8 Steps for Creating an Omnichannel E-commerce Strategy

With the digitalization of commerce, customers are adopting new shopping patterns. According to Salesforce, 78% of customers use several channels to start and complete a transaction. Additionally, on average, customers communicate with companies through nine different channels. That’s why it’s essential to optimize your e-commerce strategy for omnicannel purposes.

However, providing omnichannel experiences requires substantial effort, resources and competence from the retailer. Therefore, future-thinking merchants should focus on a comprehensive e-commerce strategy if they want to advance their omnichannel initiatives.

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What is omnichannel e-commerce?

Omnichannel e-commerce is the integration of a brand’s separate sales channels to provide uniform, seamless shopping experiences. With omnichannel capabilities, customers can start their buying journey in one channel, switch to another and pick up shopping right where they left off.

Why is omnichannel e-commerce important?

Wider reach

Omnichannel e-commerce enables companies to provide meaningful customer experiences across numerous popular channels, thus reaching more people and making brand interaction hassle-free.

Sales growth

Delivering relevant shopping experiences consistently across channels can strengthen customer relationships, which positively influences sales. According to a Sprout pulse survey, 77% of customers are more likely to buy more from brands they feel connected to.

A better understanding of customers

E-commerce businesses can collect and merge comprehensive customer data from multiple integrated sales channels to gain insights into customer behavior, deliver personalized experiences across touchpoints and plan data-driven marketing campaigns.

READ: Determining Your Business’s Target Market – Why It’s Necessary and How To Do It

8 steps to an effective omnichannel strategy

1. Make your e-commerce strategy mobile-friendly

Companies striving to make cross-channel shopping seamless need to first check that store visitors using their desktop, smartphone or tablet can access it with equal convenience. If not, then merchants should redesign their websites to provide consistent experiences for different devices. 

2. Tailor your message to the channel

Once a business chooses the channels to be present on, it should define the purpose of each channel and create content relevant to this purpose. Even though all channels should deliver a consistent brand message, they don’t have to duplicate it. Instead, store owners can adapt content to the specifics of the channel and use different timelines, tactics and formats.

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3. Map the customer journey

For each channel, businesses should understand how customers behave during the purchasing process. This will help merchants visualize the customer journey and ensure a convenient transition between every step as well as different channels, providing seamless experiences and increasing the chance of a purchase.

4. Power up omnichannel with data

Omnichannel commerce requires integrating back-end systems and sales tools to enable data sharing across various touchpoints and cross-team collaboration. This way merchants can track inventory across all sales channels in real-time to maintain supply chain stability and deliver orders on time. With their tech stack integrated, brands can synchronize critical commerce-related data and provide more up-to-date and relevant information to their customers.

5. Set up cross-channel customer service

In the omnichannel approach, companies should consolidate individual support requests from different channels into a single source of truth to give context to support reps and enable them to quickly resolve customer issues.

According to Gladly’s 2021 report, 63% of customers love brands specifically for excellent customer service. This means that establishing omnichannel customer service will also help companies increase customer satisfaction, improve retention rates and maximize customer lifetime value.

6. Keep testing

Companies should regularly review their customer-related activities to determine if current methods are working. The testing scope can include various marketing and technology components, from reviewing the correctness of customer segmentation to website performance testing, making sure it properly handles the traffic.

7. Remarket across channels

With omnichannel marketing campaigns, store owners can remind their customers of unfinished purchases by showing relevant ads on marketplaces or social media, sending targeted emails, or pushing personalized notifications in the app. Such omnichannel re-engagement helps accelerate conversions, reinforce brand recognition and encourage brand loyalty.

READ: How Brands Can Grow Customer Loyalty and Build a Positive Reputation in 2023

8. Invest in human talent

Even if a business adopts best-in-class omnichannel technology, improper or poor use by the employees will undermine the investment in the long run. That’s why employee training should accompany the introduction of the omnichannel e-commerce strategy.

Additionally, companies can identify areas where they lack in-house resources or expertise and hire external specialists to support every tech component and strategic initiative within their omnichannel agenda.

The bottom line

Omnichannel e-commerce strategy enables merchants to erase the boundaries between multiple shopping channels by centralizing data acquisition and providing consistent, personalized experiences. With the right omnichannel strategy, e-commerce businesses can turn their brand experience into a competitive differentiator, fostering customer loyalty and driving more sales.

Alena Kuptsova is a Technology Research Analyst at Itransition, a software development company based in Denver, CO. She analyzes current digital transformation trends and explores the opportunities the emerging technologies bring to businesses across industries.