O2O Strategies

Online to offline is (commonly abbreviated to O2O) used in digital marketing to describe systems enticing consumers within a digital environment to make purchases of goods or services from physical businesses.

By the end of 2018, worldwide ecommerce sales are expected to surpass $2.8 trillion. And yet, online sales only represent 11.9% of the global retail market. 

Even as consumers become accustomed to buying things like books, fashion, and electronics online, 82.5% of all retail sales will still happen inside physical stores as late as 2021.

This is where an O2O type of strategy comes in. Online-to-offline commerce is a business strategy that draws potential customers from online channels into physical stores. Online-to-offline commerce, or O2O, identifies customers in the online space – such as through emails, SMS, social media, and apps – and then uses a variety of tools and approaches to entice the customer to leave the online space. It incorporates techniques used in online marketing with those used in brick-and-mortar marketing, as well as the relatively new but fast evolving proximity based, geolocation/permissible tracking technologies. (e.g. beacons and the Physical Web).

At a high level consideration, there are 3 key benefits for businesses to adopt an O2O strategy:

    1. Brand reputation / appropriation
    2. Revenue and loyalty
    3. Time to market

And in many cases, businesses employing an O2O strategy also benefit from business process efficiencies and associated reduction in operating costs.

We know the technologies required to make a thorough, successful O2O integration and we have the required expertise to help your business develop the right O2O initiatives.