Have you ever wondered what omnichannel shoppers expect from your ecommerce store? Consider Paul, who visits your website to buy a new pair of shoes but decides to hold off the purchase for some time. Later, while browsing through his feed on Instagram, he clicks on your advertisement to receive a coupon code that he uses to complete the purchase on your mobile app. He also opts to pick up the delivery from your brick and mortar store that falls on his way back home.
Just like Paul, most shoppers view your brand holistically and expect a seamless experience across various touchpoints. An omnichannel approach acknowledges this and puts your customers at the center of your business. It focuses on delivering a consistent and seamless experience across devices and touchpoints, enabling customers to switch between channels and use them simultaneously without any inconvenience.
Actionable Tips to Convert Omnichannel Shoppers
Getting traffic to your ecommerce site through the different pillars of marketing is one thing, and converting visitors is another. Unfortunately, many ecommerce stores experience a high bounce rate because they often fail to provide what shoppers are looking for – a great shopping experience beyond price and quality.
Here are five tips for delivering a seamless experience that’s bound to impress modern-day omnichannel customers.
Use Live Chat to Boost Conversion
Live chat is popular because it is extremely convenient. For instance, if a customer wants to learn about a product or service, live chat is one of the easiest ways of doing that by providing instant information on-demand. For example, customers often use live chat when they are in the process of making a purchase. According to Forrester, communicating with customers at this time could be crucial; about 44% of ecommerce users say that having questions answered by a live person while making a purchase is one of the most important features of a website.
Besides using live chat for support or answering customer queries, you can also use live chat as an ad or pop-up to proactively connect with users. For instance, if a user lingers on a page for more than a few minutes, you can reach out to them via live chat and offer help proactively. This way, users will feel welcomed and are likely to complete their purchase after receiving the help they were looking for. Live chat can also optimize shopping cart checkouts by enabling prospects to find the answers they need in real-time and even seek help filling out lengthy forms through a co-browsing facility.
Furthermore, with live chat, you can offer customized support and a personalized shopping experience to users based on their past behavior. In other words, you can use an advanced live chat platform to improve customer engagement by threading together disparate customer conversations to create a unified experience.
AI-Based Search = Personalized Experience
As an ecommerce user, you might agree that irrelevant product results often lead to abandoned site visits. To tackle this problem, you can consider using artificial intelligence-based technologies like natural language processing to narrow down and contextualize search results for online shoppers.
For instance, AI software based on machine learning can automatically tag, organize and visually search content by labeling features from an image or video. One example is Pinterest’s update of its Chrome extension that enables users to select any photograph online and ask Pinterest to find similar items using image recognition software.
With similar features on ecommerce platforms and by setting up the store, you can help users find what they want on your site, be it a pair of shoes they liked online or a necklace worn by a celebrity, in just a few clicks.
Integrated Data Across Touchpoints = Unified Customer View
Customers interact with your business across multiple touchpoints. These interactions often happen with different employees at different points in time, which can lead to customer frustration and missed opportunities in the long run.
For instance, if a customer sends an email to complain about a product and then calls up for a follow-up – they would expect the customer support representative to be aware of their complaint. Unfortunately, this is rarely the case because of the informational siloes that exist in an organization.
A single customer view can help your company get past this hurdle and better engage with customers by knowing who they are and what they want. For instance, integrating your live chat data with your CRM software is one way to build a single source of truth about your customers. This will help you analyze the past interactions in order to better personalize future conversations and seamlessly engage your customers across diverse touchpoints – creating a truly omnichannel experience.
A/B Test Landing Pages for Different Devices
Landing page A/B testing is crucial to boost conversions. For instance, you’d never know whether your current landing page is the best you can do unless you compare it with another version of the same page. Some of the important factors you may test include the position, text, and color of the call-to-action button, the copy on the page, and the image positions.
The Wrap
The changing conditions in 2020 added impetus to the already growing ecommerce industry. Furthermore, increased technology penetration shaped customer expectations, creating a brand of always-connected shoppers that may use up to three or more touchpoints to complete a purchase.
As an ecommerce owner or marketer, it is your responsibility to acknowledge this changing user behavior and give your customers what they want by breaking down the siloes in your organization and building a unified shopping experience. The strategies shared in this blog have been carefully curated and will help you build an omnichannel shopping experience that’s likely to boost conversions and build customer loyalty.
Dhruv Mehta is a Digital Marketing Professional at Acquire