You want your customers to have a seamless, swift, and even therapeutic experience when they’re dealing with your ecommerce business. That’s why you should look to create an omnichannel experience. By adopting an omnichannel approach you can build brand loyalty, keep your customers coming back, and have them share their positive reviews with friends and family.
Implementing an omnichannel retail strategy is about creating a customer-centric world. The aim is to deliver a coherent experience of your brand no matter what medium, device, or platform the customer is using. From social media to customer service, being on your ecommerce store on a laptop or a mobile device – an omnichannel strategy will blur the lines between these platforms and make it a convenient and pleasurable experience every single time.
Why Omnichannel Strategies Matter
Omnichannel strategies aren’t the future – they’re the here and now. Studies have shown that brands with strong omnichannel retail strategies retain an average 89% of customers. Customers that use omnichannel platforms also have a 30% higher lifetime value than those who prefer to stick to just one channel. The aim of omnichannel is to create a unified approach to your brand and to help customers have a stress-free, seamless, and convenient experience from start to finish.
With an omnichannel approach, a customer should be able to:
- browse your ecommerce store on their laptop and pick up where they left off when they turn to their mobile device;
- return to abandoned shopping carts without going through the buying process again;
- access ample customer support across every device;
- have every interaction with your brand (for example, email marketing, social media support, and targeted offers) tailored to their previous interactions with your ecommerce company.
This approach is beneficial for all parties. It creates a relationship with your customer rather than a shallow, one-time experience and personalizes the experience, which sets you apart from the competition in a highly competitive landscape.
Omnichannel Strategies to Boost your Ecommerce Business
Take stock of the journey
It’s hard to know where you’re going if you don’t know where you are coming from. Before implementing any kind of strategy, you should take some time to map out your customer journey.
When you understand the path your customers take, you’ll know how to remove pain points from the process. From how a customer lands on your site, to the steps they take to consider, engage, convert, purchase, and return to you – mapping their journey will help you close the gaps and make the most of every opportunity along the way.
Analyze behavior
Using analytical tools to understand your consumer’s behavior can provide valuable insights and help you to move in the right direction and personalize your approach. The kind of data that may be worthwhile collecting is understanding who your buyers are in terms of age, geography and gender. Putting together a customer profile can help with this. It can also help to know which channels they regularly use and what actions they take when visiting these channels. These metrics can help you to understand where to focus your efforts and which channels to optimize.
Be mobile ready
79% of shoppers with smartphones purchased goods on their mobile devices in 2021 and a massive 50% of traffic comes from mobile users. Mobile devices are part of our everyday life and it’s essential that as an ecommerce store, your site is mobile friendly.
For those who want to shop online on their mobile, you need to create a coherent, instantly recognizable, and frustration-free space to avoid the dreaded abandoned cart. If your mobile site isn’t quick to load, easy to navigate, free of pop-ups, and pleasant to the eye, then you risk upping your bounce rate.
Details like changing the button size, reducing written content, and spacing out links can all help your mobile site be easier to use. Take stock of your mobile site, use mobile friendly themes and templates, and regularly run tests to ensure they are working as they should be.
Get consistent
Consistency is key when creating the omnichannel experience. From your social sites to your ecommerce store – everything that is linked to your brand should be on message in terms of tone and style. Creating a consistent and coherent message that carries across all platforms leads to customers trusting your brand and understanding your values and what you stand for. It helps you build a strong following and reduces confusion, uncertainty, and false leads.
Personalize whenever possible
Personalization is the center of the customer experience. Ecommerce brands that take the time to target the individual customer can create a lasting relationship and encourage a one-time visitor to become a lifelong advocate.
Some ways in which you can personalize the shopping experience include:
- targeted ads on social media based on previous purchase history or interest;
- offering relevant discounts and offers;
- email marketing tailored to specific interests and tweaked for relevant demographic details;
- being able to save and remember certain information like payment preferences;
- favorite items, and purchase or engagement history.
Boost engagement with social media
You can leverage customer engagement on social media to increase brand visibility and connect with customers on a deeper and more personal level. Social media is part of our modern day routine and many customers will use it for browsing products, reading reviews, and even reaching out directly to brands for customer service support.
If your ecommerce store doesn’t have a social media presence you risk missing out a large segment of your market – particularly if your target audience is in a demographic that uses social media on a regular basis. You can use Instagram to showcase products and you can even directly link your browsers to these products on your store to create an instant gratification shopping experience that makes the most of impulse purchases.
Merge teams and communication
A coherent strategy needs a coherent team and solid communication across all avenues. If you want to create an omnichannel experience, then you need to ensure that everyone behind the scenes is also working in harmony.
When creating a content and marketing strategy, you need to consider personalization, messaging and brand tone across all avenues – including social media, blog content, website, and email marketing. The same goes for customer support, and inventory and stock checks – when everyone is on the same page and working towards a common goal, there’s less chance of friction, misunderstandings, and breakdowns in communication.
Consider an app
The app market is on the rise and with more people turning to mobile devices for online shopping, you may want to consider creating your own app for your ecommerce store. Not only will an app improve the customer experience but you get to create your own world within the app. Customers are also more likely to return to your store and spend money if they can access it via an app rather than visiting websites on their phone. You can also use the app to deliver targeted offers and messages and create an amazing interactive space.
