Growing Omnichannel Sales Through Digital Shelf Excellence

By Luke Beatty, SVP, Digital Commerce and Chris Laury, Director, Digital Content, Acosta Group

The definition of the retail shelf has evolved.

In brick-and-mortar retail, planograms are set annually by the category manager. You aim to win your category reviews to ensure your brand captures its fair share on the physical shelf. Assuming you receive favorable POG placement, you can count on a beautiful, eye-level brand block, setting your brand up for success for the rest of the year.

In digital retail, the shelf is dynamic and changes constantly, requiring more of your brand’s attention. If your products aren’t on the first page of search results, they might as well not even be in stock since less than 20% of shoppers click past the first page.

How did we get here, and what does your brand need to do about it?

For the past decade, e-commerce sales have steadily increased as consumers recognized that Amazon and other online marketplaces provided greater convenience and product accessibility. Online shopping adoption skyrocketed during COVID-19 when consumers turned to the internet to purchase essential goods.

Now that we’re living in a hybrid world, consumers are continuing to rely on online shopping for convenience as they balance the demands of this new way of life. Digital grocery buyers have surpassed 50% of the U.S. population, with nearly 30% of U.S. consumers buying groceries and household essentials online more than once per month. EMARKETER predicts online grocery sales will continue to outpace in-store sales and will represent over 19% of the mix by 2027.

Beyond purchasing shifting from stores to e-commerce, 91% of shoppers research products online prior to purchase. Seventy percent of shoppers use their mobile devices in-store to browse product information. These monumental shifts in shopper behavior have left many brands scrambling to build comprehensive digital commerce strategies and embed omnichannel intelligence into their organizations.

Omnichannel Strategy

Sound familiar? In a Spring 2024 survey of more than 100 CPG manufacturers, Acosta Group found that respondents’ top digital commerce challenges include omnichannel insights and analytics, digital shelf monitoring, upskilling their teams, and establishing e-commerce KPIs.

In a dynamic omnichannel retail environment where brands are already resource-constrained, how can you keep up and deliver against the right KPIs? Find a partner with expertise in retail and digital commerce who can help execute cross-channel strategies to ensure you connect with your consumers wherever they are.

As retailers engage in an arms race to create the most seamless digital shopping experience for their customers, brands are provided with an array of new channels to promote and sell their products. While these digital platform innovations yield a ton of promise, they also come with a myriad of challenges and complexities as you work to create a consistent and compelling brand experience wherever the shopper interacts with your products. Every retailer seemingly has unique, ever-changing requirements to sell and promote your products online and in-store.

This is where having a strong agency partner comes in. At Acosta Group, we work with brands of all sizes to simplify the complexities of the digital shelf.

• Our digital strategists use their deep retailer relationships and digital platform expertise to align your in-store and online strategies by offering retailer-specific best practices and omnichannel marketing considerations. We’re equipped to help you win with: 
  • National omnichannel retailers like Walmart, Target, Kroger and Albertsons
  • Regional grocers like Food Lion, Meijer, HEB, ShopRite, Giant Eagle, Stater Brothers and Raley’s
  • Emerging pure-play and specialty retailers like GoPuff, DashMart, Thrive and iHerb 

• Our Amazon agency, OeP, offers an end-to-end solution that accelerates growth to drive year-over-year increases in sales and continued profitability. Our team of Amazon and Amazon Fresh experts is ready to help you with:
  • Strategy and insights
  • Operational performance
  • Product list management
  • Marketing and search
  • Merchandising and promotional plans
  • Content optimization
  • Reporting and analytics

• Our E-commerce Insights and Analytics team connects disparate data sources (customer ePOS, syndicated category and client data) to create actionable insights and pinpoint growth opportunities to help you stay ahead of the competition.

Digital Content Management & Syndication

Since the digital shelf is one of the most consistent and frequent ways that consumers engage with a brand, the quality of your content directly influences brand perception and, thereby, brand equity. 40% of shoppers have been dissuaded from completing a purchase due to inaccurate or incomplete product content. Hence, optimized PDP content is essential to winning with the omnichannel shopper.

Recognizing the challenges many brands face in maintaining digital content, Acosta Group has an established team of digital content specialists who can support your content syndication and digital shelf monitoring efforts across dozens of platforms. Our team is proficient in using leading Content Service Providers (CSPs), including Syndigo, Salsify, Nielsen Brandbank, and retailer-direct portals to publish and verify PDP content, ensuring it aligns with your brand’s source of truth.

Leveraging our scale and deep-rooted retailer relationships, we can proactively troubleshoot issues arising from changing retailer requirements to ensure your content is always compliant and available to consumers. As brands optimize their digital content and comply with retailer-specific standards, discoverability and conversion improve dramatically, thus leading to a greater share of the digital shelf and increases in total omnichannel sales.

The Future is Now

The time to act on implementing an effective digital commerce strategy is now. Yet, 60% of CPG leaders feel they are not where they need to be. By working with an experienced agency partner, you can stay ahead of the latest consumer trends, capitalize on cross-channel efficiencies, and, most importantly, drive ROI against shared KPIs that matter to you and your retailer partners.  

Dive into part 2 of Mastering Digital Shelf Excellence, featuring a deep dive into commerce media campaign ROI and custom e-commerce analysis from our experts at Mosaic and OeP.

Sources 

Acosta Group Insights, January 2023 
Acosta Group Shopper Community, 2022 
Acosta Group CPG Confidential, Spring 2023 and 2024
EMARKETER Digital Grocery Trends