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Ebook | 30 minute read
Connecting with your customers at their convenience
Customer demands in today’s market have set a high bar for brands looking to compete digitally. Prior to COVID-19, businesses globally, from retailers to B2B wholesalers, were already navigating an entirely new, growing digital landscape. Consumers were pining for more convenience, better product information, customized experiences, and brand affiliation; And were using a myriad of channels and devices to do so.
The competition for a prominent digital presence was already fierce, and the pandemic only accelerated the need for businesses to expand their digital footprint, while also introducing new constraints to the buying cycle. Brick and mortar stores were closed, delivery spiked, and services like contactless checkout and curbside pickup became a necessity for both businesses and consumers alike.
The pandemic shifted the focus to digital-only channels and forced companies to operate at a higher level of digital maturity or build a strategy to break into the landscape altogether. For brands looking to stay relevant, outpace competition, and scale their business, this means amplifying their digital commerce strategy across the growing network of available channels.
According to a 2017 study by Harvard Business Review, 73% of online shoppers were using multiple channels in their purchasing process. In the same study, Harvard Business Review discovered that the value of a customer increased the more channels they used:
However, it’s important to note that as the total number of brand touchpoints increases, so does the need for a consistent and seamless experience.
This is why omnichannel eCommerce, a commerce strategy focused on leveraging and integrating multiple online and offline channels, has become essential for businesses looking to ensure growth and stay competitive. An omnichannel approach is designed to connect every available touchpoint to give shoppers a seamless end-to-end purchasing experience.
Continue reading our guide below to learn:
Before diving into the specifics around why and how to implement an omnichannel approach, it’s important to clarify how it differs from a multichannel strategy.
Single Channel Commerce:
As it sounds, a single channel eCommerce business sells their products through one channel. Whether that’s through their own storefront, online, or in a marketplace like Amazon, they have a brand presence in only one location.
Multichannel Commerce:
With a multichannel eCommerce approach, businesses sell their products or services across a multitude of channels, enabling customers to engage with their business and buy through different touchpoints. This could mean adding in a mobile experience, or selling through social media in addition to selling in your online store.
Though a multichannel eCommerce approach allows you to deploy multiple touch points, a multichannel strategy specifically focuses on optimizing each of those individual touchpoints in silos rather than optimizing all together for the entire customer journey.
Omnichannel eCommerce:
As defined by HubSpot, an “Omni-channel experience is a multi-channel approach to marketing, selling, and serving customers in a way that creates an integrated and cohesive customer experience no matter how or where a customer reaches out.”
Unlike multichannel eCommerce, Omnichannel eCommerce gives customers a seamless shopping experience by stitching together each channel, medium, and device they use to engage with a brand.
It enables companies to deliver consistent messaging across each medium and allows customers to carry their experience from one channel to another. This gives them more control over how they search and buy based on their timeline, needs, and preferences.
This provides a more convenient shopping experience, which is one of the biggest influencing factors in buying behavior today. Aligning all of these pieces for both the customer and the company means a better bottom line.
According to Invesp’s “State of Omnichannel Shopping,” shoppers who buy from a business both in-store and online have a 30% higher lifetime value than those who shop using only one channel.
There are three areas every business needs to build upon, scale, and optimize to have a successful omnichannel business: sales and marketing, operations, and company employees. It can be easy to gravitate towards the customer-facing channels and spend more time iterating on your sales and marketing mix, but the back-end tech stack, processes, and even internal employees are equally as important. Each of these cornerstones need to be cultivated and seamlessly integrated for your omnichannel strategy to work.
Your sales and marketing channels are the customer-facing touchpoints your consumers will use to actively engage with your business; whether they’re purchasing for the first time, the 5th time, reading reviews, returning products, or looking for support. This is why these are the first cornerstones of your omnichannel strategy.
These channels are where you have the opportunity to build customer relationships, drive a positive brand identity, and sell your products to grow your business. Therefore, it’s vital that each channel maintain consistent and up-to-date messaging, as well as provide easy-to-find and accurate product information, such as pricing and availability.
Where you sell your goods will ultimately depend on your products or services, industry, location, and most importantly, customer preferences. You may decide to not make every touchpoint transactional depending on your business requirements, but they can still be just as important to your customer journey and brand perception.
Typical sales and marketing channels could include:
Many of these channels will naturally help drive traffic for your business, but you can’t rely solely on organic means and word of mouth to scale and grow. Some of these marketing channels even offer advertising, but not all, so it’s important you consider additional traditional and digital marketing methods to engage your customers.
Again, what mediums you use will depend on your business strategy, but ensuring your customers are getting the right messaging and the right time will ensure a consistent brand experience. These marketing channels could include:
Your internal tech-stack and the operational processes that connect your customers’ desires with your team internally are the second pillar to an omnichannel ecommerce strategy. These are what will keep your business running smoothly.
Your tech stack incorporates every piece of technology and systems workflows that operate behind-the-scenes. This can include the content management system (CMS) your online store is hosted on, the point-of-sale (POS) system your in-store shops use, the customer service software your customer success team uses, the inventory management platform you use to monitor and track your stock of goods, and the eCommerce solution that enables and integrates payments and processes across all of your channels.
How these work together determines whether or not customer payments are processed, products are shipped and delivered, support tickets answered, and data is properly gathered and maintained. Failing operations can lead to frustrating experiences and ultimately hurt your business by deterring new customers and keeping current ones from returning.
This is why it’s important you leverage the systems and tools that make sense for your business’ requirements and ensure they are integrated and synced.
With an omnichannel approach, you need a team that can effectively manage and optimize all of your channels, which is why the final pillar of an omnichannel strategy is the employees that make up your business.
This encompasses any and all personnel at your company, whether they’re customer facing or not, including your on-the-floor general manager, marketing team, product development team, internal sales team if you’re in the B2B space, and so on.
To make your omnichannel eCommerce dreams a reality, there needs to be consistency in how these groups interoperate and by what processes they follow.
Your employees are the masterminds behind the aesthetics of your website, your digital advertising strategy, the product experience and usability, your financial operations, and customer retention initiatives. This is why it’s important to hire the right people, ensure they’re set up to succeed.
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An omnichannel strategy promises a number of benefits for both the business and the consumer, ultimately resulting in improved customer experiences and a higher bottom line.
Today’s consumers want to be able to search for products and product information easily, compare pricing, and get personalized recommendations. 74% of online customers get frustrated with websites when content appears that has nothing to do with their interests.
This means that businesses need to learn what customers are looking for and adjust their approach accordingly. Some of these strategies could include hiding products the customer is less likely to buy and sending updates and promotions on products they’re searching for.
With an omnichannel eCommerce strategy, businesses can unify their customer’s journey across every touchpoint and provide a smooth, informative, and enjoyable experience. While it’s easier to maintain consistent brand and product messaging across every channel, businesses will also have the opportunity to cater the customer experience to the individual shopper.
These are just a few of the ways eCommerce businesses should consider personalizing shopping experiences:
The ability to carry personalized experiences across channels is a cornerstone of omnichannel eCommerce and will help businesses stand out, grow their customer database, and keep it.
The modern customer journey is no longer a straightforward path. Consumers could engage with a brand up to 15 to 20 times before buying. This could be through customer reviews, third-party sellers, online, or through their email.
By integrating the myriad of channels at a business’s disposal, companies can better understand that journey, how those touch points interact, and provide a frictionless shopping experience that caters to the whims and behaviors of their customers. These behaviors could include:
Companies should be empowering the consumer to interact with their brand and in a way that feels natural to them, which is why businesses should consider adopting an omnichannel strategy.
“Companies with omnichannel customer engagement strategies retain on average 89% of their customers, compared to 33% for companies with weak omnichannel customer engagement” (Source: Aberdeen Group VIA Internet Retailer).
By providing more convenient shopping methods, more places to engage with a brand, personalized experiences, and frictionless service between channels, businesses can boost their brand’s loyalty and keep customers from churning.
In addition, customers with positive experiences are more likely to leave reviews, give referrals to friends and family and increase your world-of-mouth, and ultimately shop with you again. The more seamless the experience, the less likely they are to abandon their shopping cart.
Siloed data makes an already complex buying journey even harder to analyze. For any operations or data teams, it’s like building four separate puzzles to get the full picture. It means piecing together data from a variety of sources to try and build connections and storylines across a customer’s journey.
Integrating channels will merge prospective customer and customer data providing businesses a better end-to-end picture of the buyer’s journey. With complete, organized and centralized data, you will be able to see what products or content consumers are engaging with, how they’re interacting with them, on what channels, and at what point in time. This will give you valuable data-driven insights that can be used to continue to optimize the end-user experience.
Standing out in the digital landscape is the key to success, and a hurdle every business faces. COVID-19 exacerbated the need to digitize commerce by forcing both customers and businesses alike to turn to the web for everyday needs, increasing the competition for the already-short customer attention span.
As mentioned previously, a Harvard Business Review study found that the more channels a customer uses, they’re more likely to spend both in store and online. Giving customers multiple pathways to engage with your brand only means more revenue.
It also means your product or services have a wider market reach. Customers today are constantly seeking new ways to engage with brands and by meeting them when and where they are, or when they’re on the hunt, you’re more likely to be discovered. Expanding to new channels, like working with marketplaces, building loyalty apps, or introducing in-person pop ups, only give your brand more visibility as consumers flow in and out of different pathways.
The success of an omnichannel approach is contingent on effectively integrating all of the various channels a business leverages. This means not only ensuring sales channels and customer communication channels are interconnected, but also that all of the systems and back-end logistics are synced and coordinated as well.
These can be complex and time-consuming to get right, which is why they are some of the most common pitfalls companies run into while implementing an omnichannel eCommerce strategy.
Giving the customer a consistent experience across every channel is important, especially when it comes to inventory, pricing, & shipping. You can break this down into multiple related sub-challenges, all reflective of the product inventory infrastructure.
The easiest way to overcome inventory and shipping logistics challenges is by leveraging an inventory management system and ensuring its integrated with your ecommerce solution for seamless and fast data processing.
The more data accessible to you, the more you can optimize and personalize your customer’s experience. But, while customers today love to see personalized recommendations and ads, they also fear for their privacy. With massive data breaches like that of Target in 2014, where 70 million customers had their credit card, debit card, and personal information stolen, it’s a warranted concern.
As you start to integrate your existing channels and adopt new tools and processes to maximize efficiency, you are by and large consolidating all of your data and increasing its exposure to new variables and risks.
Making your transition smooth and ensuring your company isn’t liable for any data handling mishaps means you will need to identify and set up new levels of access and restrictions for various employees, ensure your data is encrypted, your software up-to-date, and updates are regularly scheduled. You will also need to ensure that general industry guidelines for security and data privacy, such as GDPR and CASL are followed.
Some additional actions include:
Globalization is realistically a challenge regardless of whether your eCommerce approach is single channel, multichannel, or omnichannel. If you’re expanding your business to cover multiple geographies, you should take the language, currency, laws, and cultural trends of the countries you’re selling to into consideration to be successful.
Buyers in the United Kingdom will prefer to see their final cost in British pounds; European buyers, euros. Having a localized site that users can read in their preferred language will bolster the user experience. Data privacy standards will vary between countries and ultimately, products that are popular in one place may simply not be in another.
The same can be said for particular sales channels. If you’re selling regulated goods digitally, they could even be illegal in some locations and not others. This holds true as well for cross-state purchases even within the US.
Implementing this with a single channel or multichannel approach is difficult. An omnichannel eCommerce framework only exacerbates these challenges. Leveraging a product information management platform (PIM) or an ecommerce solution that can handle managing multiple catalogs, pricebooks, and currencies like Elastic Path, will ensure you can easily deliver your personalized, global experiences.
The existing technological infrastructure of a business is often the biggest challenge companies will face when implementing an omnichannel eCommerce strategy. Companies often find they’re missing the right pieces to make it work or that their current tech stack is not modern enough to support the new, complex omnichannel requirements. Businesses today need to leverage partners and other 3rd party platforms to make omnichannel commerce a reality.
Creating an omnichannel experience can be expensive. New tools may need to be adopted, new processes will need to be introduced, and employees trained or even hired. Depending on the scale and complexity of the project, the costs and timeline will vary.
The key is to evaluate your current business holistically, determine what aspects need to be changed, adjusted, or introduced entirely, and start scoping out costs.
Headless commerce is a rapidly growing approach to eCommerce that decouples the front-end customer experience from the back-end logic and commerce functionality that drives the business. A true headless solution will be built as a network of eCommerce APIs that can be composed into different services and features. It is not a traditional style platform that simply separates the front-end.
A headless architecture enables companies to build custom digital commerce experiences that are unique to their business and catered to their customers, while also giving them freedom to adjust, update, and maintain back-end business processes.
There are a number of benefits to going headless, but when it comes to building omnichannel experiences, headless commerce solutions excel in a few areas specifically:
Discover more about how to simplify your omnichannel strategy with a headless solution like Elastic Path.
Elastic Path Commerce Cloud takes headless commerce to a whole new level. It is a composable, API-first, Headless Commerce solution that will enable you to tackle the core omnichannel eCommerce requirements, from providing custom commerce experiences and enabling brand loyalty, to introducing new channels, and growing revenue, while making it a more seamless internal experience.
Omnichannel brands with myriads of touchpoints, or even multiple sub-brands, can ease the stress of manually managing separate catalogs with EP Product Experience Manager (PXM) from Elastic Path. The core Elastic Path Commerce Cloud feature will centralize where and how your product catalogs are managed and maintained, by decoupling product data from price books, hierarchies, and catalogs.
By leverage Catalog Composer, within EP PXM, you can create unlimited product catalogs quickly and seamlessly for different customer accounts, business models, customer touchpoints, and geographies. It was designed to handle dynamic pricing, discounts, and custom attributes at high speeds, even for catalogs with millions of products, so you can meet customer needs and have your infrastructure scale with your business.
For brands looking to expand their reach or easily support their global business, Catalog Composer allows you to compose, manage, and optimize unique catalogs for each country so that you can power country, or locale, specific product assortments and pricing without the hassle of cumbersome customizations.
Your brand identity hinges not only on your ability to deliver a smooth and unique user journey, but also a safe and secure experience. Data breaches have taken down some of the world’s largest brands and you don’t want to end up on that list.
Elastic Path Commerce cloud offers enterprise-grade security so you can feel confident your customer’s data is protected around the clock. It is the only headless solution in the market today that is officially SOC2 compliant.
The Role-Based Access Control feature will also enable you to easily provision the appropriate level of access to data for various employees. You can assign unique roles to each member of your team based on their roles and responsibilities, keeping everyone organized, efficient, and most importantly, your data secure.
Brands in need of replacing existing pieces of their commerce tech stack or are looking for partner support, can choose from a wide variety available in the Composable Commerce Hub, an open exchange of solutions and integrations from leading vendors in the commerce market. Regardless of your technical expertise, you can quickly build and launch custom commerce experiences.
For those who aren’t looking to custom build an omnichannel experience from scratch and need a ‘ready-to-go’ solution that is quicker, we have a myriad of partners who have already composed business ready solutions for you to leverage.
These Pre-Composed Solutions pre-integrate Elastic Path Commerce Cloud capabilities with third party technology so you don’t have to. With six available for direct-to-consumer (D2C) and omnichannel functionality, you can get up and running quickly.
The flexible nature of Elastic Path Commerce Cloud also means you can swap out the pre-integrated solutions for a partner of your own choosing when you are ready to build on your own.
Lastly, you will be able to cut the total cost of ownership of your ecommerce solution by up to 47% and reduce implementation time with Elastic path.
The composable architecture of Elastic Path Commerce Cloud means you can quickly try new ideas, swap out existing integrations, and reduce downtime for maintenance without incurring technical debt and lowering your costs. You’ll de-risk your projects by cutting down on development time and making updates and adding in new capabilities quicker and easier.
You can check out our full guide on total cost of ownership here to learn more.
74% of consumers are willing to abandon a brand if the purchasing process isn't easy to navigate. They expect a seamless, convenient shopping experience, regardless of whether they’re a B2B or B2C buyer. As competition rises and an increasing number of companies have to accelerate their shift to digital commerce, it’s more important than ever that businesses meet those customer demands. Engaging with customers at their level, on their time frame, is key.
An omnichannel eCommerce strategy built with a solid infrastructure will keep consumers happy, build brand loyalty, and ultimately grow your bottom line.
Discover how to propel your omnichannel strategy with Elastic Path Commerce Cloud and easily make any customer touchpoint a revenue generating channel.