74% of UK retailers are struggling to understand how their digital marketing efforts are affecting sales made in their physical shops so they are not attributing footfall to digital spend.

A survey of 1,153 retail workers by digital marketing agency Marketingsignals.com found retailers were coming across issues when a customer had first visited its website and then gone to a shop to complete the purchase, suggesting that the majority of retailers still don’t have an integrated online and offline shopping experience – known as omnichannel marketing.

A further 68% of retailers said they were unsure of the return on investment they were making of their most recent digital marketing campaign.

Gareth Hoyle, managing director at Marketingsignals commented, “While technology such as Google Store Visits exists to help retailers accurately measure the ROI of their digital spend, we see many retailers ignoring this and attempt to resolve the problem with in-store surveys. Using the surveys to establish if customers who’ve searched for something online have actually visited a retail store, isn’t a particularly sophisticated solution to a very modern problem.”

Despite the underwhelming statistics from the survey, there are brands which have registered successes with their omnichannel strategy. Oasis Fashion, for example, integrates user-generated content from Instagram into its website and allows customers in their shop to pay via iPad, which speeds up the checkout process.

Department store Neiman Marcus also has a range of omnichannel features such as its website which uses cookies to remember customers shoe size from previous searches so the next time they log in via desktop or smartphone, geolocation software is triggered to push available shoes in nearby shops.

Watch the below video on omnichannel marketing