Channel-hopping Shoppers Spend More

Customers are everywhere these days -- and that's good news. A Texas A&M study shows that multichannel shoppers buy more often, buy more things and spend more than shoppers who stick to only one channel.

Cool.

The financial value of multichannel shoppers is nearly double that of the closet single-channel shopper, Shankar says. And that is why retailers must learn to market to all channels.

"The results also show that customers' responses to marketing efforts vary significantly across the customer-channel segments. We find that marketing efforts influence purchase frequency, purchase quantity and monetary value in different ways," Shankar writes in the "Retailing Issues Letter" of the Center for Retailing Studies.

Interestingly, the center's findings reveal that catalog-only and multichannel customers are most responsive to marketing communications while Web-only and store-only customers respond more to price and discounts, respectively.

And, the findings show that a retailer can improve profits by as much as 30 percent by reallocating marketing efforts across the various channels.

If it sounds complicated, it isn't. It is simply this: Customers are everywhere today. Make sure you are communicating with them in all the places where they shop.