
Do you know why the merging of these two retail channels are important? The first benefit is that your brand will better understand the customer's behaviour. You will be able to observe the paths for each customer’s journey. This is the information you can use to create a marketing plan that focuses on the accurate target group.
OMO can also predict when the customer would return for repeating purchasing, and what they will buy. Both offline and online channels need to support and drive each other because your customers are no longer active on one single channel, but on both at the same time. What your brand should consider is the platform that perfectly bridges the two worlds - LINE Official Account (LINE OA)
Shops and restaurants with only offline retails face similar problems. The spread of COVID-19 intimidates customers from visiting your physical retails. Especially with restaurants, where customers need to spend a long period of time to receive your service. OMO is the solution to bypass this problem.
Shops and restaurants can use LINE OA and LINE API to lead your OMO strategy. LINE API acts as a conduit that helps your business connect offline channel to online channel with ease.
For example, Brand B has its own e-store, as well as a large customer database. In order to dominate its market, Brand B plans its business strategy using LINE OA as its key platform. The brand designs a Rich Menu that merges its e-store that also searches for the nearest physical store near the customer while announcing the promotions of the month and discount coupons.
Once your customer adds the brand’s LINE OA on their friend list, Brand B will gain access to the customer’s profile via connecting LINE API to the existing database. Brand B now knows what branch did this customer prefer to shop at, products the customers purchased most often and what part of the month did the customer shop.
Brand B can now send the customer the most suitable content to stimulate the customer to purchase at just the right time. The brand can also analyze past purchasing behaviour to predict when the next sales will occur from this customer so it can send the customer gift coupons to be used at the customer’s preferred physical retail. If the customer shows the need to purchase online, Brand B can also create automated messages to interact with the customer immediately through LINE Chatbot. This feature will answer the customer’s inquiry promptly and to the point without the supervision of a human administrator, giving more convenience to both the customer and the brand.
7-Eleven uses LINE OA CP ALL 7-ELEVEN TH as one of their primary channels to communicate with customers. The brand heavily utilizes the Broadcast feature, sending content to all their followers. The content they use is composed of a variety of Rich Content that stimulates awareness, which leads to sales conversion. This greatly increases sales.
Some examples of Rich Content available to brands are:
LINE OA is hugely beneficial to restaurant businesses. Besides supporting the business’s OMO in multi-channel communication, there are many LINE features a restaurant business can take advantage of to improve its service capability.
An outstanding LINE OA success story belongs to Food Passion, who merged the many restaurant chains under their management such as Bar-B-Q Plaza, Charna, Joom Zap Hut, SPACE Q, and PoCha into a single CRM platform called GON Gang.
The 4 special services are GON Gang Club, GON Gang Delivery, GON Gang Help me, and GON Gang Shop. Each service works together as a one stop solution to every demand of the customers. It is convenient and easy for both existing and new customers who no longer have to physically register for a reward card but still gain access to every benefit.
The customer simply has to register for GON Gang on LINE OA, and all the reward points the customer got will be linked to the database, allowing the brand to effectively manage information, leading to the brand’s creation of “Personalized Promotion” for the customers. For example, when Customer A visits one of Food Passion’s restaurants, Customer A orders beef more than pork. So now when a promotion is available, Food Passion can choose to send beef-oriented promotions to Customer A.
Besides this, Food Passion also uses the feature LINE Front-End-Framework (LIFF) that connects the chat windows to GON Delivery so the customer can place orders without having to move to another website or app. Simply select the “ORDER HERE” button that appears on the Rich Menu, give delivery and payment details, and confirm order.This is all the process the customer needs to take in order to order any of the restaurants by Food Passion.
LINE for Business will fulfill every need as it has every tool that aids business to effectively enter social commerce. If you are interested to a better business plan, contact us.