A Guide to Implement Omnichannel Ecommerce Strategies

Today, there’s a much bigger demand for brands to be connected with their audience across multiple channels. 

Consumers are now looking for the fastest and easiest ways to access product information, enjoy customized experiences and ultimately, find and buy products with zero hassle. 

They expect businesses to recognize them as independent shoppers and therefore curate their experience to their exact needs and preferences. Research shows that 87% of customers believe brands should put more effort into providing a seamless omnichannel experience. 

With this in mind, let’s take a look at what omnichannel Ecommerce is and how your business can implement a solid omnichannel Ecommerce strategy.

What is Omnichannel Ecommerce?

Omnichannel Ecommerce focuses on providing customers with a smooth and consistent shopping experience, whether they’re in a physical store or shopping online. 

Successful omnichannel Ecommerce allows your customers to switch between channels and still receive the same great experience.

So, whether you’re browsing products on a website, your smartphone, or walking into a store, the idea is to make it all work together seamlessly, like different parts of the same shopping experience.

3 Core Benefits of Omnichannel Ecommerce

There are several benefits to utilizing an omnichannel Ecommerce approach. From enhanced customer satisfaction to increased traffic and sales, having multiple touchpoints to interact with your customers is crucial in today’s consumer landscape. 

Let’s look at the top three. 

Enhanced Customer Experience and Satisfaction

Personalization is essential to the modern consumer. 

They expect every interaction with your brand to be personalized to their preferences and expectations. For example, let’s say one of your customers finds your product via their smartphone, pop it in their basket, but later decide to visit your physical store to make the final purchase. 

With an omnichannel approach, the transition between these channels would be smooth, and the customer would experience a consistent product display, pricing, and promotional information. 

More Sales Opportunities

Following this, omnichannel strategies create multiple touchpoints for customers to explore and purchase products. Whether online or in-store, businesses can capture sales opportunities through various channels, expanding their reach and maximizing revenue potential.

Your customer could start their journey on your social media channel, and then end up purchasing from your mobile store. As long as their experience is consistent throughout their journey, they won’t mind where they make their final purchase (and neither will you!).

Increased Brand Loyalty and Customer Retention

Having a strong brand presence across multiple channels helps create trust between you and your audience. However, it’s not simply a case of being omnipresent on every channel. Everything from your messaging, imagery, payment options and branding has to be consistent to gain this trust.

If your brand isn’t consistent across every channel, it can break down that trust and lose potential customers to competitors. A consumer research report in 2022 discovered that 46% of customers who had chosen to buy higher-priced options did so because they preferred to pay a higher price for a brand they trusted.

How your brand is perceived through your various channels is absolutely essential for not just sales, but customer retention.

How to Implement an Omnichannel Strategy

There’s a lot that goes into structuring an omnichannel Ecommerce strategy. 

But don’t get bogged down in the intricacies, it doesn’t have to be that complicated. The key is to build a strong foundation to base your strategy. From here, you can begin implementing your omnichannel strategy with a clear and strategic approach. 

Here’s how to get started:

Identify Your Audience

You can’t expect to turn scrollers into buyers without first knowing who you’re targeting, right? 

So, before you start strategizing, you’ll need to conduct some thorough market research to identify customers’ demographics, behaviors, and preferences. 

Analyze data from your existing customer base, utilize tools like Google Analytics, and gather insights from social media platforms (if you’re using any).

You might also find it useful to create a buyer persona using this data. From here, you can create your ideal customer (or customers depending on your audience segmentation) to create campaigns and strategies that specifically target and align with their needs. 

All of this enables you to be better equipped to create content, promotions, and interactions that resonate with your customers.

Understand Your Customer’s Journey

Knowing how your customers are exploring and interacting with your online store can help you create a solid omnichannel strategy. First, pinpoint the different touchpoints your customers are interacting with through their buying journey.

This includes their journeys on mobile, your website, social media and even physical stores. Each touchpoint should be seamlessly integrated to guide users toward their desired goals. 

If, at any point in their journey, they encounter challenges or obstacles, it becomes your responsibility to pinpoint the issues and implement solutions for a smoother and more enjoyable user experience.

Understanding the stages of customer journeys will help you align your omnichannel efforts and ensure that every interaction contributes positively to your users’ experience.

Make Your Online Store Mobile-friendly

Most users who shop online do so using their smartphones. In fact, smartphones today now account for 87.2% of mCommerce sales (sales through mobiles and tablets).

So, it’s pretty important that your online store is mobile-friendly. 

This means talking to your managed hosting provider or web developer to ensure that things like load speed, site layout and design, responsiveness and UX (user experience) are all running smoothly on mobile. 

Additionally, as an Ecommerce business, your mobile site must have an easy payment option. For example, payment solutions like Apple Pay, PayPal, SumUp, Square and Klarna are not only widely trusted forms of payment, but they’re incredibly user-friendly. 

As opposed to having to manually type out their card details, users can use face recognition or PINs to purchase items swiftly and securely.

Create Engaging and Personalized Content For Your Channels

While you may find success on one platform for a particular piece of content, it doesn’t mean you’ll see the same results on another. Each piece of content you create should be tailored to specific channels. 

For example, social media platforms like Instagram typically thrive on visually appealing and snappy content, whereas platforms like LinkedIn often prioritize more in-depth and long-form content.

By creating engaging and personalized content for each of your channels, you not only maximize the impact of your messaging but also ensure a consistent brand experience tailored to the expectations of your users.

Engage Your Audience With the Right Tools

With there being thousands of engagement tools floating around, finding one that’s tailored to your needs might seem a bit difficult.

However, top of our list are chatbots and/or live chat. In a recent survey, 31% of US B2B marketers are using AI for chatbots, coding, and design. The main benefit of this technology is that it offers instant personalized support to your customers when you’re not able to. 

For example, if a customer has a question about returning an item, they can ask the chatbot and it will provide them with a response tailored to their specific request.

On the other hand, live chat support allows you to speak directly with your audience in real-time. This is a far more personalized support service and allows you to get straight to the query at hand. However, the only downside is that this does require you to be available whenever a customer sends a message.

Ultimately, the choice between chatbots and live chat depends on your specific business needs and resource availability. If you’re a corporate multinational business driving hundreds of thousands of visitors each week, chatbots might make more sense. Whereas SMEs and startups may have more time to answer customer messages personally.

Test, Assess and Repeat

To ensure all your hard work is paying off, you’ll need to dive into your analytics to see what’s working and what needs improving. Google Analytics should cover your customer demographics, behavior and interactions but there are other ways to optimize your online store.

A/B testing is one of the best ways to evaluate and compare different versions of your landing pages. For example, you could experiment with different product descriptions, images or CTA buttons (call-to-action) to see which yields the best results. A/B testing allows you to switch up certain elements of your landing pages based on your customers’ preferences.

You may also want to invest in heat mapping tools like Lucky Orange, as they are great for gaining visual insights into how your customers are interacting with your website. 

Tools like this can identify hotspots where they’ve clicked and also areas that might need improving. From here, you can chop and change elements that are stunning your customer’s journeys to make their experience easier and more enjoyable. 

Conclusion

Customers have come to expect a shopping experience that’s fast and simple, and anything that derails these two pillars can see them leave and never return. Being able to provide a personalized and seamless omnichannel experience is crucial to keep up with this increasingly demanding industry. 

The good news is that there are plenty of tools and helpful information to keep you up to speed with the (often volatile) consumer landscape.