Retailers should opt for the omnichannel strategy to provide a great and smooth omnichannel user experience. It has become the biggest key to increase your eCommerce ROI exponentially. You may have heard omnichannel customer experience as a buzzword across retailing, but omnichannel is more than just being a buzzword. It helps in building a direct and reputational connection between your brand and customers — offering them a range of frictionless omnichannel retail solutions.
Many brands are doing great with omnichannel strategy — Starbucks, Ola, Amazon, and many more. Omnichannel marketing has helped them earn the badge of top players in shoppers’ hearts at the omnichannel platform.
Today, in this blog, we will help you get deep insights into the omnichannel experience. Let’s get started —
Outlook on the Omnichannel Experience
The best thing about the omnichannel experience is that it is not bound to a single channel. You can use this to provide a consistent experience to your customers across different platforms and devices. It’s a perfect combination of convenience and customization — two things: the demand of customers from a brand.
As a retailer, your responsibility and necessity are to provide a smooth and convenient customer experience and customer journey. Ultimately, it is going to provide you a better customer experience ROI. You should know that a customer leaves all their data with any transaction they made online — from their browsing history to their filter preferences and sort choices — you can use this data to prepare strategies to increase sales in retail. Finding this data can be a daunting task, but it has become easy for brands with omnichannel buyer history.
Omnichannel Vs Multichannel
Omnichannel for retail is all about the eCommerce marketing strategy that focuses on the target customers that you are selling your product instead of focusing on the brand’s products that you are trying to sell to the target audience. With the best omnichannel experience, you can provide multiple ways for the customers to interact with your eCommerce business and share a connection. The easier customer experience you will provide them, the better it is for your business to grow ROI. You can also create and provide more ways to interact with your brand to make it easier for them to consume it.
Ultimately, omnichannel helps retailers to remove the difference between sales and marketing channels — you merge all those to make it an ideal and a seamless platform for your consumers. This platform can vary from in-store, mobile websites, to social media any many more.
It may not be practical for every platform because it doesn’t need to include every platform and perhaps it isn’t practical for many businesses. However, omnichannel is an extension of multichannel so it isn’t the only option. Multichannel is a superior one.
Multichannel for retail is similar to omnichannel, but as aforementioned, it simply can encompass multiple channels. The only difference between this and omnichannel is a priority. Customers aren’t on that list because customers can still interact, but every channel gets treated differently rather than all together, as we all know very well.
With time, customers can easily find out which channel is needed to sign out and still be worth the focus. And this ultimately excludes and decreases the value of other channels. Consequently, customer experience matters and they can easily opt for channels they want to interact within the future.
You might be thinking which one is better between omnichannel and multichannel? Aren’t you? See, omnichannel has a lot of limelight because multichannel has limited communication options with its other channels.
You must know that unlike omnichannel, multichannel doesn’t have everything connected. This diminishes the actual value of multichannel for retailers — ultimately, every retailer wants to increase ROI — that can be increased with satisfied customers because if they are happy, they will spend their time and money. It can only be possible through the right omnichannel strategy and user experience.
How omnichannel increases retail sales?
Omnichannel engagement is key for consumers to stay in touch with the retail store business. This connection with customers helps retailers with purchase frequency. Who doesn’t know the importance of customers’ experience in the retail business — you can provide the best retail consumer experience to your consumers by using omnichannel retail solutions.
ROI is highly dependent on consumer experience because the better the user experience, the higher the retail success, and therefore it increases the ROI. This is the place where omnichannel plays an essential role — omnichannel strategy forces the retailer to get involved and increase their presence on a larger scale. Ultimately, this leads to opening more options to interact with customers and make them your happy consumers. Lately, it turns into more sales and increases ROI and makes the retailer more successful.
Increase your brand competitiveness using omnichannel
Retailers need to come out and show their out of the box thinking because it is not easy to stay in a competitive market — where all businesses are eager to switch to omnichannel. It is important to apply omnichannel strategies in brand campaigns to increase customer interactions.
Retailers can provide a seamless shopping experience to shoppers by setting up an online shopping business with the help of an online retail marketing strategy.
Main Reasons why retailers should opt for omnichannel:
Five omnichannel retailing trends are mentioned below for you to consider them for integration into your omnichannel marketing —
A personalized experience for the customer
Every shopper prefers personalized user experiences that make sense to their interests. Brands need to overcome all the problems and provide their consumers a better shopping experience, which should be targeted to their preferences. Retailers should consider centralized data management and use that to combine identity data with deep insights — to provide customized offers and experiences to their customers — to reinforce your competitive advantage and increase the reputation of the brand among customers.
Fast and easy payment checkouts
Asking again & again for address and credit card details to complete the payment checkouts is a big NO in today’s world. Retailers need to solve the blockchain and provide fast & easy payment checkouts — especially for existing customers who repeat their orders. Also, providing various payment options at checkouts such as PayPal, UPI, Debit Card, Credit Card, and many more is a big plus for today’s fast-paced world. The easy and short payment option would be the better the customer experience — leads to happy customers.
Social media integration
Who doesn’t like the visually-oriented approach — especially for shopping? Shoppers find it convincing when they can visually see the product while scrolling on their social media. Retailers should be available on social media and stay consistent with their product updates. It allows consumers to buy their favorite products directly from their preferred social media. Omnichannel retailers can figure new ways to integrate their social media pages into their brand’s websites or directly add their product listing to social media posts and price tags.
Customer service 24/7
Providing 24/7 services isn’t practical for every brand, but it is feasible to offer 24/7 customer services to your consumers. While aligning your eCommerce strategy with omnichannel retail trends and strategies, ensure to consider 24/7 customer services.
Embracing innovation
There is so much technological advancement that has been made in the retail sector — virtual and augmented reality, to ease the customer experiences. Brands that aren’t available online find it hard to interact with their customers because they do not have different approachable ways. However, retailers whose business is available at omnichannel — customers can have a better experience online with their smartphones no matter if they are present in the brand’s store or sitting on their couch.
Final Thoughts!
At this point, you might have understood the value of providing a seamless shopping experience to increase customer experience ROI. Omnichannel helps retailers stay ahead in the marketing game and make it a more professional and well-received connection between retailers and consumers.
IDC’s study of 2015 states that omnichannel shoppers demonstrate a 30% higher lifetime value compared to the consumers who prefer using only one channel. Ultimately, the omnichannel experience is imperative in this era, where acquiring new customers has become the most important task. And who doesn’t know that it is becoming prohibitively expensive day by day? .
So what are you waiting for? Start building your online shopping business and take your business to next level shopping.